Ronald Knox is the
suspect. He gave us Ten Commandments for writing crime fiction.
I have three commandments for writing crime
fiction.
One.
THOU SHALT NOT place the word algorithm
or any variation thereof in thine manuscript. For there will be a hundred days
of darkness and a plague of locusts upon thee if thou fuckesteth this up.
Two. THOU SHALT NOT place the word protocol or any variation thereof in
thine manuscript. For thine bloodline shall be accursèd unto the seventh
generation and long will be the wine-red shadows o’er thine tomb. Frederick Forsyth
appears to be notably excused from this commandment.
Three. THOU SHALT NOT permit any character
to utter the phrase beginning Is this the
part where. For if ye transgress against the Writing Gods themselves, woe
be unto thee and thine and all others within a mile’s radius of the divine
blast. Also, lice shall worry thee.
Death
by Algorithm on the Nile just ain’t gonna cut it. A brick wall will delay
your protagonist. Or a hard and fast law. But placing a protocol in a murder
mystery isn’t a barrier. You’ll only make it sound as though you just
introduced a green yoghurt-ish health drink to the scene of the crime.
Is this the part where I get to subvert the
cliché by prefacing the cliché with the phrase IS THIS THE PART WHERE? Frankly I’d prefer it if you just hit us
with the cliché minus the preamble. We’ve abolished the Edwardian Age and the
string quartet prelude to taking a shit. It’s quicker just to go when you need
to go.
I was going to talk about the writing
commandments set forth by Ronald Knox. And I planned to do that by dragging a
few crime shows into the conversation. But I immediately realised that
confirming or denying the existence of the breakage of these commandments in a
show…well, that might spoil certain aspects of the mystery for you.
So I’ll just have to talk around a few
choice areas.
A
Murder at the End of the World.
Death and Other Details.
Two television shows aiming themselves at
the Golden Age of murder mystery. Yes, the Golden Age of detective fiction is
dead. However, its corpse is on permanent display in the kitchen freezer, and
that is here to stay. For the body is trotted out at regular intervals as high technology allows us to revisit the case in search of suspects new.
What was the Golden Age of the crime story?
Very specifically, the detective story. You’ll be shocked to hear that this
amazing period of untrammelled homicide is generally fixed Between the Wars. Loosely, we’ll take that to mean in the 1920s and
the 1930s, though there were ripples from before 1914 and many aftershocks well
beyond 1938.
Does this exclude Doyle and his creation
Holmes? Of course not. The Problem of
Thor Bridge appeared in 1922. We don’t really exclude anyone writing after
1938, my dear Watson, given the building blocks of golden murder mysteries are
so durable.
A
Murder at the End of the World and Death and Other Details both make use
of an old foil: death in the isolated English country house. This house is
ivy-clad and snow-bedecked. The telephone is cut off for at least some of the
action. And the party? It’s a party of rich ne’er-do-wells and rapscallions.
With a coat of computer technology daubed across the scene, to make things
appear less ancient, you are in business.
End of
the World features a bright female detective and her bright male
co-detective investigating murder in the past. We move through another story in
which the same two detectives meet up years later after one walked out on the
other. The venue is an English country house a Bond villain’s lair in an icy wasteland,
and there are suspects aplenty when death occurs. Technology features heavily.
That story shifts between past detection and
current investigation. It’s a major feature of the tale. Two murder mysteries
for the price of one.
Other
Details features a bright female detective and her bright male co-detective
investigating murder in the past. We move through another story in which the
same two detectives meet up years later after one walked out on the other. The
venue is an English country house a cruise ship very much all at sea, and there are suspects aplenty
when death occurs. Technology features heavily.
That story shifts between past detection and
current investigation. It’s a major feature of the tale. Two murder mysteries
for the price of one.
Both narratives showcase at least one scene
that should be discussed heavily. Each scene isn’t. Therefore, each scene is
instantly deeply important to the seasoned mystery reader. The cogs whir, and
you reach a conclusion.
Also, both shows feature security cameras.
And then they both do backflips to neutralise the security in the name of
allowing the murder mystery to continue. These aren’t spoilers. No. Massive
building blocks are shuffled around to keep the episodes going.
What are the Ten Commandments, provided by
Knox? Well, he was a priest as well as a mystery writer. He provided guidance.
The High Priestesses of the Golden Age were many, and their works are still known
very well. Commandments exist to be broken. How many were broken in those two
television shows? Here, I tread on thin eggs.
One. The
criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be
anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.
Veteran readers are always on the lookout
for aliases, disguises, wordplay in names, servants in the background, distant
relatives, shady tradesmen at the door on the night in question or two days beforehand,
and all sorts of tricks. The warning about thoughts is about thoughts, musings,
unreliable narration, outright lies, and so on. These are not facts. And murder
mysteries rely on facts, not the murderer’s thoughts. Flashbacks by narrators,
reliable or otherwise, are always suspect.
Knox demanded that the mystery have a
mystery. He wanted the mystery presented early. And the mystery had to grab the
reader and make the reader care about the resolution. You needn’t care about
the legion of unsympathetic suspects, detectives, or even victims, in these
tales. But you should care about how it all ends.
Two. All
supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
If you tell a tale of a ghostly dog and then
present evidence concerning the
footprints of a gigantic hound, you’d best follow up with a declaration or
two against the supernatural. To his credit, Holmes, through Doyle, does so.
We are, therefore, going to rule out
vampires, demons, the forces of darkness, Christmas in July, and all other
nonsense. Since the commandments were written, people have gone on to write
vampire murder mysteries – but even those come with their own particular
logical or vampirological frameworks, guides, rules, regulations, and commandments.
Three. Not
more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
If a passage of text is written in invisible
ink, does that count as a secret passage? I’ve always liked the idea of a
secret door leading to a secret passage that has another secret door inside it.
You’re meant to miss this door on the left, on the way to the more obvious
secret room ahead.
In electronic murder mysteries, we’ve reached the point of
no return. Secret passages are conjured from nothingness when the security
cameras fail. This is the only way for a murderer to bypass all that
surveillance. The mystery writer creates a secret passage through the field of
vision. It’s all done with mirrors.
So secret passages aren’t only to be found
in ancient castles. They may exist in ancient castles with security cameras all
over the place. I like a good secret passage myself, though your taste may
suffer an allergic reaction. Is there such a thing as a secret passage? Or are
we really speaking of the hidden door? Have as many of those as you like, I
say.
Caution. The more secret doors, passages,
and rooms you add, the greater the chance of turning your detective story into
a comedy. Perhaps that was what Knox had in mind, when warning us off.
Four. No
hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a
long scientific explanation at the end.
At least Knox leaves scope for long
scientific explanations in the middle of the story. Brand new untraceable
poisons are right out, it must be emphasised. If the victim dies from a heart
attack and science goes on to prove this, then you’ve written a story about
someone who died of a heart attack. Don’t slap a murder mystery label on that one.
Five. No
Chinaman must figure in the story.
That’s extreme. What Knox is attempting to
say is that he was bored. He’d had enough of racist depictions of Chinese
characters popping up as instant suspects in murder mysteries on the basis that
they were being Chinese in a built-up area or being Chinese in the English
countryside – both crimes once punishable by hanging and possibly flogging.
Spoiler alert for Death and Other Details. Part of the plot involves a merger with a
Chinese company. So Chinese characters are in the show aplenty, and they are
suspects. They are played by Chinese actors. This was not always the case. Did
Peter Ustinov really need the money?
Here’s a spoiler alert for A Murder at the End of the World. The
cast includes Joan Chen. Now I’m wondering if Knox would have objected to a
Chinese woman featuring in the story.
A Chinese murder mystery set in China with an all-Chinese list of detectives,
victims, and suspects…could, at least, include one unsympathetic chinless
wonder of a toffee-nosed English public schoolmaster, surely.
This isn’t just about Chinese
murderers/suspects/victims or detectives. You may take it that racist
depictions of all types must be excluded from murder mysteries. Unless the
murderer is racist.
Six. No
accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable
intuition which proves to be right.
Note that Knox doesn’t rule out accidents
which hinder the detective, or
intuition which proves to be wrong.
Seven. The
detective himself must not commit the crime.
This goes without saying, but Knox said it. I’m
reminded of publishing advice when it came to putting the book in front of
someone in the business.
When dealing with publishers, in your summary of the
story you must never describe how the
mystery ends. There was another piece of advice to go with that. When dealing
with publishers, in your summary of the story you must always describe how the mystery ends.
Anyway, I think Knox is hinting, strongly,
that the detective’s sidekick should also be included in this particular
commandment. We’ll return to sidekicks shortly.
