Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

I waited quite a while to write this review, and for good reason. There was alot of knee-jerk reactionary hate directed towards Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (KotCS) when it was first released; reviews claiming their childhoods had been ‘molested’ or internet posters renaming the film with titles such as ‘Indiana Jones Episode 4: The Phantom Skull’ were everywhere, and the fanboy effect was quickly in full swing. Thus, despite having quite a few things I wanted to say about KotCS, I waited for some time to pass in order to present a non-reactionary, objective opinion.

This movie is terrible. I mean, wholly and truly awful.

Easily the worst of the Indiana Jones movies, KotCS isn’t just underperforming compared to it’s legendary predecessors, it’s not as good as the bloated adventure movies of today such as Pirates of the Caribbean or notable Indy knock-offs such as The Mummy . While a truly horrible script is the primary villian, weak performances and poor creative choices also play major roles in the (hopefully) last adventure of Indiana Jones. What’s worse is the deliberate feeling of it all. I believe that KotCS is exactly the movie that Spielberg, Lucas, et al. intended to make; I think they knew it was going to be bad, and made it anyway.

Now, KotCS had serious expectations dropped on it before it was even officially announced, and one could argue that it was never going to live up to many people’s expectations (like Lucas did here), but let’s get something clear right now - the fact that you’re unlikely to match the near unimaginable greatness/cultural impact of your previous work doesn’t just give you carte blanche to make a second-rate shitty movie. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the kind of thinking that shows itself everywhere throughout the film.

It all begins with the script which seems to be based on a simple premise - “Since the idea of a 65-year-old, fighting adventurer is ridiculous to begin with, we can do whatever the fuck we want. Yay!” I’d like someone to prove to me that George Lucas didn’t say those exact words while playing with a Jar-Jar doll on a giant pile of money and hate-mail, but it’s really the only explanation I can come up with for some of the sequences in this movie.

Indy who, while living a charmed life, had never previously been portrayed as superhuman is now surviving ground-zero nuclear blasts and being thrown miles while inside refrigerators; not to mention the fact that it seems that if you are his son, you are inexplicably the second coming of Tarzan.

Indy and Mutt aren’t the only beneficiaries of this newfound cartoon existence either. Marion Ravenwood now seems to be able to identify gravity-defying, elastic trees. The natives surrounding the city of gold seem capable of surviving in tiny little cubbyholes for indefinite amounts of time, just waiting for an intruder to pass by. And Harold Oxley (William Hurt) must be invulnerable, as there’s no other explanation as to how he could have reached that city on his own and survived.

Key moments of incredulousness aside, the script also fails in its primary purpose, which is to interest viewers in the story being told. While many have complained that they didn’t like the insertion of aliens into the Indiana Jones universe, my complaint hinges more on how uninteresting the aliens and the mythos surrounding them actually is.

Indy, we’re told, nearly died as a young man searching for the city of ‘gold’ that we ultimately learn was founded by aliens, but we’re never told why finding the city was so important to him. Obviously Indy, as an archaeologist, has an invested interest in the discovery of ancient ruins, but that doesn’t mean the audience does as well. One of the script’s greatest failings is the assumption that people seeing the movie care about crystal skulls and alien temples in the same way Indy (and Lucas) does.

Even if you aren’t a Christian, the cultural significance of finding the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail is obvious and the impact such a real-life discovery could have might literally affect the everyday lives of people who watch the movie. The lack of such a clearly potent macguffin was one of the primary weaknesses of Temple of Doom, and that weakness is exacerbated in KotCS by a breakneck pace which barely pauses to offer us any real explanation as to what is going on. Sure, at the end they try to make up for it by revealing that the crystal-skull aliens are responsible for everything, but by that point it’s far too late to matter.

Speaking of too late, why don’t I talk about Harrison Ford a bit? While I know most critics agreed that his portrayal of Indy this time around was still spot on, I happen to think it wasn’t. Let’s face it - Ford hasn’t been in a good movie in a long time (probably not since The Fugitive). All those years of phoning in performances of the same grumpy-for-no-reason, frowning on cue character seem to have really taken their toll. The wry sense of humor and the playfulness of Indy’s charm seem to have been replaced by irritability and sarcasm.

