By the way, what's with this "Temple of the Forbidden Eye"? Indy never went to that before in any of the movies! That whole ride is full of things LIKE what happened in the Indy films, but Disney should have specifically recreated the cave from the beginning of Raiders, the Temple of Doom, and the Grail's sanctum. Spikes, jeeps, boulders, snakes, bugs, mummies, darts, rats aren't good enough!!!
And too much ambient 1930's music outside. Where's the John Williams!?
It's a great point that shows the difference between great creative choices and terrible ones and that it's an art, not a science.
Tony Baxter did an amazing job of putting you into an Indiana Jones adventure from the entrance to the queue to the exit that hit all the right notes. The experience includes blaring Indiana Jones music on cue, actually has Indiana Jones in the ride in character, and lived up to all of your expectations of the "beats" of an Indy movie.
Contrast that with the terrible creative choices to create a dull, lifeless, depressing world void of the characters we care about, nothing happening in the land, food and beverage workers saying "Bright Suns" and other nonsense, and you have a mess on your hands.
Now, if they would have just built ROTR like Indy without Batuu and just an awesome entrance, I think they would have been much better off, but that ship (full of hundreds of millions of dollars) has sailed.
Imagine if Baxter tried to create a 14 acre land out of the entrance to Indy. Can you imagine wandering through a 14 acre jungle with the sounds of crickets, 1920's radio music, and broken down abandoned trucks, archeological equipment, etc? Yeah, it would have been as bad as Batuu or worse.
As they said in Spinal Tap: "It's a fine line between clever and stupid".