Eight. The
detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
Murder mystery stories depend on the steady drip-drip-drip of information to
the readers. Overwhelm your audience with clues. Many people have gotten it
into their heads that a mystery must, by definition, be mysterious – and they
write books in which clues are jealously withheld in favour of padding. Padding
won’t lead to a conviction at the Old Bailey, not unless the murderer smothered
the victim with an exotic brand of cushion.
Are there variations on this one?
Absolutely. The detective may draw attention to a detail that is not recognised
as a clue at the time. But the avid reader makes note of this. Clues may be
presented in a jumbled order. All the better to disguise the timeline of
events, my dear. The detective won’t last long in a series of books by
pocketing clues and declaring that those will all be explained later. This
simply will not do.
Nine. The
sidekick of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any
thoughts which pass through his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but
very slightly, below that of the average reader.
It’s a roundabout way of saying that the sidekick
mustn’t remain silent. The detective can always do with someone to talk to.
Musing aloud lets the detective dangle herrings – red or otherwise – in front
of the reader. Meanwhile, musing silently tells the readers eff-all.
Ten. Twin
brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly
prepared for them.
This applies just as well to twin suitcases,
near-identical cars, similar doors, and clones. If clones are to feature in
your murder mystery, put clones in
the title. You’ll save a lot of bother later.
There’s an alternative list of twenty acid
barbs, fired off from the waspish pen of S.S. Van Dine – who sounds as though
he might’ve been torpedoed off the coast of Newfoundland by the Germans back in
1917. We needn’t concern ourselves overmuch with those. I’d find myself having
to avoid spoilers all over again.
One non-spoiler to finish on. A Murder at the End of the World
features Harris Dickinson as one of the detectives. You can catch his
performance in See How They Run. He
plays Dickie Attenborough in a murder mystery set around the performance of an
Agatha Christie play. And I daren’t say anything about that.
I’d leave to write The Algorithm Protocol, with the opening line Is this the part where…
But I fear murder most foul would be
committed.
RLLauthor@outlook.com and @RLL_author GO TO AMAZON KINDLE STORE AND TYPE RLL. YOU WILL FIND MY BOOKS.
Monday 1 April 2024
CRIME FICTION’S TEN COMMANDMENTS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.
Friday 8 March 2024
VIEWING ANOTHER PILOT EPISODE – ABOUT A PILOT. SHŌGUN: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.
Anjin.
Pilot.
I sat down to watch a pilot about Goody Three-Shoes Galadriel and the Rings of
Something or Other, Does it Truly Matter? Just to refresh your memory…
*
Galadriel returns home and
has to attend a town council meeting to receive some kind of STAR WARS medal. These town council
meetings are always the fucking same. The rebellious character is on to
something, but the elders don’t want her interfering. So she’s dragged back
from the latest scraped knee incident to be given a final warning about not
doing the thing.
At which point, she proceeds to fuck off and
she does the thing she was not meant to be doing – leading to adventure. Except
for that very last part. Her reward at the meeting is to sail to Elf Heaven on
a boat that is so fucking viciously green-screened that I cannot say the
visuals were the best thing about this pilot episode.
*
My conclusion? Clearly, the
best thing about Galadriel’s pilot episode was the ending. In the sense that
the torture finally ended.
But The
Rings of Pah! reminded me of SHŌGUN
in one respect. Town council meetings. Except…these really are council
meetings, and they all have meaning. It is a time of unease in Japan. The old SHŌGUN
appointed a council of five regents to watch over his son until that young boy
grows old enough to rule.
Then the old guy died. And that’s when the
differences of opinion came in.
Five
friendly lords. Four lords are allied against one. You may have seen Hiroyuki
Sanada in a John Wick movie or an
Edward Zwick production of The Last
Samurai. The man has an impressive list of credits to his name.
But this. This is his time. And this is his
role. It helps that he’s a producer on the show. Often you are told a character
is a master strategist. And you know this on the basis that you’ve just been
told the character is a master strategist. Not here.
Hiroyuki Sanada plays Tokugawa
Toranaga, the lord who is given the shortest and shittiest end of the stick in
these council meetings. You see, you are shown, in every scene he occupies that this character truly is a master
strategist. Every furrow of the brow, each pause in speech, the concealment of
his true plans, the shifting of his schemes to take account of outrageous
swings in fortune…
There’s lot of acting involved in SHOWING
you that he’s a master strategist. And we need more television along the same
lines. All I learned about Galadriel in that shit-fest of a travesty of a TV
show was that…she’s blonde.
Mm.
James Clavell was a writer who worked in
movies. Somehow, he ended up directing To
Sir, with Love. Yes, that’s a film about an outsider. The movie was a
box-office hit. It helped that he was a producer on the film. You’ll find his
writing spread across cinema. He has an impressive list of credits to his name.
Being taken prisoner in World War Two made Clavell
as a writer. The Japanese put him in Changi in Singapore. His wartime book was King Rat. From there, in leaps and
bounds, he worked his way up to writing SHŌGUN.
Clavell wasn’t the first to take history and
fictionalise it into a page-turner. The master strategist Toranaga is a
thinly-veiled fictional copy of Tokugawa. But you can send your fictional
fellow on different paths. You do this to keep a rein on pacing and the
absurdity of life.
History takes bizarre turns at times, and
often outdoes fiction. Clavell worked on the script for The Great Escape – based on the book by Paul Brickhill. Brickhill’s
account of a mass escape-attempt from Stalag Luft III was toned down for the
movie version.
Partly, that’s about pacing and turning in a film
that isn’t as long as World War Two. Many of the escape efforts defy belief and
would come across as ridiculous if you piled them on, one after the other.
If you write a historical novel, you do so
under the confines of history. You must colour your picture within the lines.
But if you change the names to protect your own narrative, history becomes a
broader canvas, and you throw buckets of paint at the damned thing.
Did you write a history book at that point?
No. Did you create a page-turner? Clavell wrote a page-turner. He involved one
William Adams, a ship’s pilot who arrived in Japan in 1600. But he’s John
Blackthorne in the book.
Prison obviously shaped Clavell’s whole life
when World War Two ended. Watching the pilot episode of SHŌGUN, you see John Blackthorne spend a lot of time as a prisoner
of the Japanese. There’s no getting away from that.
You’d think this would crush the narrative.
No. It opens the story up. You get more scenes of interest from a character who
is imprisoned than you view in the whole of that misbegotten pilot episode for Galadriel and the Masters of the Universe. Or
whatever it is called. Amazon and the
Folly of Bezos.
Goody Three-Shoes spends an episode walking
around Middle-Class Earth twiddling her fucking thumbs. Over in SHŌGUN, John Blackthorne, a man with the
occupation of twiddling his thumbs while held prisoner, does more.
Everything in the sub-Tolkien parody is so
fucking earnest. Meanwhile, in Japan, practically every second character is a
barbarian or calls another character a barbarian. I watched a shower of
bastards being a shower of bastards to each other.
And there was more sympathy for these
rascals, rogues, rapscallions, and ruffians than there was for all the
nice/twee characters across the way in Tolkien-ish land. Spoiler alert. One
character has a man cooked in a big metal pot. We have sympathy for this swine
when he almost dies in the sea.
Not by drowning. He’s going to commit ritual
suicide before that happens. Gchaladriel went about being nice and I didn’t
care. (People became unaccountably Welsh when they uttered her name, hence the
extra letters.)
In Japan, a bunch of bastards thrived.
Everyone had an agenda, and that agenda was often violent and bloody. The
English pilot? Bastard. All the Portuguese? Utter shower of bastards. The four Japanese
lords, intent on protecting the heir – but secretly plotting to kill him and
each other – total bastards. Toranaga – under sentence of death from the start
of the show – has to be a bastard in order to survive.
His main rival, Ishido, is a complete and
utter bastard who wants to kill everyone on the council. And then he wants to
find more people to kill so he can die gloriously in a legendary battle. We
even have sympathy for him.
No sympathy for Gchchchchaladriel. Even less
for the photocopied Indiana Jones who lumbered through a non-movie. These
things were difficult to watch. SHŌGUN
was easy to drink in.
A character speaks out of turn at the
council meeting. Well, that’s it for him. He must go off and commit ritual
suicide. Oh, and his baby must die with him. Surely his lord will be merciful?!
Toranaga allows the man’s wife to live. That’s it. No last-second rescue for a
loyal follower who let his emotions get the better of him, almost creating a
massacre right there in the room.
