Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (DVD)

Synopsis (from Imdb.com):

"Famed archaeologist/adventurer Dr. Henry 'Indiana' Jones is called back into action when he becomes entangled in a Soviet plot to uncover the secret behind mysterious artifacts known as the Crystal Skulls".

"INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL" - Review by Jodi Johnson.

I want to preface this by saying that there are spoilers here, that it is ...
...reviewing the theatrical release (not the DVD, as Ciao seem to force us to), and that I'm not the biggest fan of the franchise, but have always kept my respect for the trilogy up, have followed it on top in parallel through the computer games (most notably the adventure ones by Lucasarts, "The Fate of Atlantis", and "The Last Crusade"), and I made sure to re-watch the first three over the weekend before finally getting around ... more

Synopsis (from Imdb.com):

"Famed archaeologist/adventurer Dr. Henry 'Indiana' Jones is called back into action when he becomes entangled in a Soviet plot to uncover the secret behind mysterious artifacts known as the Crystal Skulls".

"INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL" - Review by Jodi Johnson.

I want to preface this by saying that there are spoilers here, that it is for those who have seen the film already, that I'm reviewing the theatrical release (not the DVD, as Ciao seem to force us to), and that I'm not the biggest fan of the franchise, but have always kept my respect for the trilogy up, have followed it on top in parallel through the computer games (most notably the adventure ones by Lucasarts, "The Fate of Atlantis", and "The Last Crusade"), and I made sure to re-watch the first three over the weekend before finally getting around to seeing this fourth outing. I'm coming from a slightly outside angle, but identify in having a mild aversion to "The Temple of Doom", and, because of my age (24), an irrational preference for "The Last Crusade", which I nevertheless feel to be a weaker film than "Raiders of the Lost Ark", the film I know least, but it's a generational thing, and I'm not going to force the issue just to feel "right".

I went in tonight to watch "The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" as objectively as possible, aware of my own faults as a viewer, but figuring that if there's one thing I've learnt beyond bad things located behind cobwebs in Indy films it's that you have to accept the movies on their own terms, and adapt - you show a form of kindness to them, and I figure that has always been Spielberg and Lucas' wish, where you pay homage to what they pay homage to (which I think Ford understands likewise). I accept that and I try to embrace it as far as I can, not being an American, and not being an American of their generation - I am always keen to be shown, to be led, and I guess to learn, but there is only so much understanding one can give, and coming out of the film regretting seeing it is heartbreaking to a neutral like me because although the films had a part in my childhood, they were not the more definitive ones, and I feel genuinely sorry for those who placed more importance on the series and left more hurt than I did - it's one thing feeling cheated financially, and quite the other culturally.

I can honestly say that I was enjoying the film greatly for a substantial portion of the first half - there was a visible struggle from Spielberg to weather Ford into the post-Nazi panic of Communism, and I thought the setting in the 50s didn't seem forced as it actually has been by Ford's age - in fact some of the stilted conformity, and the background of the nuclear age, gave Jones incidental depth, along with his age, as a sharper maverick against the wider social context he's placed in (after all, the Nazis were always a negative maverick match in the first and third films, so they tended to counter-balance Jones a little). I was generally happy enough to tweak in my mind the projected arc of the Area 51 warehouse scene and make it more palatable as background detail, rather than concentrate on the implications I figured it was going to hold for later, and I could forgive Blanchett as a Russian (other than just employing a newcomer Russian and then downplaying her a bit, as I thought should have been done) - she didn't have much to work with really, and got an awful lot of dead screen-time. Shia LaBeouf was impressing me with his energy during his initial scenes too, and the motorcycle street/library chase was camp enough to hit nostalgia and reveal the College universe that got tantalisingly expanded a bit more here (which actually added a lot to "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis", and its fairly persistent after-hours sense of loneliness and desolation that avoids the party-of-five mentality of this new film's denouement) - in fact, I actually enjoyed the Ford/LaBeouf interplay generally, when they were alone, and had a lot of time for an evocative graveyard scene they find themselves in, more because it kept hitting a level of dark and gloom that perhaps should have been more a hallmark of this film.

