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Comment by aynyc | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but to think about what Amy Farrah Fowler said about it on TBBT.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYa26EnN8t0

Nah, that's baloney.

Marion would be dead and the Ark would've been in Berlin where the baddies could keep trying after getting it wrong the first time.

would they really have taken it to that island though, if it wasn't for Jones? I think without him they might have taken it straight to the Fuhrer?

Also without Jones they wouldn't have found the actual Ark, because they were digging in the wrong place.

I don't know who this Amy person is, but I am unimpressed. :(

Also without Jones the ark wouldn't have ended up in a big government warehouse at the end.

boo, Amy.

So, what you're saying is, without Jones, they would have taken the ark to the Fuhrer, and upon opening it, the Fuhrer and all of the attendant Nazi leaders would have had their faces melted off, thus probably ending WWII.

So, Indiana Jones prolonged WWII. Got it.

exactly, that guy is a prime exemplar of the long line of lovable doofus action heroes.

but I don't think he had absolutely no effect on the events of the movie.

British had a plan to assassinate Hitler during his routine walks through a certain garden. They supposedly realized Hitler's death was more likely to prolong the war. Because while Hitler may have been charismatic he was a mediocre, even bad, commander by that point in the war.

Regardless, Indy movies are less about politics and more about swash buckling action with a dash of history.

> Also without Jones they wouldn't have found the actual Ark, because they were digging in the wrong place.

They were only digging in the wrong place because Jones stopped them from getting the headpiece of the Staff of Ra. Without Jones they get the headpiece and then dig in the right place.

oops yep, I was wrong there.

This is also true of Luke in Return of the Jedi. Luke does nothing to help destroy the death star and Vader and the emperor would have probably been killed when it was destroyed without Luke being there (okay, maybe they would have escaped but it doesn’t feel like Luke was super impactful)

This is true, but neither of these things are what Luke is after.

Luke's motivations in RoTJ are a) becoming a full Jedi Knight; and b) his father's redemption - not his death. He achieves both of these, and Vader would not have turned from the dark side without him there.

That's the same argument with every "Gullivers Travels" movie, where we see through the eyes of a character that is present at all the significant moments. It's a theatrical device, it's often used, and there's nothing wrong with it.

My view on this always been that if it did not happen to this specific character, we (the audience) wouldn't have learn about their story.

For folks who don't want to click, the argument is Indiana Jones didn't have an impact on the outcome of the story; the Nazis still would have found the arc and died in the end.

It's an amusing idea, but I've always thought it was weird to call it a problem with the movie, as it would apply to the protagonist in a bunch of movies (spoilers abound in this extremely random assortment of movies off the top of my head):

* If Kurt Russel's character hadn't been in The Thing, everything that happened still would have happened

* If Harry and Sally hadn't been in When Harry Met Sally, New York would still be Yorking

* If Florence Pugh's character hadn't gone to Sweden in Midsommar, the tourists still would have died

* If Richard Dreyfuss's character hadn't been in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the aliens still would have made contact, dropped off their old passengers, and picked up new passengers

* If Scott Pilgrim hadn't been in Scott Pilgrim, everyone would probably still just be hanging out more or less the same

* If Matt Damon's character hadn't been in The Martian, they would have all still ended up back on Earth

* If Rocky Balboa hadn't been in Rocky, probably two other people would have boxed and one of them would have won

To each their own, but for my money good stories are about character journeys, not about... I dunno, like, an accounting of what changed during the movie.

It is very, very cutting. It hasn't stopped me enjoying the film thankfully

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