Why does it work? The stakes are
all-consuming and they are explained to us. Then they increase vastly at every
turn. Is it a perfect TV show? Perhaps it’s asking too much that the characters
speak in their own languages…
There’s a little bit of The Great Escape here. The movie convention for the years 1939-1945
is that all the actors speak the same language for the benefit of the audience
in that country. The Great Escape is
in English for the English-speaking market. But you know everyone in the movie
speaks German for the German market.
Here, with SHŌGUN, the Japanese characters speak Japanese with subtitles. John
Blackthorne “speaks Portuguese” to the Portuguese bastards who do their
damnedest to have him hanged or crucified when they translate from Portuguese
to Japanese. But for the English-speaking audience the “Portuguese” speech is all
in English.
I think they could have gone full subtitle
with this show. Throw in all the languages with all the subtitles. It’s a
weak mark against a production with so many strong points, and I let it pass
without real complaint.
Speaking of strong points. The production
has such a great level of detail to the costumes that the costumes bleed
character. I love the acting, particularly across the language barrier. It’s
great. Some of these bastards truly are dressed like a shower of bastards. And
others, perhaps even bigger bastards, are resplendent in the finery of
peacocks.
I understand there’s a degree of technical
wizardry involved in portraying scenes. John Blackthorne at the tiller of a
ship in raging weather simply can’t have been filmed in a genuine storm. But
the scenes at sea look as good as they can look. You are right there with the
crew as water dominates the deck.
Contrast that with the choir of heavenly
angels at sea in Middle-Class Earth. I watched two pilot episodes. One about an
elf named Blah-Meh of the Beige.
Barely a character. I’m having trouble spelling Galadriel. The other pilot was about a pilot. A bastard. Prisoner.
Liar. Pirate. Heathen. A character we could care about.
One story had no story and made me flee the
series in search of sanity. The other story made me want to tune in for more.
Which I did. The pilot episode of SHŌGUN
was the least-impressive episode of the series. Stakes increased in episode
two. No matter the awful things characters did, I’m guessing you’d be cheering
them on at that finish to episode three. At least, in that show, the characters
dive into the sea for a reason.
Thursday 1 February 2024
BELATED VIEWING OF A PILOT EPISODE. RINGS OF PAH!: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.
This one I came late to, on
the basis that I’m no Johnny Tolkien fan. More of a Clive Staples kind of
reader, truth be told. Though Clive
Staples Lewis sounds like an unexpected office brawl, come to think.
I was
invited to mock the opening episode of Johnny Tolkien’s Amazon Prime’s The Lord of the Flies, Damn Flies, and
Statistics Rings: The Infinity Gauntlet of Bigby Rings of Power
– brought to you by Darth Bezos and Weetabix.
Indeed. I may have made some of that up.
Context. I haven’t read The Hobbit. But I did read The
Lord of the Rings. I’ve read The
Chronicles of Narnia, which has such
a huge spoiler for it as a series that it is a huge spoiler just admitting
there’s a huge spoiler for it. And I won’t spoil it for you. Clive can do that
on his own time. What else? I watched The
Lord of the Rings as animation before I watched the live trilogy of movies.
If I ever tell you I’m a massive fan of The Silmarillion, it’s a coded warning
that I’ve been kidnapped for ransom.
I had to check notes for this next bit.
Apparently, I was once invited to watch a Hobbit
movie. It didn’t matter if I’d missed one. And it wouldn’t matter if I didn’t
see the next one. So I guessed I’d be watching the middle one of the three
padded movies.
Normally, I would never do this. I’m going
out on a stout limb here and stating that I don’t watch the second movie in a
series unless I’ve seen the first. What does this all mean? It means I’ve now
done this terrible deed, this crime against cinema, once, and once was enough.
Also, the movie itself was a crime against
cinema, padded to fuck, and quite the terrible deed. Something about a giant gold
statue of a dwarf melting like a pack of butter and filling a swimming pool for
a dragon to bathe in. There were a few dwarf characters as well, but it wasn’t
worth paying attention to any of that.
So. You will understand that I could never
be a butt-hurt Johnny Tolkien fan, coming in here with my brand of criticism
while cultishly praying to The One True Text. (Yes, The Brand of Criticism is a magical Dungeons & Dragons sword. And that…is a roleplaying fact.) No.
That’s not the angle, here.
By
contrast against the non-fun movie about a Hobbit, the Narnia movies were fun. Far from perfect, true. But there was
enough spirit to see you through to the end. Unless you were Disney, who bowed
out after the second film in the series for reasons of corporate soullessness.
The problem was that Disney needed a lordly
ringly movie spree of its own about a wizarding bunch of English schoolkids
caught up in magical adventures. Far better to stick to the source material
provided by Lewis, than attempt a mish-mash of other franchises for the sake of
a quick buck. Would’ve made more money by not trying to make more money chasing
other franchises and their Balrogian shadows.
After the third one, minus Disney, the
moviemakers were really pinning their hearts to their sleeves in plugging the
idea of a fourth movie about Eustace and Jill. It was not to be, Chéri.
I am no butt-hurt fan of the land of Narnia the book series being ruined for
eternity by Narnia the movie series. No.
Even the harshest fans of the books-to-movies will tell you that Will Poulter
was terrific casting as Eustace. In other matters, matters of story, were there
some bewildering choices for those movies? Yes.
You didn’t have to go to New Zealand to make
Narnia come to life. That was a Tolkien-franchise-based thing. Do I care about
accuracy to the sacred text? I don’t see the talking lion as a big furry golden
Jesus-figure, and you don’t have to either if you don’t want to.
No matter how shitty the adaptation from
book to movie, the book is still there if you want to read it. And that’s
always the harshest lesson to remember. The thing that you liked initially…is
still around. We need reminding of that, from time to time.
I’m looking at you, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Dullness. Not merely the worst Indy movie I’ve seen, but one of the
worst movies I’ve seen. But the
trilogy is available to watch. The thing you liked is still here.
Sadly, I must return to the business of
Johnny Tolkien. Too many people turned Tolkien into a business. The movies
based around Smaug the dragon and the giant dwarf statue and Tolkieny
shenanigans…they were padded to fuck, but made their money. Yes. The business
of Tolkien.
Tolkien’s son Christopher was saddened to
see that Peter Jackson’s crew gutted the
book and turned it into an action movie…
He referred to The Lord of the Rings, but he also applied that to the impending
film about Bilbo. Should have been a TV series. It wasn’t. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Trilogy is something I won’t be watching.
Tolkien’s lore deserved a long-form approach. Television. Episodic. Building a
world.
And so, someone somewhere decided they could
do a prequel. There was a TV series. By Amazon. Bezos. Massive fan of Middle
Earth shenanigans. He sat there in a Star
Trek shirt on his dick-shaped spaceship, contemplated Middle Earth, pondered
his orb, and said Make it so.
Cue Game
of Thrones with its introductory map sequence set to jaunty music.
I guess it’s better to have a dick-shaped
spaceship than a spaceship-shaped dick. Depends on the sci-fi franchise. Back
to Tolkien, though we’ll be detouring into a testicle-shaped spaceship eventually.
What are the criticisms of this lamentable
TV project? I am not here to have a go at the acting. So what is worth
criticising? This folly. The format of the show, which we’ll return to.
Criticism?
It
rewrites Tolkien! Big fucking deal. Tolkien rewrote Tolkien, and he was Tolkien for fuck’s sake. Once The Lord of the Rings became a thing, The Hobbit underwent some revision to
bring it into line with the later history. Tolkien’s choice.
Criticism. Events in the history are
compressed for the sake of the TV show.
Big fucking deal. Go back to The Lord of the Rings at the movies and
watch Gandalf ride majestically to the parchment version of the National
Database, in search of evidence on the One True Ring. He might be gone for a
few weeks. We’ll be generous and say a month. There and back again, he doesn’t
spend more than…wait. Read the book. See how long it takes for Gandalf to
reason things out. Seventeen years.
Rewriting Tolkien and compressing events are
hardly criticisms. So where does the TV show go wrong? It’s fucking boring.
Nothing happens in episode one. There are no stakes. Evil is gone and we cannot
find it. Well, fuck all the dwarf prostitutes, hide my lunch, call me hungry,
does Gollum still shit in the woods – and would that make for a more exciting
TV experience? No, no, it wouldn’t.
Generally, my tolerance for a new TV show
reaches the point of crisis after fifteen minutes. I’ll know, within that time,
whether or not I am going to switch off. Rarely, I’ll finish the first episode
in full and then decide the show is not for me. But for the most part your
goodwill, as a writing team, as a production crew, dies in the sixteenth minute
of a show if nothing worthwhile happens in the first quarter-hour.