Usually I would be more willing to drop the blame for this on Lucas, as he’s well known for getting poor performances out of good actors, and I don’t even think Spielberg can counter the grandeur of Lucas’ failures, but even that doesn’t explain the lack of chemistry when Indy and Marion are bantering back and forth about Mutt’s education, or when she first reveals Mutt to be Indy’s son. The scenes just fall flat, and not due to any failings on the part of Karen Allen, who is great with what little they give her to work with. Ford simply fails to capture that larger than life persona that makes Indiana Jones the type of person for whom schoolgirls swoon and ships of mercenary sailors cheer.

Ford’s performance isn’t the only one that falls flat however. Cate Blanchett does a decent job of being interesting on screen, but the lack of any discernible motivation for her character means that when she’s off camera she’s completely forgotten. Ray Winstone’s ‘Mac’ is one of those characters who feels as if he simply does not exist when off camera and materializes out of the ether just to walk into a scene and deliver a line or advance a plot point, and the big bruiser Dovchenko is lifeless & forgotten even before he is eaten by giant ants.

When going to see KotCS for the first time I had adopted a ‘hope for the best, expect the worst’ mentality and when running the possible scenarios of how the film might play out, I recalled an interview with Speilberg and producer Frank Marshall in which the claim was made that this film would be shot like the other three films - i.e. using old fashioned stuntwork & a bare minimum of CGI. “At the very least,” I thought to myself as I found my seat “it’ll have that going for it.”

As it turns out, Steven Speilberg and Frank Marshall are two-faced, lying scumbags.

No more than 10 seconds into the movie I am greeted by a an obviously CGI gopher, which is shortly followed by an Area 51 sound stage that looks about as real as the ones that were supposed to look fake in The Truman Show. None of the death-defying stuntwork that made Raiders literally jump off of the screen and amaze can be found here, and the movie suffers considerably for it. Had the infamous ‘Tarzan’ scene not involved cute CGI monkeys, and been an actual stunt sequence that someone had to pull off, it could have been really incredible. Instead, it looks more like reels of Disney’s 1999 cartoon were accidentally cut into the middle of the film.

Fuzzy lighting and blurry backgrounds plague the action sequences, particularly those in the jungle, and the shots that aren’t doctored are so strikingly different in look and feel of the ones that are that the sequences loses all tension. All the effect shots in the film are categorically substandard, probably the worst I’ve seen come out of ILM, and they left me wondering if the effects team was rushed to meet a deadline.

Even some of the shots that didn’t require CGI still looked surprisingly bad. There is a scene in which Indy and Marion find themselves in some sort of jungle quicksand, and the only thing worse than the dialogue in that sequence is how incredibly cheesy the jungle looks around them. It’s made even when Mutt tries to use a ’snake’ to pull them out that looks like one of those giant foam noodles you buy at Target for your swimming pool. It was so bad, I half expected Gilligan and the Professor to walk on set with some sort alien tracker built out of coconuts. (Also, am I the only person that remembers Indy always carries a whip? Couldn’t he have just used that to pull himself from the sand?)

I could probably write twenty more paragraphs on the problems I had with Indy 4, but I think I’ve already ranted on more than was necessary. Needless to say, I think that the movie was bad - real bad, but what really angers me is the fact that I feel it was deliberate. I think that the poor CGI, shitty sets, & lazy script make a strong argument for the fact that Lucas, Ford, Speilberg, and everyone else involved knew what they were working on was garbage, and they did it anyway.

I’ve paid to see plenty of terrible movies, and I often leave a theater wishing I hadn’t forked over the ten bucks, but it’s rare to leave a theater feeling as if I’d been consciously robbed by the movie’s creators. Maybe they should have called it Indiana Jones and Highway Robbers.

Tags: CGI, George Lucas, Harrison Ford, Indiana Jones, Radiers of the Lost Ark, Shit, Stupid, Temple of Doom

This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 3:15 am and is filed under Movies, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.