Indiana Jones ATKOTCS review (non-spoilerish)

With the exception of an overly anthropomorphic monkey (a portent of awful things to come like Jar Jar Binks and a nuclear gopher family), Raiders of the Lost Ark was a terrific piece of film making that successfully paid homage to 1940's cliffhangers without becoming a parody. Its follow-up, the Temple of Doom, was a large scale screwup that largely ignored everything that made its predecessor enjoyable in favor of a Goonies style sidekick (I know Goonies came out the year after, but Jonathan Ke Quan played identical parts as both Short Round and Data) and a high concentration of Troma-style visceral visuals (chilled monkey brains anybody?). The Last Crusade was an overall enjoyable film with a great first act followed up meandering father / son schtick and, finally, a satisfying ride off into the sunset to end the series. Which brings us to the latest entry in the series: Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Crystal Skull.


I set my expectations really low prior to watching the movie. From the look of the trailers, the movie already seemed to be suffering from the Lucas-style clash of visual noisiness and thematic clutter that were prevalent in the Star Wars prequel trailers and were more than telling of their respective final products. As evident in the Star Wars original trilogy special editions, Lucas has a problem with subtlety (something that budget constraints imposed on the original Star Wars) and, left unchecked (he is the world’s richest independent film producer), his particular form of narcissistic creativity tends to drown out the entertainment value of his films rather than improve them. Three minutes of the Fifth Element’s congested skyline has far more impact than thirty minutes of various planets suffering from ten times the amount of traffic.

In the first twenty minutes of the movie, we’re quickly reintroduced to Indiana Jones who has been captured by Nazi-like communists (only Cate Blanchett’s Russian purr and Dora the Explorer haircut differentiate her villainous aspirations from Raider’s Major Toht) and forced to locate a mysterious artifact buried somewhere in a labyrinth-like warehouse in Area 51. Luckily for him, her mother-country-renowned mindreading skills (which never manifest themselves again for the rest of the movie) fail to purloin the artifact’s secrets from his archeological mind, but do ensure that the audience will have to endure two more hours of mumbo jumbo to reach the same conclusions together.

One of the biggest problems with the movie becomes evident in the first big action scene. In the original Raiders, much of the movie’s fun was watching Indy make mistakes both intellectually and physically and suffering as a result. This thematic throwback to pulp-grade heroes made his victories and successes that much more exciting. In the Crystal Skull, much like the relaunches of Die Hard and Rocky, Indiana has become less of a hero and more of a superhero where any amount of damage inflicted by stunt and set piece is shaken off with an incredulous been-there-done-there smirk and a quip. This imperviousness to any sort of damage makes it difficult to connect to the character since there’s never any real sense of danger. It’s almost like age has inured his body rather than slowed him down which puts the believability of the conceit on the audience rather than the character. Personally, I didn’t buy it.

The Crystal Skull’s story has too many problems to make sense of. It has the structure of a honey-do list where elements are checked off regardless of order, planning, or necessity: nods to the series prior installments are rattled off to please the fans, themes are introduced and then thrown away before they can develop, major plot points are revealed through prequel-quality dialogue that causes the pace to stall out, new characters are introduced with imposed familiarity and little relevance other than simple mechanics to drive disparate parts of the plot along. As with the Star Wars prequels, the burden of responsibility here falls on the screen writer (Lucas) since the cast is made up of some truly talented actors that are capable of much more.

Much ado has been made of the movie’s action set pieces which should be the icing on the cake and not the prime motivator for the entire picture. We have Capoeira Mayans, a nuclear bomb exploding, multiple waterfall drops, a Mayan surprise party, a jungle clearing truck (re-appropriated from the opening scenes of the Phantom Menace), sword fighting between moving cars, video game style crushing blocks, and a vaporized villain (which pales in comparison to past villains’ demises). By the time, the movie reached its Mission to Mars finale (which was actually nearly identical to 1983’s Wavelength), I finally realized that the movie would have been better split up into 15 minute mini-movies and shown on the SciFi network before Stargate Atlantis. There’s at least four different movies going on in the Crystal Skull and none of them are very strong.

My friend Stephen summed up the movie the best. Since the Last Crusade, we’re had entirely new franchises in the same genre appear: the Mummy, Tomb Raider, National Treasure, the made-for-TV Librarian series, and, to some degree, the DaVinci Code. None of these movies have improved upon Raiders of the Lost Ark, but rather than use the opportunity to show the audience how a real adventure movie can be made, the Crystal Skull has, instead, snuggled up with the new comers.

Last Thursday represents the last time I want to see the green, sparkling Lucasfilm logo pop up in a movie theater. I've been burned too many times and so Lucas and his works are now relegated to the same big budget, egotistical director's kid's table that Michael Bay and the Wachowski Brothers are sitting at while the adults do more interesting things. He'll be in good company until the day he decides to order off the menu.