The Indy 4 Review

Remember what I said in a previous post about spoilers, kids? This applies here! There are spoilers galore in store! This is NOT a spoiler-free review! So warning you ahead of time…if you have NOT seen “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”, then do NOT read further! First, because I’m giving stuff away, and second, because you should never read a full review of a film before you go see it anyway! So if you want to read this, go see the film first, then drop on back by!

Spoilers ahead.

Yes, I said spoilers.

Spoilers below, matey! Arrrr!

Don’t you remember you warned me of spoilers, baby (Da da da…)?

If I had a spoiler…I’d spoil it in the mo-or-ning…

Pour…some…spoilers on maaay…

We’re clear on the spoiler thing now, right?

Good! On with the review!

So I made it out with a few friends to the film this evening, as planned. Our showing wasn’t sold out, but was very full, which was cool. We were at the Century theater on Ethan, which provides, as ever, crappy wheelchair seating, so I was off to the side seeing everything kind of stretched out. This is nothing new, so it didn’t really bother me, it’s just something I’m now noticing more since I started taking the occasional drive up to El Dorado Hills to go the beautiful stadium theater there, where if you’re there in a wheelchair, you’ve always got the best seat in house. But, neither here nor there. The movie itself is our topic of discussion.

So as to the movie, after so much stressing over it and speculation and worry, wondering if one of my favorite franchises of all time was going to be ruined by latter-day Lucas and (somehow still Lucas’ bitch after all these years) Spielberg, I have seen it, and can definitely tell you that “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” is a

BIG STEAMING
PILE OF #$%@!!!

Was that too vague?

As you can tell, right now, just home from the theater, I’ve got some pretty strong feelings about it. In short, that very first review that hit the internet, over on Ain’t It Cool News, that said “this is the Indiana Jones movie you’ve been dreading” turned out, despite what quite a number of apparently over-medicated movie reviewers have thought since, to be 100% correct. All my fears (and even a few I hadn’t thought of) came true. Wow. Part of me is angered, but another part of is almost impressed. You really have to go miles out of your way to blow something on this scale. That almost made the price of my ticket worth it, just to see that feat accomplished myself.

Part of me knew, from the opening sixty seconds of the movie, that it was doomed. We open up, as with all Indy films, on the Paramount logo, and the mountain on it dissolves into some kind of actual mountain. This time was no different. It dissolved into what looked like a mountain, but you quickly realize is a dirt mound. Okay, some possible humor there, throwing a little unexpected at you. And then the mound starts to come apart, and a CGI groundhog pops up.

I’m not joking.

A CGI groundhog.

The poor groundhog then ducks back down (ha ha!) as a hopped-up roadster runs over the mound as an Elvis tune is playing, and we see some teens racing along through the desert, raising a ruckus and being all rebellious and such. This was the narrative way to let us know, in case we didn’t hear going in, that it was now the 1950s in the Indyverse. Yeah, okay, fine. This is also the part where you’re supposed to go, “Hey, it’s like American Graffiti! And George Lucas made American Graffiti! It’s an homage! Get it?!”. Good idea. Remind us of a time when Lucas HAD talent and wasn’t a disconnected, senile mouth-breather.

FYI, the computer ground hogs make two more appearances for the sake of “humor” in the opening sequence.

The wacky teens in the car race past an Army convoy made up of a car, a few trucks and a bunch of soldiers. We see, soon, that this convoy is headed to a military base out there in the desert. The convoy is stopped at the gate by the personnel stationed there, and are told there’s testing going on, and no one is allowed in. A little tension sets in…what’s going on in there? Are these guards on the up-and-up, or is something funky happening here? Suddenly, the soldiers on the trucks we’ve been following whip out their machine guns and gun down all those guards, and we quickly find out what we thought were U.S. soldiers are actually Soviet spies. Okay. Nice twist. I had a little hope there for a moment.

I think that was the last moment in the film. Seriously.

As the convoy heads in and stops in front of a (big) warehouse, the lead car’s trunk is opened, and a couple of obviously reluctant passengers are pulled out. One, we don’t know. The second is our boy, Indy. Okay, NOW I was ready. Harrison was going to start making this movie work for me. Dr. Jones in the HOUSE! I was sort of hoping to be in the theater with the kind of crowd that started cheering when he appeared, but apparently the 8:15 crowd isn’t that demonstrative. That was fine. I waited to see where the film was going next.

The word that sums it up is “downhill”.

