It’s safe to say that fans of the Indiana Jones movies are looking to the upcoming adventure movie Indiana Jones 5 with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Indiana Jones 5 will be the first movie in the franchise to be directed by someone other than Steven Spielberg, it comes off the back of the divisive Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and then there’s also Harrison Ford’s age.
Whether or not the movie will be able to adjust to the fact that its leading actor is now 80 is a legitimate concern. And, it looks like audiences and fans of Indy weren’t the only ones who were thinking about that. Now speaking to Empire magazine, the director of the movie James Mangold has said that Ford’s age was something that concerned him.
However, more interestingly, the director also said that the initial script for the movie failed to sufficiently address the theme of age. He said “It became really important to me to figure out how to make this a movie about a hero at sunset. The issues I brought up about Indy’s age were not things I thought were being addressed in the material being developed at the time. There were ‘old’ jokes, but the material itself wasn’t about it. To me, whatever you greatest liability, you should fly straight towards that. If you try to pretend it’s not there, you end up getting slings and arrows the whole way.”
It sounds as if Mangold’s insistence on engaging with Ford’s age, rather that ignoring it, will be the the benefit of the movie which is set to focus on the space race. In Indiana Jones 5, Indy will confront the new villain Voller, played by Mads Mikkelsen, while he tried to unravel the influence of ex-Nazi’s on the success of NASA programmes. That’s quite the departure from what we’ve seen before, and coupled with an exploration of the effects of age, it could make for one of the most thematically rich instalment in the ’80s movie series yet.