I won’t name two shows. One I quit after six
minutes. The other I left two minutes in – but I was playing it at double
speed. So I guess I quit in the first minute, two minutes in. Yes, I almost
always watch YouTube videos at double speed, to save time. If I could do that
with all of your empty movies and ponderous TV shows, I fucking would.
Amazon wanted their Game of Thrones experience. Yes, that one ended well. I’d seen the
first series of that show, and stopped reading the books after a while when it
occurred to me that G.R.R. Martin was a step below J.R.R. Tolkien in the sense
that Tolkien was still alive after the conclusion of his large fantasy tale. If
Martin lives to finish writing, I may return to his saga – from the start,
obviously. Or, y’know, maybe fucking not.
The Amazon TV version of Tolkien didn’t move
fast enough at the very beginning. We have Galadriel narrating past events for
us, as happened in the movie version of Tolkien’s world. And that’s the
problem. We need to make this like Tolkien, which means we’ve only vaguely made
it like Peter Jackson’s version of something like Tolkien. We’re in the general
area, right? There’s a map, to guide us.
I believe Amazon spent most of the budget on
Elf Wallpaper™ and Google Middle Earth Maps®. Seriously,
what is it with this fucking map? It shows us we are in another part of the
land, somewhere, and people are not doing
stuff in each location. Okay.
Yes, yes, the beginning. It’s…the opening of
The Lord of the Rings again.
Galadriel narrates the history of evil, which, in this case, is the story of
Morgoth, who – in a fit of anti-social tree rage – cuts down the Christmas
lights on two mighty English Elvish oaks. Or something.
There’s no Christmas in Tolkien. No Santa
Claus. There is a Santa Claus over in Narnia, though. That pissed Tolkien right
off. You can’t have Santa in Narnia, but you can alienate your readers by
placing Tom Bombadil in The Lord of the
Rings.
Why is Tom Bombadil the first to be cut from
adaptations? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the way he treats that One True Ring
as if it doesn’t exist and has no hold over him. No explanation. If you smoked
weed while reading the books, you were into him. And if you were dropping tabs
of LSD like Legolas dropping fools with his bow, then I guess you fucking loved
Tom Bombadil, man. ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE NOT STONED READING THE STORY…not so
much.
Right. Morgoth is evil. He doesn’t like Christmas
trees. They aren’t Christmas trees. Stop that. Even with the fairy lights. So
Morgoth is ushered on and almost instantly ushered back off. His minion,
Sauron, is soon ushered on and off again.
It’s hard to care. The main antagonist in The Lord of the Rings is the One True
Ring, not Sauron. Sauron has a walk-on part at best. He is remote. A pantomime
threat. Where is Sauron? He’s behind you!
The Ring, though. With its whispers, and temptations, promises, and sense of
power. It’s the villain of the piece.
And in a fucking prequel…is absent. Oppenheimer
is having trouble gathering enough fissile material for its construction. So
the story is about Galadriel and her search for evil. She piles helmets up into
a muddy mound, commemorating the deaths of 300 Spartans, and regrets wearing clean
willowy dresses on spattered battlefields.
Don’t worry. She changes into Jeanne d’Arc’s
battle armour soon enough. And we get this ice cliff climb that does nothing.
Start that fucking scene on the icy wastes with the wind blowing and people
falling behind, not on this sub-par Tomb
Raider cliff climbing exercise. She’s looking for evil, but evil isn’t
coming looking for her. Fuck. What’s the point of all this, then? Speed this
up, for fuck’s sake.
We are inter-cutting throughout, going to
the prototype Hobbits and then to the doomed Elf-Mortal romance that borrows
from The Lord of the Rings. Plots
with not much going on in them.
Who
are the antler folk? Doesn’t fucking matter who the fucking antler folk are. Forget
the fucking fucketty antler folk. Apparently, it mattered to Gary Oldman levels of EVERYONE!!!!!!!!!!!! when watching the
trailer.
But
the trailer isn’t meant to showcase the TV show. It is just meant to promise
you lies, damn flies, and statistics. Statistically, around a third of people
watching actually finished the show.
We’re in the realm of streaming and
data-mining the streams to see who loved the…oh. Just below two-thirds of the
audience fucked off before the end, sparing their eyes, ears, and brains, I
guess.
Too many characters spouting deep meaningful
meaningless words from the ancient scrolls of Live, Laugh, Love. This is the internet bitches, and the fans
turned up to Die, Scowl, Hate. Whole
lotta nothing going on. But that doesn’t even begin to cover it. Back to the
non-story…
So Paladin
GIRL BOSS Jeanne D’Arc LARA CROFT Galadriel and her D&D party go into this winter dungeon, see. They gaslight the
lone inhabitant into being a monster, kill the beastie, and… gain experience
points so they can go up a level. Oh, and Sauron’s been leaving a QR code
around the place, to remind everyone that evil’s
been up in ya business, ya bitches.
I’d have started this episode with the
testicle spaceship landing on a blasted heath. Fire up The Ride of the Valkyries, boys; sounds like Wagner’s back on the
menu.
Galadriel returns home and has to attend a
town council meeting to receive some kind of STAR WARS medal. These town council meetings are always the fucking
same. The rebellious character is on to something, but the elders don’t want
her interfering. So she’s dragged back from the latest scraped knee incident to
be given a final warning about not doing the thing.
At which point, she proceeds to fuck off and
she does the thing she was not meant to be doing – leading to adventure. Except
for that very last part. Her reward at the meeting is to sail to Elf Heaven on
a boat that is so fucking viciously green-screened that I cannot say the
visuals were the best thing about this pilot episode.
No.
The best thing was the end of the pilot episode and the lessening of the burden
on my shattered mind. I no longer had a shred of mocking commentary left in me.
Commentary. You shouldn’t be in a position
to provide live commentary for an opening episode. Or, indeed, for any episode.
You should be swept up in a world and not swept out to sea.
I’d have quit at the CGI snow troll fight if
I hadn’t been asked to watch the whole pilot. Fuuuck. I am angered at the lack of quality in the writing of this
non-episode, and, reminder, folks, I am no Johnny Tolkien fan. Even I was
pissed off at this drivel.
Galadriel’s reward is to sail to a big
golden light. I thought for a second that Barbie
and Oppenheimer had somehow come
together in an imperfect fusion of mash-ups drawing The Lord of the Rings into the same orbit. Sauronheimer: The Barbie Incident.
But no. That would have been a mercy. And
faster-paced. Galadriel sails a stormy sea. On a boat with everyone standing
upright and not swaying. At least on Star
Trek they’d lean to the side when the ship was hit. Elf scientist Mr Spock
confirms this, when he’s not singing about Bilbo.
I think I’d rather just have the green
background, if I’m brutally honest. Look at the amazing background visuals of
the sea! And wince in pain at the truly fucking atrocious foreground nonsense
going on there.
Pros:
it’s a pilot episode I never have to bother with again. Cons: everyone else
listing pros and cons mentions great visuals as a pro. It’s a fucking lie.
Watch and wince in agony at the CGI troll fight and this sheer buffoonery on
the boat. Paging Ralph Bakshi. Ralph
Bakshi to reception.
ANYWAY,
Galadriel is about five seconds from Elf Heaven when she makes the sort of rash
decision that would get you killed under all other circumstances. This absolute
megacorporate soulsucking fuck-muppet of a diluted non-character jumps
overboard so she can swim an ocean in search of evil. Shit like that will get
you killed in Dungeons & Dragons,
real life, and most bleak movies.
But not in Amazon’s version of Middle England
Earth: The Land that Plot Forgot.
What else is there? Racial slurs for Elf characters. Mysterious cow poisoning.
More Sauron QR code nonsense. And waiting for the pre-Hobbit character Dolly
MacGoodGollyMissMolly to run off and have a fucking adventure for fuck’s sake.
Galadriel is not the only diluted
fuck-muppet of a character in the show. And here, we must acknowledge that
there’s a bit of a problem. When you are talking about the rings, three of them
end up with the Elves. And we can quote the opening to the movie, for this bit.
One word will do.
IMMORTAL. Elves are immortal.
I was there,
Gandalf, three thousand years ago, when Tolkien himself signed away the movie
rights.
So how do you deal with immortal characters?
This is what leads to time-compression in the timeline. You can keep throwing
the immortals into the story, but your pre-Hobbits and your other mortal types
will have story segments as long as the life-expectancy of a flailing fly. One
option would be to do a detailed story of mortal characters, with the immortals
restricted to cameos.