Harrison Ford begins to speak. This was disturbing problem number one. If you’re not familiar with the film term “looping”, this is where the actors go back, later, and re-dub their own dialogue. Those recordings made on the set, or on location, aren’t great. Actors go into the recording studio, watching their scene on the screen, and speak their dialogue again, trying to match it up with how their lips are moving in the film. I don’t know if it was bad filmmaking in this case, or if Harrison just stinks at the process, but his looping the first fifteen or more minutes of the film was horrible! I thought I was watching a Godzilla movie for a minute there. It was so bad that for a minute I thought they were dubbing someone else’s voice over Harrison’s performance for some reason. Way to take me right out of the film.

The second problem was the scene itself, outside a warehouse with the desert behind them. I realized, as Cate Blanchett came walking into the scene, that something was odd and not quite real about the lighting. And then it hit me. There were NOT in the desert. This was green screen work! They were on a freaking soundstage somewhere and were being digitally placed in the desert like they were on freaking Coruscant! Are you KIDDING me? We can’t even go to actual LOCATIONS anymore?

And the third problem came up when Blanchett suddenly started trying to use her psychic powers to read Indy’s mind.

Again…not joking.

As Indy is coerced by the Soviets who have him at gunpoint to go inside this warehouse to find a crate they’re looking for, I started to cringe…and was justified. Yes, this was the warehouse from the end of Raiders. Are…you…kidding me? That location, and that scene, should never have been touched again. And yet, here we were. Indy ends up finding the crate for them – which contains (back in not joking mode) a mummified body of an alien – and then tries to make his escape, leading to a big chase through the giant warehouse. And the final big dump taken on the memory of the first film is when they’re racing by some crates in the truck chase and hit one, and part of it breaks off, letting us see, for a moment, that it’s the Ark of the Covenant inside! Ha ha! Shoot me, shoot me, SHOOT ME.

I’ll gloss over what happens next by just saying that, before we get on to the actual film, Indy ends up in mock town in the middle of the desert where a nuclear bomb is about to go off nearby, and he survives by closing himself in a refrigerator. As the town is blown apart, the fridge goes flying and bouncing across the desert, and when it stops, Indy falls out, unharmed…and finds himself face to face with the last of the CGI groundhogs. Sigh. I’m sorry, I meant “Ha ha!”.

Taken into custody by the FBI, Indy, because he was kidnapped by Soviets and forced to take them into the warehouse, is now seen as a possible Red. This, despite the fact that, as we find out in that scene, sometime after Last Crusade he joined the Army, made his way up to Colonel, and was instrumental in spying on the Reds. We cut back to Indy teaching at his college, and soon find out that he’s been fired due to this FBI investigation (blacklisted! Zoinks!). A scene in his home after this tells us that Sean Connery’s Henry Jones Sr. has recently passed, so I guess he’s definitely out of the franchise. Indy decides to go off somewhere, and is just taking off on a train when Shia LaBeouf shows up on his motorcycle looking for him. Why? Because his (stepfather? I never quite figured out the relationship) has been kidnapped in the jungle somewhere. Oh, he also mentions that his mother has been kidnapped, too, but she got away and sent him a letter telling him to go find Jones and give him something (stepfather?) drew. He mentions now that Mom is on the run again, but doesn’t seem all that bothered by that fact. This all leads to Indy and this kid, “Mutt Williams” (wasn’t that the producer for Def Leppard?), taking off (after being chased by more free-roaming Soviets with guns in America) to find some answers. Oh, and “Mutt’s” Mom? Her name is Marion. But because her last name is Williams, Indy seems unable to figure out which “Marion” this might be. Apparently, he’s known many of them. Okay…

What follows is a drawn-out investigation and search for clues that gets increasingly silly. There’s a great moment where they’re in the cell that the missing archeologist (the maybe-stepfather, but I don’t think that’s right) and they’re looking at some figures and writings that he must have “scratched” into the stone walls and floor. These deep and clear “scratchings” could not have been made without a hammer and chisel and a hell of a lot of time. They get their clues, they face some danger, the end up captured, and they find not only the archaeologist (John Hurt, whose character is now completely insane) and the magical crystal skull, but the big reveal happens with Marion (Oh! THAT Marion!). More silliness leads to a big escape, which leads to a quicksand moment where Marion reveals to Indy that Mutt is his son, and then they’re captured again. But escape again! An escape that involves LOADS of ridiculous CGI use, a horrible Tarzan scene with Mutt swinging through the jungle (and somehow making allies of monkeys, who kindly attack the evil Russian dominatrix, because these are free market monkeys, damnit!), a chase by flesh-eating ants and not one but THREE unsurvivable waterfall drops that our heroes make it through just swell.

