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I'm usually notoriously hard on spoiler Nazis. I know I'm in the minority on this--I recently found myself embroiled in a pseudo-hostile Twitter fight between John Brownlee and Joel Johnson because of it-- but my theory is that if you care enough whatever is being spoiled, your investment should be able to withstand the revelation of a simple plot point.

Still, I think what Pete Vonder Haar is doing sounds intriguing. The FilmThreat writer has been intentionally avoiding reading set reports and watching trailers for new films, in order to preserve a sense of excitement for the film's eventual release. Now, Vonder Haar is specifically attempting to avoid acquiring any pre-release information on the fourth Indiana Jones film, which is currently shooting in New Haven for a May 2008 release. "Call me a crazy insane crazy person," Vonder Haar writes, "But I'd like to not know how the movie is going to end (or every major plot twist, or the big action sequences, or the climactic one-liner) before I actually go see it."

In a great post at Movie Marketing Madness, Chris Thilk explains how Vonder Haar's information abstinence stands in direct defiance of what the typical studio marketing campaign tries to achieve.

[S]ince 'surprise' is in some people’s minds synonymous with 'displeasure' ... the campaign creators, then, want the movie to feel familiar and safe so as not to scare anyone off. That’s why these casting announcements for the major flicks are broadcast far and wide, and it’s why studios on some level like Web sites that post spoilers. Those plot points reduce the odds of the movie being seen as an unknown quantity by the audience, upping the comfort factor as well as, hopefully, the subsequent desire to see the film.

So the studios are actually engineering a world in which the concept of spoilers--and the conflicting drives to either pursue or avoid them--becomes virtually meaningless. This makes Vonder Haar's mission of interest on two levels: not only is it an effort on the part of a professional critic to recapture the enthusiasm of fandom, but it's also a subtle form of protest.