Cameos for Galadriel? That would actually
work. Mortal characters across many lands and many years are there to uncover
the clues. Only the immortal Galadriel, Elrond, and Kelly Osbourne can fit the
clues together, over time. Yes, you’d have to keep replenishing the mortal
characters, but you’d do it from batch of episodes to batch of episodes, year
after year.
That’s one way. Incidentally, the very exact
number of eight episodes was a contractual thing. The rights to TV shows longer
than eight episodes live on in the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie.
Something to do with the legal powers of the Witch-king of Angmar, Saul Zaentz.
Operating from beyond the grave, beyond the pale, and beyond belief.
No, Galadriel isn’t the only fuck-muppet of
a diluted character. Yes, part of the problem lies in the immortal qualities of
certain characters. In other words, all the Elf characters in this TV show are
pointless. That’s despite having pointed ears.
Did I mention I preferred the Narnia movies, and that I thought Susan’s
romance with Prince Caspian wasn’t on my bingo card of things that really upset
Hitler?
The
Rings of Power. Or. The Pangs of
Hunger for a story. Oh, and don’t forget a guy fell out of the sky inside a
ball-shaped spaceship disguised as a rock. At which point I declared him the
Last Son of Krypton.
And I just didn’t care. Evil made a cow ill.
How evil is that? Galadriel didn’t go to Elf Heaven. She’d have to work her way
through a Peter Jackson movie trilogy to gain the Golden Ticket admitting her
at long last to that Great Chocolate Factory in the sky.
But, in the meantime, in this TV show, night
swimming. Lots and fucking lots of it. I’m sure I missed out loads of the plot
from this pilot episode. Just as the writers did. Oh, Kelly Osbourne popped in
to offer to build a few rings of power, but the show seemed reluctant to
mention this. I may be pronouncing Celebrimbor
slightly off-key.
At least Sexy
Shelob™ didn’t turn up to turn heads and drain bodies. Even if parts of
this show looked like a computer game.
Someone call the burns unit. We’re admitting
an entire cast and crew.
Is it a criticism to say nothing much
happened in this pilot episode? You can criticise Tolkien for that, too. He
built a fucking world. And used that as the backdrop, the foreground, the side
dishes, and everything else. Plot takes a back seat to majestic travel at times.
Then the Ents appear, and the story REALLY paused for breath. Why would you
expect a TV show set BEFORE the main action to be any differently-paced?
Don’t trust
Bezos, Mr Frodo.
This guy in a loincloth landed on Horsell
Common , much to the dismay of the pre-Hobbits and H.G. Wells. Dolly MacGoodGollyMissMolly
and her chums must face the mystery of discovering whether or not this truly is
Kal-El, Son of Krypton. Or possibly Braniac.
Maybe
he’s Bruce Wayne trying out a funky ejector seat, given that his Batmobile was
sliced in twain by a Balrog named Bane. That would tie in to Galadriel’s
arrival in Gotham City in episode two.
What do these TV shows do for us? Not much.
To quote Michael Moorcock out of context…
They don’t
ask any questions of white men in grey clothing who somehow have a handle on
what’s best for us.
Moorcock’s criticism of Tolkien’s Middle England
Earth, taken from last century, applies to the town council meeting in this
century’s empty non-adaptation of bits of Tolkien’s wallpaper the writers were
permitted to plunder from the back of that Weetabix packet for a duration of no
more than eight episodes. Contractual obligation achievement unlocked.
When the first thing out of their mouths is WE’VE PLOTTED AHEAD TO COVER FIVE YEARS OF THE SHOW,
you know you’ll struggle to make it through episode one. Let me just watch the
trailer again.
Oof. That trailer music should have served
as warning enough. Everyone in the trailer looks busy getting ready for some
unspecified looming evil. Buy one Morgoth, and have a half-price Sauron whether
you like it or not.
The show has been out for a while, now. It
is difficult to research any of it. When I go to the internet, the internet
seems to be concerned with who Galadriel is dating. Is it the bad boy, Morgoth?
Sauron, rebellious and daring on his motorbike, perhaps. Could it be Kylo Ren
or Sauron-a-like Snoke? Rosemary the telephone operator? What about that
mild-mannered janitor?
Could be.
And the reviews. Holy fucketty fuck. By all
means, change your opinion over time. But some of those reviewers were breaking
Olympic records when it came to doing the backflip over shifting the reviews
around.
If your initial review was about sweeping
majesty and a show not afraid to take its time, I’ve got hot fucking news for
you. The show was eight episodes long. You didn’t have time to climb an ice
cliff, twirl a blade like a drum majorette waving off an ice troll as a joke,
or go on a quest for evil only to find out evil’s gone away for the weekend.
Your reward for your pointless side-quest
shall be…retirement in Elf Heaven. Off you go, now. Remember, we know best. You
are just a youngster, Galadriel. Don’t huff those mushrooms in the forest, now.
Then the head of the town council is off to
a wooden condominium in what will one day become Rivendell, with the rest of
the afternoon spent scouring the Palantir for rumours of Sexy Shelob™. A massive burning eye blinks on there for a second,
but it’s a known Microsoft Update glitch. Nothing to see here.
What haven’t I talked about? Dolly
MacGoodGollyMissMolly, the pre-Hobbit. That isn’t her name. No. Really, she’s Dolly
O’GoodGollyMissMolly. The Hobbits, in case you haven’t read The Lord of the Rings, are unfeasibly,
unswervingly, abso-fucking-lutely ENGLISH.
This is not the case in the movies, but
we’re here to talk about the pre-Hobbits from the TV show. The Harfoots. Or the
O’Harfoots. Just call them O’Hare and
be done, bejesus. When is a Hobbit not a Hobbit? When it is a pre-Hobbit, or a…LEPRECHAUN
Harfoot.
So there are these…
…pauses,
sensitively, then gives up…
…travellers, see. Down-to-Earth. Salt of the very soil.
We know that, as they are shorter people. And there’s a lilt to their accents,
begorrah.
Aye. Travellers, in wagons, who speak in a
particular way. And they are scavenging for food. Soon the forces of Sauron
will engineer a food shortage aimed specifically at the Little Folk. With their
chirpy attitudes and their ragged clothes and their muddy faces, they’ll fuck
off to America in search of gold.
You won’t find America in Middle Earth,
silly. Though you will find Amarehk in the works of Michael Moorcock.
Why are they hiding from the antler folk?
FORGET THE FUCKING ANTLER FOLK. We need to boost this plot with something.
These pre-Hobbit travellers don’t live in the Pale. They live beyond it. Could
we throw in a villain?
Dark
Lord Sauron, come on down, the price is right. For Amazon, the financial cost
of being TV hobbyists was far from right. Sauron is wheeled on with all the
subtlety of Darth Vader turning up for a cameo in your Spider-Man movie. Back to the
Future we forgive for that kind of nonsense, but don’t push your luck.
An episode devoted to Morgoth being a
character…would’ve been handled just as badly, I’m sure.
MORGOTH: I’ve left the keys in the ignition
and you really have to use those sandwiches up by the weekend. Other than that,
rock on my #dudebro.
SAURON: (TEENAGE GIGGLING.)
Other problems. A horse died making the
second series of the show. And that is fucking tragic. Whether a show is great
or not, any death associated with it is simply awful.
If you whined about black people being in a
TV show featuring magic fucking rings, I’ve no words for you. Why is there a black man in STAR WARS?! He’s
a Stormtrooper! Yes, he is. And he’s in Tunisia, filming the very first STAR WARS movie. He’s removed his helmet
for an informal photo-shoot, back in the 1970s. So why are you angry at John
Boyega, decades later? Oh.
I don’t believe there’s any way to finish on
a positive note, which is why I kept these last points to the end. Hard to
believe a horse died over this show. I’ve made it this far. Let’s wrap it up in
a bow of barbed wire. I thought I’d type up an exercise in comedy. But you all
know it is tragedy.
They tore out Tolkien’s appendix and
displayed it on TV, so we could watch it slowly decomposing into dust over the
course of eight treacle-slow episodes. Or so I am told. I barely made it
through episode one.
One episode to ditch them all and to TV
history consign them. In the land of Amazon, where the positive reviewers lie.
Then they sit up and gasp as other people hold contrary opinions.
Stop making insipid piss. Yes, it is a
medical condition. The cure for insipid TV is to stop watching. Find something
you like and watch that instead. Sounds like a plan. Luckily, it won’t take
eight episodes of tree-porn to enact. And now we must take our leave of
Tolkien’s appendix, the CGI festival of notes for an actual story, and we must
watch anything else, maybe even everything else, instead.
