Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Shia LaBeouf, John Hurt, Ray Winstone, Jim Broadbent, Andrew Divoff
Genre: Adventure
Rated: PG-13
Review By:
Michael Dance
School:
NYU Tisch '07
Quote:
"...And hey, I met you. You are not cool." -Almost Famous
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Raiders of the Lost Ark is a perfect action movie. The opening sequence alone — go ahead, watch it again — was the inspiration for at least a dozen stories I wrote in grade school and remains the single best piece of pure adventure I’ve ever seen put to film. The two sequels, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, were both excellent, but their flaws were a bit more noticeable, and for a growing kid like me, there wasn’t, nor could there be, that gee-whiz sense of discovery that the first film gave me.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull arrives under a mountain of expectations, some impossible to fulfill, and has gone through many rounds of development hell, with at least eight screenwriters hired to work on different drafts over the years. All things considered, it’s a minor miracle that the film works as well as it does: as a worthy successor to Temple of Doom and Last Crusade. It’s uneven thanks to a murky mythology, but they get the attitude and the action right.
Things have changed in the Indiana Jones universe. It’s no longer the ’30s, which means Nazis can’t be the villains anymore — Indy is now in the middle of the Cold War 1950s, so of course the antagonists are Russians, led by Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett). Subtlety is not the goal with Spalko, who’s searching for legendary crystal skulls because she believes they have psychic powers to defeat Soviet enemies, but Blanchett has the chops to make her not so much less of a cartoon than just a more fun cartoon to watch.
The crystal skulls steer the story towards some supernatural stuff that foregoes the religious-themed pursuits of the original films — the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail — for a theme that veers into science fiction territory, and I think ultimately it loses something there. I’ve heard that the idea was done to deliberately reflect the shift from the adventure serials found in the ’30s — the type of stuff the original films paid homage to — to sci-fi serials in the ’50s. That’s a neat idea, and one early scene in which Jones finds himself in the middle of a ghost town/atomic test site works surprisingly well.
But usually, all the sci-fi mumbo jumbo — and I’m not saying the first three films were lacking in mumbo jumbo — doesn’t come off quite as, well, cool. The style of Indiana Jones better suits the discovery of mythical artifacts, not borderline-Close Encounters of the Third Kind situations.
Then again, it could just be the paragraphs of exposition that screenwriter David Koepp has awkwardly inserted every chance he gets. There’s too
Luckily, he absolutely does justice to the characters. Ray Winstone, as Indy’s greedy sidekick Mac, looks right at home in this universe, and Shia LaBeouf, if you’ll forgive the cliché, really does breathe some fresh life into the franchise. He plays Mutt Williams, a young greaser who comes to Indy for help when his mother goes missing in the jungles of South America. If you’ve been following the marketing for the film at all, you might guess that his mother turns out to be Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), the original love interest from Raiders of the Lost Ark. I’m happy to report that both Marion and Indy himself are pitch-perfect.
That’s thanks principally to Allen and Harrison Ford, of course. Ford brings his A-game after a full decade of mostly sleepwalking through roles, and Allen, with an ear-to-ear smile, just looks like she’s having a blast being there again. Bringing her back was probably the single smartest decision in the entire film; Marion was the perfect original romantic foil — the next two movies had glaringly weaker female characters — so watching the two of them play off each other once again isn’t only nostalgia at its best, it’s a lot of fun on its own terms, too.
Unfortunately, the climax basically consists of lots of expensive special effects happening while Indy and the gang stand back and watch. That’s how a lot of big blockbusters tend to end these days, and it’s increasingly troubling given that we’re dealing with Spielberg, who should know better. Give me a hero who’s actually proactive over a million-dollar CGI shot any day.
That’s another thing — Spielberg has bragged that most of the effects in this film are CGI-less. I’m no expert, but there’s a lot of CGI in this film. And frankly, many scenes as a whole look oddly fake; cinematographer Janusz Kaminski overdoes it with the hazy, soft-lit backgrounds, while in one establishing shot of a graveyard, it’s embarrassingly obvious that we’re looking at a miniature. If these quirks were done to mimic the style of the original films, it would be understandable, perhaps welcome, but they’re not.
But let’s step back and relax. Impossible as it is to watch this film without constantly comparing it to the past, if you do, you’ll discover a well-above-average adventure yarn; kids who don’t know the previous films may discover the same sense of wonder that I did the first time I saw Raiders. Watching this with an overly critical eye will fuel your nitpicky-fanboy
Unevenness aside, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull brings Indiana Jones back — the real, true Indiana Jones, not a weak imitation or a pale shadow. That’s the most important thing of all — that, and the red line that traces Indy’s journey on a map whenever he travels, which is back too.
Movie Grade: B
Synopsis:
Indiana Jones is back for his fourth adventure, which no one knows the plot of but apparently involves kingdoms and crystal skulls. Ray Winstone‘s the sidekick, Cate Blanchett might be the villain, Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) from Raiders of the Lost Ark is back, and Shia LaBeouf…well, if the rumors are true it would spoil it, so I won’t say. The film is set in the late 1950s, so this time evil Nazis couldn’t be involved…or could they?
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