Of course I wanted action, but I figured that nineteen years would bring wisdom and consideration too - I know I'm missing something and wanting the series to be deeper than it is, but I do consider the first twenty minutes of "The Last Crusade" to have been the moment the whole series gave itself access to something emotionally deeper, which will always be a River Phoenix thing in part (he hangs over this film a little too, as does Connery), but the wasted expanse should always be there in mind alongside the gilded tombs - Nevada gestured towards it in the latest film, but Spielberg seems to have lost his handle on these things (as well as the mistaken decision to shoot all of the film in North America because Spielberg didn't want to be away from his family). Spielberg's traditionally a balancing direction with a great talent for letting natural tensions hum ("Jaws" was always notable because sea/land tensions got personified in Brody, and Scheider really seems to have understood Spielberg, which is what makes his performance remarkable), but I didn't see much of it in "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" at all, so, as much as I enjoyed LaBeouf's first-half, he didn't have the ability to wrestle from the material a deeper not-just-based-on-a-generational-and-educational-gap relationship with Ford, before he was nullified in the monkey swinging and blunt-force father revelations (tag-teamed with a seemingly medicated Karen Allen, who was just as out-of-place as John Hurt's career imploding), which, and I say this somewhat wearily, just really damaged things, so I want to say this now: I think there is one thing a sensible viewing has to take into account, and that's that the nuked fridge was stupid or even unscientific, the alien/spaceship likewise, but the damage is done elsewhere. For example, and expanding the above, I think there's a whole article to be written on LaBeouf being given the most difficult acting job in a number of years, struggling for a relationship against a script that seems booby-trapped and generally "faster" than him (the strange trick of the illogical) - if "The Temple of Doom" suffered from a bad cocktail of slapstick and serious occult business, LaBeouf gets a kicking somewhere in the "space between spaces" (the ghost of Connery, CGI, lack of on-scene filming, confining his development to a limited portion of the script, and the cotton-wool of his Mother, this all in addition to that vine-swinging). I'm not here to be his apologist, but to say that screenwriters need to be aware that they need to be responsible with the careers of younger actors, and, even if they can't do that, the business sense of LaBeouf carrying on this series has been severely compromised by Lucas and David Koepp (the latter, apparently the full scriptwriter, and responsible for the always fun "Death Becomes Her", puts in a disgraceful shift during the tired second half, and I wonder what Tom Stoppard, as caretaker of the "Last Crusade" script, would have done with LaBeouf's castration given his own work on those ineffectual wonders of "Hamlet", Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - anybody want to send him a letter?)

As most of you know, things become awfully messy after the truck chase that I kept thinking could have been done almost entirely physically, with a little less emphasis on cliff drops and scope - any plot development there was up until here is jettisoned for what seems like an increasingly visual storyboard project, and Spielberg seems to relinquish control to Lucas. There are cushion scenes with nothing redeeming about them at all (snake-rope), mind-control discussions with laboured (and long) diversions of little consequence, continued selective magnetism (C.S.M.) of those elongated heads (which bizarrely take up an awful lot of screen-time too), waterfalls that take the ratios of the previous films and start to dislocate out of logic (which calls into question the film's dedication to the canon), an increasingly-bemused Ford, the combination of the odd grins of Allen and Hurt, the Mayans from nowhere, the ants, the aliens, the selective vaporisation, the spacecraft, and the from-left-field ideological bachelor-shift of Jones that says at the end, "After a degree of off-screen character development hitherto only seen in the first film, and left to memory through weak writing in this film, Jones and Ravenwood have decided to marry - given the fridge and the aliens, the implausibility of this shift of outlook shouldn't look out of place, and besides at least they didn't have to court at a reduced level…you know, like 'Episode 2'…so be grateful and chalk this down as a deus ex machina - it's the same thing as a tour de force…right?"

What affects the film the most though is the sense of a massive opportunity missed, not just in terms of thinking that things could have been improved, but that there was a real alternative available to Spielberg and Lucas beyond Koepp: a certain Frank Darabont, who was involved in drafting an early version of the script in 2002. What is remarkable about Darabont is that he was nominated for an Oscar for "Best Adapted Screenplay" for "The Green Mile" and "The Shawshank Redemption", the latter rated as the second best film of all-time on Imdb (The Internet Movie Database), and a collaborator with Spielberg on the decent "Minority Report" and "Saving Private Ryan" (as well as an ill-advised stint on "The Mist"). Spielberg said Darabont's script for a proposed "Indiana Jones 4" was one of the best three he had read for any film…ever, but apparently had to defer to his old friend Lucas' judgement (who disliked it), and wanted his own story to be adapted, tentatively called "Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars", and if that doesn't sum up this whole almost-disaster, then I do despair for you.

"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" was released theatrically on the 22nd May 2008, and I give it a still somewhat generous 2/5.

Jodi Johnson, Coleraine, Ireland - (jj_doody@hotmail.com). 

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