Gimli
proffers his axe. But I’ll see your axe, Gimli, and raise a remote control.
Thursday 4 January 2024
INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DULLNESS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.
Finally saw that
movie. And by finally, I mean I don’t
have to watch the entire film again. Just snippets, for the purposes of this
chat.
If you came here to read this, you came here
after watching movies featuring Indiana Jones as the hero. I won’t be
describing every single scene in detail. So if you came here randomly without
having watched any of those stories, you are on stony ground.
There are only three movies about Indiana
Jones. Let’s clear that up from the start. But there are five, and that is
worth mentioning in passing. RAIDERS OF
THE LOST ARK is marketed as INDIANA
JONES AND THE RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. Indiana goes on to have risky
adventures at THE TEMPLE OF DOOM and
on THE LAST CRUSADE.
After that is anyone’s guess. Spoiler alert.
In the third film, he rides off into the sunset as an adventurous cowboy
should. And that’s that.
Except, belatedly, he allegedly turned up on
the quest for THE CRYSTAL SKULL.
Following those shenanigans in a kingdom, BELATEDLY again, there was something
about a dial of dullness. But with the characters populating that last movie,
it was impossible to care.
No one has ruined Indiana Jones. Those early
movies are still available, after all. Spend your time enjoying what you love,
and turn away from what you hate. If you hate the later films, that is. Maybe
you are just rather blah on them, as
expending hate isn’t worth the effort.
In the
first three films, the road to adventure kicks off with a transition from the
Paramount logo to some sort of depiction of a mountain. There’s a transition to
a mound in the fourth film, which shows the direction we’re heading in, but
they just don’t give a flying fuck by the fifth and very final film in the
series.
Just couldn’t be fucking arsed, could they?
The series is owned by Disney at that point. However, the Paramount logo is
still present and they could have made the standard transition. But no. We get
the sound of ticking. Time is running out for the franchise. We need to push one
more movie out there before the star, Mr Ford, grows too grumpy to alter
digitally.
Indiana Jones heads off on adventures to
stop the Nazis. But not in a fifth film. No. I grabbed hold of that fucking
dial of destiny and went back in time to stop the film being made. And we’re
all better off for that. Occasionally, expending a little hate is worth the
effort. Where did it go wrong?
Too long a gap in production between movie
number three and movie number four. Same again, pretty much, going from movie
four to movie five. The big problem with Indiana Jones was the trio: Lucas,
Spielberg, and Ford. They had to get together to make these movies.
A lot of heels were dragged over film studio
floors to reach where we are now. The movies have dates to go with them: 1981,
1984, and 1989. Then, if we quote Sallah, we cut to 2008 and 2023: bad dates. The initial run covers the
1980s. In the 1990s, there was a TV show.
Spielberg was dragged kicking and screaming
back in for his last hurrah in 2008. The crystal skull beckoned. Ford was happy
to make a fifth one as long as the gap in production wasn’t anything like the
gap between the third and the fourth one. Bad
dates.
Lucas could have directed one. As long as he
had his STAR WARS collaborators
Harrison Ford and composer John Williams on board, no reason why not. Lucas
reminds me of Sergio Leone – both being directors with great influence on the
world of movies. They directed around a handful each. Spielberg keeps churning
them out by way of comparison, chasing the output of Alfred Hitchcock.
Indiana
Jones. We always knew that one day you’d digitally walk back through cinema’s
door.
The first film featured great stunt work. This
is true of the trilogy. Then the production gap kicked in and computer
generated images were available for use in the fourth film. Too available. A
lot of people say that the fourth film lost them when Indiana Jones dodged the
effects of a nuclear blast by shielding himself inside a refrigerator.
Not me. No. For some reason, I expected that level of nonsense from a
story featuring Indiana. It was Tarzan in the jungle, later. The whole foliage-bedecked
sequence. I’m sure on paper that a duel in the jungle, across vehicles, with
swash being buckled…
Yes, I’m certain that looked fun on paper.
But on the computerised side of things…
Fuck off. I mean…this is the crystal skull
adventure. Misadventure. Fight scenes and chase sequences really show their
lack of value and are revealed as padding in this fourth film. I haven’t
reached the tedium of the mystical dial, yet. That’s a whole movie and many
years away at that point.
There are physical stunts in THE CRYSTAL SKULL. But there weren’t
meant to be that many computerised effects. The opportunity slipped out from
under them. Was the fridge a step too far?
When Indy went to the doom-laden temple,
that sequel/prequel had to go above and beyond, didn’t it? Did it? It didn’t
have to. More of the same would have done us, I’m sure. Had that been the case,
would we have complained about over-familiarity, though?
The opening of the first film is great fun.
It gives us Jones the adventurer. He hates snakes. And we meet his enemy.
Belloq. More on him, during the fifth film. Shortly after that, we see Jones the academic.
His friend Marcus Brody hands him a mission. It’s important that you understand
the pacing of the first film. There’s the mission before the mission which
somehow ties in to the mission – a set-up freely borrowed from the movies of Bond
– James Bond.
Action in the jungle. Meet Belloq. Return to
academia. Encounter Belloq later. Yes, we’ll keep returning to Belloq. But
remember this: SHORTLY after Belloq, we see Jones the academic. The short
opening sequence sets the standard for the entire movie’s pace. Shame that
wasn’t the case for the whole series.
What about those opening sequences? In the
first movie, Jones is in the field facing action. He encounters a villain he’s
met before, and he’ll meet that villain again. Escaping off in a plane, we
travel with Doctor Jones to the groves of academe. He’s Professor Jones again
within the first quarter of an hour of the film’s opening.
In the second movie, he’s in the field. This
is a bit different. The opening gives us villains, but throws them away.
Really, the sequence introduces us to Indiana’s sidekicks. Still, he makes an
escape by plane just barely within the first fifteen minutes. Then it is on to
other adventures.
The third movie opens with a flashback. But
it does relate to the later plot. We’re out of the flashback and back at the
university just barely within the first fifteen minutes of the start.
Then we have this gap in production. In the
fourth movie, we start very directly with the villains. But we don’t return to
academia until almost 25 minutes after the movie starts. This is true of the
fifth film. We have a flashback, introducing the villain. And it is almost 25
minutes before we hit academia.
So, just looking at these stretches of time,
over time, the sweet spot for an opening is close to ten minutes. But we’ll
allow for slight detours and go up to almost a quarter of an hour. The last two
films take this too far. For a lot of people, that fifth film gives them the
big highlight of the movie in the opening flashback. That wore off for me
pretty quickly. It could have been cut in half, reducing the number of digital
shots related to a Nazi train.
Do I object to the absurdity of it all? No.
The movies are full of improbable nonsense. We demand that, after a little
while. Escapist fantasy is escapist. The only place to draw the line is at
heavily foreshadowed plot points that lumber into view with all the subtlety of
no subtlety. Watch the fifth movie and see. See what I did there.
Escapism. The second movie, set rather
puzzlingly before the first film, opens in a nefarious nightclub. You might say
it’s a wretched hive of scum and villainy. The action becomes more and more
improbable as the seconds pass. Escaping to an aeroplane and from the aeroplane
is as daft a sequence as being saved in a refrigerator is, come the fourth film.
No parachutes. Just an inflatable yellow
raft. It falls improbably to a landing on snow. This is a Slalom on Mount Humol, going by the soundtrack. Yes, I am playing
the music of John Williams as I type.
The raft goes even further into the realms
of improbability, leading to a river. Absolute nonsense, and every bit as daft
as the refrigerator scene from the fourth movie. Let’s detour into that for a
second.
Indiana Jones survives a nuclear blast
inside a fridge. Any radiation damage he suffers is offset by his experience
with the Holy Grail from the third film. We’ll run with that. If you hate the
refrigerator and nuclear bomb double-act, take note: you’d have fucking
detested it in BACK TO THE FUTURE,
where it was slated to appear originally. Spielberg’s a nut on the subject.
Fortunately, Doctor Jones survives the
nuclear blast and is warned by the military – don’t climb into fridges. They
aren’t safe. That’s for any children watching. I think nuclear weapons are a
wee bit more dangerous than fridges are. That’s for any adults reading.
What
stands out in the first film? Many things. The truck chase. Not just the truck
chase…
From the moment Indy and Marion start their
escape from the tomb, the action is terrific. It doesn’t feel padded. The movie
comes in at under two hours, even including closing credits. Okay. What stands
out in the second film?
