So, for all my complaining about The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull BEFORE it even hit theatres, I figured it only fair that I WATCH the damn thing to see if my griping was all for naught.
It wasn't.
Unlike this year's The Dark Knight, this was one movie that could not live up to its own hype. Indy 4 was rather more like Episode I, in that surpassing fan expectations was nigh impossible. The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, however well-intentioned it might have been, got very little right, in my opinion.
So what did the movie get right? Aside from a few striking visuals (like Indy observing a mushroom cloud), not much. Everything about this film was phoned in, from Spielberg's lazy direction to Harrison Ford's barely-there performance to the script's criminal lack of character development. I remember a time when the Indiana Jones movie set the standard for action movies in the way that classic Bond films once did. The Indy films actually spawned their own genre of (copycat) adventure films (like The Mummy series) and videogames (like Tomb Raider, which itself begat a few movies). And now, with this latest entry, Crystal Skull does very little to set itself apart from its sea of imitators.
So, what does Crystal Skull get wrong? Here's a list:
-Too many new characters, none of whom have any backstory to speak of. Mutt? Oxley, Mac--who cares? Why couldn't it have been Abner Ravenwood in this movie, instead of Oxley? Oxley meant nothing to the returning audience. One of Indy's charms in films past was his ability to figure out cryptic clues, figuratively and literally. Oxley basically stole Indy's thunder in that regard--and his intellect, too. And with Mutt was on hand to play the de facto action star of the piece, what was left for Indy to do but serve more as a supporting character?
-Riding out an atomic blast in a lead-lined refrigerator? SERIOUSLY? At this point the whole enterprise began to feel like a cut-rate parody of an Indiana Jones movie. It was also at this point that I considered abandoning the movie entirely.
-If you're going to do something gutsy like bring back Marion Ravenwood, make sure she packs an even bigger punch (literally) than she did in Raiders. This woman used to be a first-rate badass. Just like Morpheus in the third Matrix film, though, Marion is an all but useless character in her latest screen incarnation.
-Give us a villain with some depth. We knew nothing about Cate Blanchet's baddie. A slavic accent does not a character make. Look at Belloq in Raiders. He was interesting because he was multi-faceted. In the end, he wanted what Indiana wanted--they just had different ideologies. Blanchet's villainess (I can't remember her name and don't care to even bother looking it up online) is a forgettable one-note baddie.
-An over-reliance on CGI. Seriously, what happened to the practical effects Spielberg talked about during the making of the film? Why should I care about characters that never, ever seem like they are in any real peril? Indy navaigating his way beneath the Nazi truck in Raiders is a movie stunt for the ages. Not so much his CG-rendered scion's straddlling of CG-rendered Jeeps in a CG-rendered jungle.
And then they took the movie to even lower lows with those CG monkeys. As current CG goes, the monkeys weren't even all that convincing. (The CG gophers from the beginning of the film likewise looked very fake, even on the small screen.) I feel this bit with the monkeys in particular was Spielberg at his laziest. Is it too much to ask for even a LITTLE bit of verisimilitude at this point? I mean, just throw in a few extra shots of Mutt shooing away monkeys as he clings desperately to his vine. Better yet, as he swings through the jungle, SHOW us how Mutt might contend with dense foliage and wayward insects smacking him in the face. Make us FEEL like we're there with Mutt. Make us feel SOMETHING. Put us in the heroes' shoes, man. We want to be these people, right? We want their triumphs to be our triumphs--and we want to anguish over their failures, right? Isn't that just good storytelling?
-Lastly--ALIENS. But not aliens from outerspace--but aliens from the space between spaces, as one character describes them. What??? So then why do these aliens even need a flying saucer?
Anyway, I could go on, but hopefully you see my point. The bottom line is this: never at any point was I ever emotionally invested in this film. How could I be, when its execution was so caculated and bloodless?
The day after I watched Crystal Skull I watched Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind. Be Kind, for all its deliberate quirkiness and inventive deconstruction of movies, was clearly meant as a love letter to cinephiles. The movie does this by respecting its characters and the audience. And it does it all with heart and style (and yes, with just a dash of CG as well).
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Of course, I still have TONS of Hairbat back issues, though not all of them have fared well during the last 15 years. I guess you could say that this picture sums up Hairbat's current overall state quite well. (The damage is not nearly as bad as what is pictured here.) I literally have hundreds and hundreds of back issues--all in the boxes that shipped directly from the printers. Still, it doesn't mean that throwing away these wasted issues wasn't sobering or depressing.
