On the New Indiana Jones: We're So Renting 'Raiders' When We Get Home

By Steven Zeitchik

With a name like Indy, it had to be...mediocre?

The first worldwide screening of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" at the Palais Sunday afternoon -- which, as THR editor-in-chief Elizabeth Guider notes in her color piece, was a bit of an action-adventure in its own right -- showed the movie to be a mishmash of action pieces interrupted by puzzling explanatory sections about topics like conquistadors and Etruscan architecture. (Warning: some spoilers below). It all could shape up as the story of the summer: a new franchise from a character few had previously heard of ("Iron Man"), is snappy, original and complex. A revived franchise the entire planet knows about feels tired and mechanical.

Boldness points for Spielberg et al for using aliens as a villain - bet you never thought you'd see a flying saucer in an Indiana Jones movie -- but on the whole the script is flat, the motives are murky and, outside of one mountaintop car chase involving swords, monkeys and some thrillingly vertiginous angles, most of the action scenes are noisy and uninspired, and likely to yield more than a few pejorative comparisons to a video game. They're in a jungle! They're in a restricted military area! They're in a temple! Each level is adequate in its own right, we suppose, but narratively they add up to little more than your average XBox title.

The visuals, while lavishly budgeted and colorfully staged, aren't much better. Designed to look like the earlier films, the movie winds up resembling, in some instances even more than the originals, the 50's action serials from which the whole franchise derives. This isn't surprising given Spielberg's comments that he wanted to make a classic and mostly CG-free  action movie. But that pledge creates something of a problem. The effects in modern summer tentpoles need to be bigger and badder than ever. Spielberg and Lucas, however, are using the standards of twenty-five years ago.

How do you get around that contradiction?

As it turns out, you shoot the same way you did two decades ago and make it up in volume. Instead of slicker scenes, there are simply more of them, and they feel a lot longer. Amid archaeological ruins, Jones and Shia LeBeouf character Mutt (yes, it's his son; this is handled relatively quickly and without as much revelatory fanfare as you'd expect) are set upon by some ghoulish looking thing for no apparent reason; they fight him off after ten minutes and move along, the encounter never explained or spoken of again.

The script tries for comedy (most of the best jokes, as they were in the earlier films, are actually visual; when Jones is pulled off the back of a motorcycle through a car window he fights the bad guys, then climbs out the window on the other side back onto the motorcycle). When people try to say funny things they fail (Jones, upon learning Mutt is his son: "You need to stay in school.") The only time anyone is funny is when they're trying to be profound, and that's not a good thing. On the aliens: Q: "Where'd they go, into space?" A: "Not into space -- into the space between spaces." Anyone who wonders about the quality of the script need only hear these lines. "Their treasure wasn't gold; it was knowledge. Knowledge was their treasure."

The most eyebrow-raising element is the skull itself, which is more versatile and multi-dimensional than any character in the movie. The mythic Mayan power of this totem is glossed over in the film, but its utility, apparently, is not; it's alternately deployed as a weapon, a door-opener, a laser gun, a magnet and enough other uses to make Krazy Glue jealous.

At the end of the movie, in what's clearly meant as a reference to the nineteen-year lag between the last film and this one, a character asks, "How much of human life is lost in waiting?" In the case of the new Indiana Jones, as it turns out, not so much.

Comments

[e.l.]

umm, i have no clue how i arrived at this page, being it's 10pm israel time, but let me just say... kudos on the review.

[KM]

yeah, I didn't like it either. full review at yesicannes.blogspot.com . you left out the worst part! it wasn't the saucer or the stilted dialogue!

[Bognelia232]

Oh give it a rest!

There's over 100,000 people dead in the mud in Burma, and you twits are picking over a multi-hundred million dollar spectacle, years in the making and calling it "stilted".

You are SO FORTUNATE to just be alive, let alone "entertained by your leave".

Why don't you get a horrible crippling ailment, just so you can learn what it feels like to be grateful.

Punks.

[Sal]

This was not the best Indy movie but it was by far very, very entertaining. Critics -- fans and pros alike-- forget that we are tired of who dunits that never are cleberly made or scary movies that never frighten. In this 4th installment we have thrilling scenes and a great sense of adventure. That was worth my $7!

[Jeffydee]

Fact is, Raiders was the best of the series because Lucas had the most to do with it -- including completely re-editing the film Spielberg handed him, and shooting Second Unit stuff. With the other Indy movies, Spielberg was left to his own devices...and...well...

[Jeffydee]

Fact is, Raiders was the best of the series because Lucas had the most to do with it -- including completely re-editing the film Spielberg handed him, and shooting Second Unit stuff. With the other Indy movies, Spielberg was left to his own devices...and...well...two words for you: Short Round.

[HighIQ]

well...indian jones is a bad film...i missed the first half of the 2nd Act bc nothing going on...there were no character motivations (ref: the diner scene)...i find it difficult to believe that this is a Spielberg film...it's a very lazily directed film (if u want adventure re-watch Pirates 2...Indy would never survive a release date next to Pirates any given time...

[SeaShark]

CRYSTAL SKULL, full of sound and relentless forced fury, fails to recapture the magic of RAIDERS and LAST CRUSADE, two films that ignited the screen with exciting adventure.

The CRYSTAL SKULL disjointed script surrenders continuity and requires too much green screen and CG for an Indiana Jones movie, and some of the special effects--the cliff hugging car action and the ants in particular--look just as fake as the special effects in the first SPIDERMAN and INCREDIBLE HULK movies. Impossible not to speculate what the fourth Indy film would have achieved if George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had shot Frank Darabont's legendary script instead of CRYSTAL SKULL.

Wonderful to see Karen Allen again. Harrison Ford looks great but the script requires him to reference the past too much at the expense of providing CRYSTAL SKULL with a mission and identity of its own. The usually reliable Cate Blanchett is miscast and burdened with a hair color and style that appears to be inspired by CRIMINAL MINDS co-star Paget Brewster's unflattering bad hair. The film is also poorer for the absence of the late Denholm Elliot and the retired Sean Connery.

[Michael Magan]

Spielberg and Lucas are nerds who bastardized an American icon. Yeah, Lucas created it, but he already had his Star Wars and it was simply absurd to take something so pure and natural like IJ and do what they did to it. I enjoy the occasional Sci-Fi flick as much as the next guy, but it had no business creeping it’s ugly face into this picture. I bet Stevie contemplated a spaceship in Schindler’s List but someone smacked him. I mean WTF? It’s like they used the IJ character to sell their sci-fi sorry...a WEAK sci-fi story. Cate Blanchett made me sick and when that kid started swinging with the monkeys I felt embarrassed to be in the theater watching such a movie. The woman next to me laughed and awed at everything terrifying me to think that the public want this and Hollywood will continue to spoon-feed the sh*t to us all. Terrible, terrible... An estimated $126,040,000 at the box office for the opening weekend. Wow. They got their $20 from me. I’ll be smarter next time.

[Vanessa]

The satire used in the critiques is good and keeps you reading through and through. A concrete idea is put forward in a beautiful fashion.
---------------
Vanessa

http://www.treatmentcenters.org/indiana

[peoplemagazine lover]

I did watch the movie. Not exactly what I was expecting from Harrison Ford. I think, that the worse came early, when he went to hide inside a fridge, to escape from the nuclear blast. Oops! Too much of a lie to swallow. But, a celebrity like Ford gets away with it easily, with his fame and past record of films. He does not show up in many flicks, which is a good thing, for protecting your image and minimize the risks of being involved in a trash film I suppose...