The movie is a rollercoaster ride. Yes,
literally. The mine cart chase is a theme park ride waiting to happen. But
there’s more to the film than that. Willie Scott and Short Round are based on
characters from old movies. I say they are great at conveying the mood. You
might find them irritating.
A fish-out-of-water nightclub singer and a
gambling kid sidekick are just right for this second (first) story. They all
visit the temple, take in the sights, see a spot of doom, and have spooky
adventures.
I suppose the second film is set before the
first film to keep the hope alive that Indy would still be with Marion in a
third movie. Maybe that was the plan at the time, but it didn’t pan out.
Technically, I should watch TEMPLE OF
DOOM first in the series, but I can’t be bothered. Maybe one day. We’ll
have a detour into Sergio Leone in a wee while.
What stands out in the third film? The tank
chase. But there’s more to it than that. Marcus Brody is in the field, for
once. And the last crusade they are all on…it’s just a great way to end a
trilogy. This wannabe Bond movie has a James Bond actor in it, after all.
So what stands out in the first three films?
We are given characters to root for in dire situations. Those situations
include a truck chase, a mine chase, and a tank chase. But without the
characters, you would have padding and nothing but padding. We are also given
characters that hark back to the days of Old Hollywood.
Indiana Jones raids that lost ark, and, to do
so, he’s borrowed items of clothing from Charlton Heston in a film called Secret of the Incas. If you are
wondering why no one sued, well, it was a Paramount picture. Keep it in the
company and all is well.
Before he reaches the doomed temple, Indiana
appears to be taking style tips from Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. And his
(supposedly) last crusade is a Bond film with a Nazi coat of paint on it. (A
pot Ian Fleming himself dipped into, in the novel Moonraker.)
Characters we care about. Indy and Marion.
The characters not everyone roots for in that doomed temple: Willie Scott and
Short Round. But you need to be heartless not to care about Short Round
desperately trying to turn Indy away from the cause of evil. There is
heartlessness in that movie. And it is done practically, rather than digitally.
Willie Scott is a hapless force of nature.
And even if you don’t buy into it, hey, surely you still care about Indy in
that second film. The point in this prequel is that Willie Scott is definitely
not Marion.
We
could’ve been given more of the same, more of the stuff that appeared on the
big screen in the first movie. But the temple is full of doom, and it is very
bleak in places. Call it an experiment in giving you more Indiana, but in a
different setting with new sidekicks and a departure from the widely
globetrotting first movie.
It’s pretty much about the palace above the
temple, some nods to the cinema of Sir David Lean, the temple, and that literal
rollercoaster ride. The movie is a little longer than Indy’s first cinematic
outing. But not overlong. We’ll get to that bit.
I like the combination of Willie Scott and
Short Round. Yes, they are plunged into horror. There’s an old-fashioned
movie-making sensibility at work, at the same time delivering a film that puts
the gore on screen rather than in the shadows…though shadows always play a part
in stories featuring Doctor Jones.
Characters we care about. For the last ride
into the sunset, we’re joined by Marcus Brody who provides a fair bit of
comedy. Sallah makes a brief but welcome return. Connery clucks his way through
the production declaring that everything is intolerable. But the movie is
highly tolerable.
For once, the love-interest is a villain.
That’s hardly a spoiler. Obvious villains are obvious, and I’ve refrained from
naming another obvious villain here. Still wouldn’t be a spoiler if I said the
name. The movie doesn’t outstay its welcome. And the series doesn’t outstay its
welcome, either. Near the end of the film, Spielberg is dangling over a cleft
in the planet. The audience is there, holding him up. Spielberg reaches for
another movie in the series…
Spielbergiana…let it go.
Let us turn to the cinematic masterpiece
that is INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF
THE CRYSTAL SKULL. In light of the fifth movie, we can dub the fourth movie
with this title: cinematic fucking
masterpiece. Which version, though? Frank Darabont surfaced to kick the
script around. He had form, having worked on the TV version of Indy’s
adventures. But there were a lot of cooks in that kitchen. Hardly any are
credited officially.
Darabont isn’t credited in the opening. There
are characters in the movie that weren’t in Darabont’s head or the script that
fell out of his head. How much of his input made it to the finished production?
Hard to say. Darabont was caught between Spielberg and Lucas. A rock and an
even harder rock.
When these new characters turn up after an
agonising pre-production period, they feel bolted on. I knew none of the script
chicanery when I watched the movie. Is it a cinematic masterpiece?
No.
Is it a bad movie? The first hour of the
film is pretty much what you’d expect from a film featuring Indiana Jones if
the actor hadn’t portrayed Indy in a movie in a long time. Nostalgia played a
huge factor in the movie’s financial success. Also, Ford still had it, had it
in spades, diamonds, clubs, and hearts, when he made the film. Spielberg didn’t
really come across as a director who wanted to be there. But Ford was game. He
made sure he was fit for the assignment.
Ray Winstone has very little to do as Mac, a
friend of Indy’s from the war years. He turns up a heartbeat before Indiana
does, and then rapidly betrays Indy. So much for that so-called friendship.
It’s hard to care when the instant character goes for instant betrayal.
Indiana is built for instant characters. He
meets Belloq. Someone he’s met before. For us, that’s our introduction to the
villain. Indiana talks to Marcus, an academic colleague of long acquaintance.
Indy meets Sallah, an old friend who guides Indy through the problems with the
search for the lost ark. All instant characters. So much for the first film.
Mac as a friend who betrays Indy in the opening scene of the fourth movie…just
doesn’t cut it. And there’s no recovery from that, which is why Mac has very
little to do thereafter.
Cate Blanchett also has very little to do.
She arrives on the scene as Irina Spalko – she’s a budget Rosa Klebb from a far
better Bond movie, reminding us that the character is a budget Rosa Klebb from
a far better Bond movie, and that she has very little to do.
Igor Jijikine is the henchman. But, y’know,
if they’d ditched Mac and Irina and beefed this guy’s role up and given him a
memorable sub-henchman of his own, I think the movie would have played better.
Jim Broadbent is okay, but he has the
unenviable task of being a replacement character for Denholm Elliott while he
walks past a portrait of Denholm as Marcus Brody. Broadbent is given a little
more to do than that, but not much. I’d say he fares pretty well out of the
experience. Denholm also puts in a cameo as a statue at the faculty.
I’m not really a fan of Shia LaBeouf, but he
does what’s asked of him and he’s okay. Except for the jungle sequence. Not his
fault. He turns up in this film as Marlon Brando. No, seriously. If you missed
the reference, that’s what was going on there.
John Hurt was, presumably, well-paid for his
appearance. I have the sense that he’s a soft replacement for Connery. Connery
was to have had a cameo, but that didn’t suit Sean. If his role had been
enlarged, he could have been off in the jungle, driven mad, and had a few key
scenes.
How to fit Sean in? At the wedding. That was
the plan, I guess. We’ll return to the wedding.
Crystal skulls abound in this story. The
year is 1957, and the movie opens to Elvis singing for the entertainment of the
people who had the most fun making this film. I’m talking about the American Graffiti rejects racing against
the villains. The youngsters soon depart.
Indy still has it. The Nazis are no longer
suitable as villains. (That would change.) Hitler is out. Commies are in. Hell,
they could have at least hinted that they’d saved Hitler’s brain.
Lucas dragged the Roswell incident into
proceedings from the 1940s, and here are the Russians looking to loot something
crystalline and skullish from a top secret warehouse. They’d have been better
off going after the ark…glimpsed in a throwaway joke.
This opening sequence is long. Far too long.
Reduce the characters. Cut the time spent on the opening. Leaving aside CRUSADE, as Indy is right there as
River Phoenix in the flashback, CRYSTAL
SKULL takes the longest of all five movies to show Indy as a character on
the screen. Hell, that’s allowing for TEMPLE
OF DOOM, which runs a whole musical number before he walks into the club.
After a bumpy start, and clunky
introductions of various characters, Indy is on the hunt for an old colleague:
Oxley. This is John Hurt, who babbles throughout his performance, and then
returns to sanity to babble an explanation involving creatures that are
definitely not aliens.
If
they were aliens, that would hurt Spielberg’s feelings, as he didn’t want to be
heavily associated with making movies about aliens. Says Spielberg, signing up
to direct a fourth movie about Indiana Jones. Could we make the movie about a
shark skull, maybe? One of crystal. No one would notice.
Let’s deal with the mutt. Or Mutt. Shia is
playing Marlon Brando by way of James Dean, filtered through the coffee-paper
of American Graffiti. But the
character is named…after a dog. See what they did there…
There’s a motorbike chase. I quite like that
chase. It’s a bit of fun. Musically, it’s enjoyable. Leading up to the chase,
we discover Mutt’s mother’s name isn’t Martha. That would be too much of a
coincidence. No, her name is Marion. This had to be the worst-kept secret in
moviedom: Karen Allen would reprise her role as Marion Ravenwood.