The finale takes place in the temple they discover, where they’re menaced by zombie Mayan warriors (?) and find the big chamber with thirteen crystal skeletons on thrones (one missing a head – the one that they’ve brought back). We find out that these aliens are the ones who visited this ancient people and brought them irrigation and other such stuff that was hundreds of years ahead of them. When the skull is placed on the final skeleton, it COMES TO LIFE. Cate Blanchett wants all its knowledge and starts having some psychic pow-wow with it (did I mention that the Soviets were looking for this place so they could get vast telepathic powers and take over America and the rest of the world?). There is a moment in the middle of this scene that I SWEAR I am not making up. Indiana Jones actually stops and says “I’ve got a bad feeling about this”. While I’ve had many reasons to want to punch George Lucas in his bearded face in the past decade, never has the urge been so strong.

I’m at a loss to properly describe how it all ends, but Cate gets all the knowledge but is inexplicably killed for it, and a big (wait for it) FLYING SAUCER rises up from beneath the temple, destroying it, and our heroes make it out just in time before the saucer goes not off into space, but back to the other DIMENSION that it’s from. As the once-more-sane John Hurt tells us, they’re not spacemen, but extra-dimensional creatures. Guess they were just waiting for some helpful soul to return one of their group’s head to them so they could zoom back home.

If this all sounds like I’m pulling your leg, I wish it was so. The film ends with the long-awaited wedding of Indy and Marion. As they’re getting ready to leave the church, a wind blows the doors open, and blows Indy’s fedora off a rack and sends it rolling to Mutt’s feet. Mutt picks it up and starts to put it on – but as Indy and his bride walk by, Indy grabs it, with a grin, and puts it on his own head. Ooh, a portent of a new series of Mutt Williams movies?! Don’t tease me!!

We know, now, the story behind the development of this film, and how it’s been in the works for over ten years, and WHY it took ten years. I read the AP story on this last weekend. Apparently, George’s whole idea – one that he had someone write a screenplay for – was “Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars”. Yet ANOTHER thing that sounds like I’m making it up, but I’m not. That was the actual title. And this film involved Martians vs. Russians and Americans, right down to a big air battle with U.S. and Soviet jets vs. the saucers. For ten years we haven’t gotten a fourth Indy film because George, Steven and Harrison couldn’t agree on a story that all worked for them. What that translates to is that poor Spielberg and Ford WANTED to make a new Indy film, but had to get one horrifying idea after another handed to them by George – who, if you hadn’t picked up on this yet, is now insane.

Can you just imagine that first pitch lunch? They all head out to Skywalker Ranch. They sit down for lunch together, all in high spirits now that they’ve decided they’re going to make another Jones adventure. Steven and Harrison, all pumped and ready to go, ask George the details of the story he’s been working on. George, grinning proudly, pulls out his spiral notebook, opens to a page that, for some reason his lunch companions can’t quite fathom, has a crudely drawn flying saucer on it, and lays it all out for them. Can you imagine them staring at him, wondering if this is some kind of prank and Ashton Kutcher or Johnny Knoxville is going to spring out of the bushes laughing? Can you imagine the glances of disbelief they carefully slide to each other while George pulls out sketches of the menacing (yet lovable and wacky!) Martians he had his art team come up with? These three men, who have all done such amazing things in film, are not just artists and businessmen, but are good friends. I think we’ve all had one of those moments when a friend of ours is excitedly telling us about some great idea they have, and we KNOW it’s actually a horrible idea, but we really don’t want to hurt their feelings and tell them so? I’m sure friends of mine have been through that with me and my ideas, too. This was the position Steve and Harry found themselves in with their old buddy George.

Try to imagine the final meeting before they went forward with this film. A teleconference, maybe, with an emotionally exhausted Spielberg sighing and staring down at the lengthy list of all the different ideas George has pitched them over the past decade.

“Okay, George. We’re willing to concede on the Martians and the saucer. But no, we can’t work in the Loch Ness monster. And you can’t use Frankenstein. The whole musical number with Indy tap dancing on the Great Wall of China? It’s just not workable. The talking camel? Interesting, don’t get me wrong, but…just not going to work. Same with the giant robot. The thing with Jar Jar stowing away on a saucer bound for Earth and teaming up with Indy? A little too…problematic. Indiana’s lost twin sister, “North Dakota”? No. That leaves us with animated groundhogs, a nuclear explosion, psychic Russians, the Tarzan scene with the capitalist monkeys, the thing with Marion driving their car off a cliff onto a tree that safely lowers them down to the river…” (Steven pauses here and closes his eyes in pain and resignation). “…your Star Wars ‘bad feeling’ line, a sword fight going on between two cars speeding through the jungle, the carnivorous piranha ants, the idea that the heroes can essentially go over Niagara Falls three times in a row and be just fine, and the big portal to another dimension that is apparently set to open up and kill anyone who does the Martians the favor of bringing the skull back to them. If we can just finally agree on all that, then let’s just get started and get this thing over with.”

