Harrison Ford brilliantly deals with time-warped nerds

Harrison Ford is a man whose self-expression can often be self-contained.

Sometimes, it seems as if his inner anger courses beneath his skin like a pinball waiting for an opening.

Yet he must have been bracing himself Thursday for an inevitable rise in his blood pressure and concomitant fall in his hope for humanity.

For he appeared at Comic-Con to inspire today's nerds toward his new end-of-the-world-space-battle-and-stuff movie, "Ender's Game."

Yet his audience seemed intent on living in the past.

As SlashFilm reports, these nerds look at Ford and only see his characters from the '80s.

The first question: "What would Han Solo and Indiana Jones say to each other if they met?" This was prefaced with "Lightsabers aside."

Oh, dear.

For myself, I fear Solo would say to Jones: "Goodness, we look so much alike. It's quite extraordinary, isn't it?"

To which Jones would reply: "I'm taller than you. Get out of my way."

And yet Ford was expected to offer a serious philosophical musing on this subject.

Instead, he looked pained -- unquestionably one of his best looks -- and offered: "Probably 'Hi, how are you?'"

You might imagine that this would have stopped any more nerds from standing up and being entirely misguided. Sadly, nerds aren't always known for their social graces.

So another intrepid explorer stood up and began by saying he'd dreamed of being Indiana Jones as a child. Then he tried to tie a question to Ford's new movie, in which he plays Colonel Hyrum Graff: "Would Han Solo have been a good soldier for General Graff's army?"

I did say "tried."

Ford must have felt fortunate that, unlike most of his movie characters, he wasn't armed. Instead, ever intelligent, he began with: "You know, you and I have a lot in common. I used to dream about being Indiana Jones when I was younger. Not so much anymore."

Did everyone in the audience grasp the aridness of the remark? Probably not. But Ford continued: "I don't think Han Solo would be a good soldier in anyone's army. He's more, what we call now, an independent contractor."

Ford has made a reluctant art of handling such questions, while surely wishing that the questioners had sufficient humanity to ask about something that might interest him these days.

Still, who could forget his masterfully faux-angry performance on Jimmy Kimmel's showin April, when Ford stormed off the set after one question too many about "Star Wars"?

After his little session at Comic-Con, Fandango Movies caught up with the Ford. The first question was about how often he got asked "Star Wars" questions.

"Here?" he said. "Uncountable."

I wonder how he'd react if, one day, someone asked him about, say, the political situation in Tajikistan. That would be fun.