What is it about George Lucas that makes us all apologists for him and desperate to not hurt his feelings? Hey, I’ve been there. I went into denial and defended Episode I for quite some time. I’m a huge Star Wars fan, and I’m grateful to him for setting it in motion. But at some point do we have to admit that he’s completely lost it – “it”, and his grasp of reality? If someone doesn’t tell him, then all we can do is count the days until – and pray for – the day he retires and lets the new generation of talented (and sane) creators out there whose imaginations he sparked take the reigns and carry his properties to the next level. Nothing’s ever going to change if we keep coddling him, and rewarding him for horrible, idiotic creations, an act that assures that he’ll continue to disappoint and insult fans of beloved properties like Indiana Jones. Yes, Spielberg directed “Crystal Skull”. But I don’t blame him, except for the fact that he didn’t stand up for the Indy fans of the world and keep this mess from happening. The direction of the film itself – along with Harrison’s performance – felt like it was forced, like it was done reluctantly, like he knew what was happening but felt powerless to do anything about it. George’s complete disinterest in characters and story integrity over “neat-o” ideas he can get his ILM folks to pull off was all over this mess of a movie. And his Kool-Aid-swigging fans are all over the message boards, attacking anyone who dares question him, telling us all that there’s something wrong with us if we don’t actively lower our expectations and force ourselves to find the good in this film. Why should I have to LOWER my expectations for a tested franchise being handled by the same people that created it – brilliantly – in the first place? Their desperation for me to “shut up and like it” is completely self-defeating. Is their great fear that if we offend George he’ll take his whip and his stormtroopers and go home? Is it worth continuing to get Star Wars and Indy films, just to have them, if they’re terrible and leave us all feeling empty and – for many of us – angry and betrayed? I was a huge fan of the show “Millennium”. Its second season was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen on television. But when it was about to be canceled, the network allowed a third season if numerous changes would be made. Those changes made the show nothing like it had been before, made it completely horrible, and while I own the first two seasons on DVD, I refuse to buy, or ever watch again, the final season. Does this make me a bad fan? Am I supposed to accept some horrible abomination just for the sake of having more Millennium? Better that it HAD just been canceled, and us fans left with the good memories, than to have to have been force-fed a hollow and sub-par final season. And if this is the best we could expect of a new Indiana Jones movie, then the franchise was better left resting in peace.

I honestly went into “Crystal Skull” prepared to cut it huge slack (which apparently you’re required to do) and “just have fun”. I just couldn’t pull it off. Apparently, I have a different idea of “fun” than many people. Bad stories are not fun. Bad acting is not fun. Ridiculous situations that take you right out of the film are not fun. I cannot be mesmerized by green screens and animated monkeys and Shia taking tree branches in the nutsack while straddling between two speeding Russian vehicles. All I really wanted was for this movie to at least FEEL like an Indiana Jones movie, to see the famed character in action again. I didn’t get that character. I got the same actor, in the same outfit, but this was not Indiana Jones. That was not Marion. These were insults to the memory of those beloved characters, now forced to speak and act to serve the effects, not the story. They were there to deliver gags, nothing more. They were the animated corpses of these characters, forced by some Lucas-cast voodoo spell to crawl out of the grave and dance for his amusement. I, for one, was not amused.

I really hope you heeded my warning and didn’t read this if you haven’t seen the film, because I really do want you to make up your own mind. If a swinging Shia and a flying, refrigerator-entombed Indy bring you pleasure, then I hope you get your enjoyment from your summer movie dollar. I realize that my concerns may well not be yours, and if you walk away feeling like you had a great ride and find yourself fulfilled, I envy you, and I’m happy for you. Me? I feel dirty. I feel used. I feel cheated. I feel insulted. I want Spielberg to rush out and make me another “Private Ryan” or “Shindler’s List” to wipe away my memory of his involvement in this as quickly as possible. He’s better than this. I need to be reminded of that. And I need George Lucas to have a moment of clarity, somehow, and retire to his ranch and delegate his empire to people who are ready and willing to take up the mantle and show him what can happen when hungry young minds with fresh ideas are allowed to carry on the dreams he planted in all of us. I will, if that happens, be doubly grateful to him. Until then, I will continue to call him on it whenever he passes some new pile of mind-numbing soulless crap onto us, regardless of the danger I put myself in from rabid Lucasites who do Lord George’s bidding and will want me frozen in carbonite so I’ll stop voicing their secret fears. They’re out there, already starting to write their Mutt Williams fan fiction, continuing to cheer the master on. Only a master of garbage, folks. Only a master of garbage.