Why be so coy about this inside the movie,
when the actress was on the poster and in the trailers? Oh, and credited in the
opening. This was 2008, and the internet was a thing in a way that it hadn’t
been in (checks notes) 1989. There weren’t even a million users of the
primitive internet back in ’89.
Reminds me of STAR TREK: INTO DIMNESS. A movie that went out of its way, in 2013,
to hide the fact that it was THE WRATH OF
KHAN remade. In 2013. With the internet. And phones. A worldwide squeal of
internet annoyance over the phones and your secret is busted. What was all that
shit with this John Harrison guy? In the non-build-up to this non-film, he’s definitely not Khan. Spoiler alert.
No one cared.
Excuse me while I veer off into talk of the
Keaton-Jackman Effect. In 1989, irate Bat-fans physically wrote letters to
complain about Michael Keaton’s casting as the lead character in Tim Burton’s BATMAN movie. The news that a sequel was
announced off the back of the film’s success led to fans commenting that Keaton
better be fucking involved, or there’d be no point watching the damned thing.
This happened later with the character of
Wolverine. Who the fuck is Hugh Jackman?
Keaton had a dozen movie credits to his name and was derided as being a comedy
actor with no business portraying Bruce Wayne, let alone the Batman. Jackman
had two movies behind him and was slagged for not having a career yet.
Presumably, if Jackman were the veteran of
ten Australian comedies he’d have been wrong, so wrong, for Wolverine on that
basis. After the release of X-Men,
fans demanded a solo outing for Wolverine and that only Hugh Jackman could play
him.
We’ll call this the Keaton-Jackman Effect.
One of the best portrayals of the character
by Jackman is in the movie Logan,
directed by James Mangold. I’ll return to him on the small matter of a dial. Of
dullness.
Things that don’t often work. Belated
sequels to movies. Sequels so delayed that you are in another decade, or, gasp,
a different century. Bringing back a much-loved character in a cameo role so
that the torch can be passed down to the next generation. I think that worked
once, in a STAR TREK TV show. In
movies, not so much.
I
haven’t bothered to explain the plotting of these movies featuring Indiana
Jones. Maybe I should summarise. Indy is an archaeology professor who would
give real archaeology professors absolute fucking nightmares. In his first
outing, he tries to stop the Nazis from claiming a powerful pile of dust made
from rocks. This is before war breaks out.
Stop the bad guys from obtaining the
mystical thing. Have adventures along the way. That’s the formula.
A word or two about William Hootkins. Hootkins
is in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, taking
a lesson in biblical matters from Harrison Ford. Indy sketches out a staff and
explains what the Ark of the Covenant actually is.
Mr Hootkins is also remembered as Porkins in
STAR WARS. Porkins is the recipient
of the worst advice in a space movie. As he struggles to deal with some trouble
aboard his one-man fighter jet, er, spaceship, while attacking dams in the
Ruhr Valley the DEATH STAR, Hootkins is told to…EJECT.
WHERE TO?!
Oh, to the surface of the DEATH STAR, which
Luke Skywalker will shortly demolish? That’s assuming there’s even an
atmosphere on the DEATH STAR’S surface. I quibble over these things. Where are
the clouds on the DEATH STAR, damn it?!
To this day, I think all the lights on the
DEATH STAR should flicker as the big ray gun is fired. A man in an orange
jumpsuit sticks his head through prison bars and intones…dead planet walking. Yes, I’ve seen too many prison movies. Frank
Darabont appears to be responsible for many of them.
Why mention Hootkins in connection with
Indiana Jones? CRYSTAL SKULL retreads
that government guy moment in the hunt for a few nostalgia fumes. Jones is
dumped by the Russians at the top secret warehouse. We’re introduced to the
idea of aliens.
They are extradimensional lifeforms, damn
it!
Jones is betrayed by Mac and escapes.
Harrison Ford does his own stunts here. The safety wires are easy enough to
remove digitally, and I have no problem with that. For some reason, there’s an
experimental rocket sled that leads off in the direction of nowhere. Indy
hitches a lift.
In the morning, he reaches a deserted town.
It is a nuclear test site. Let’s find out how American houses stand up to those
atoms. Indy takes shelter in a fridge. The Russians race out of town in their car
and die in a haze of sub-par digital destruction.
Indy is discovered, decontaminated, and then
interrogated by government guys. This section reminded me of Hootkins.
Essentially, the scene goes nowhere. Then it’s off to academia. Is Indy a
communist agent? The only enemy agent he consorted with was a suspect Austrian
that time in Venice. And she could hardly be described as communistical. Ah, Venice. It’s okay. You get a pass
for dallying with the Nazis, provided they are rocket scientists.
Leaving the fourth movie under something of
a cloud, Professor Jones boards a train. To emphasise that he is older, his hat
has turned grey for a bit. Enter Marlon Brando and a spot of exposition leading
to the motorbike chase.
There’s some faffing around with a language
Indy must work hard to understand. Being a movie, this takes a few seconds. He
and Mutt are off in search of Professor Oxley. And possibly treasure, power,
fortune and glory…
There’s a bit of Indy stuff leading to the
next location and the next location. This is all okay. Ultimately, once you’ve
pieced so many clues together it is time for capture. Indy and Mutt are
captured and taken into the commie camp of captured characters.
John Hurt earns more money for babbling a
bit. Karen Allen puts in a welcome return as Marion. We get some character
stuff. And the repeat, I guess, of a thing no one wants to see. But there it
is. And we’ll see more of it in the future.
Two characters get together in a movie. The
audience cheers. Damn. What to do in the rest of the series? I know. We can
split them up so we can put them back together again. Now, in defence of Marion
as a character…that’s how she starts.
Indiana Jones walks back through her door in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. She’s an instant character from his past.
They were together. And they split. Now he
needs her help, and she joins his world of adventure. Marion vanishes from the
other movies. It’s in the fourth film that she returns after a long absence
which…
Allows these characters to get back together
again. Oh, and here’s your son.
Marion is used as a hostage to force Indy’s hand. Indy, slow on the uptake,
realises Marion Ravenwood is Mutt’s mother. He lags a bit behind on the rest of
that story.
Mutt takes the lead and mounts an escape
that goes nowhere. Except, we all officially learn that Mutt is Indy’s son.
Next, we shift into the jungle in daylight and a convoy of vehicles. And this
is where the movie loses me.
So, instead, for a bit, I’ll talk about STAR WARS. George Lucas, again. Once
upon a time, in an earlier galaxy that just happens to be this one, STAR WARS was STAR WARS. As soon as you number them, and start at the number four, you’ve created scope for filming
the first three.
What then? Announce episodes seven, eight,
and nine?
When episode seven was announced, I believed
four things. One. Harrison Ford would get his long-time wish and Han Solo would
die. Two. Luke Skywalker would merge with the Force and become a ghost. Three.
We would see Princess Leia use the Force in a big way. Four. They could do what
they liked with the story, as long as they didn’t just repeat the attack on the
DEATH STAR.
It is the year 2015. Harrison Ford plays a
character who had a happy ending with his Princess. Now, we find that they’ve
split up over the thorny issue of their wayward son. Also, Luke Skywalker has
fucked off somewhere.
Much time has passed. Format? The original
characters would appear, and pass the mantle of heroism to the next generation
of new and interesting characters. But the original characters would still be
involved in a major way. Up until Han Solo’s death, of course.
Implementation? Utterly sideline the
characters we turned up to see. Not how I’d have written it. You want to keep
the fans happy, right? Start with the regulars from the very opening and add
the fresh cast from that point on. You don’t utterly sideline people. In the
much-delayed and frankly unwanted BLADE
RUNNER sequel, you would like to think you could add a layer of interest to
what was great before.
You’ve done a man’s job, sir. I guess you’re through, huh?
The writing is certainly through. If you
must bring Gaff back in a sequel, meet him in a bar watching a dancer perform
with a neon snake. Don’t stick him in a nursing home.
TONY SOPRANO: It’s a retirement community!
When there’s talk of retirement in BLADE RUNNER,
it doesn’t mean taking it easy. No, it means taking it rather fucking harshly.
Funny, that. Harrison Ford, again. Almost as if there’s a fucking pattern here.
He had a happy ending with his replicant girlfriend in the first movie, and
that went to shit in the sequel. Is this the default setting for films, now?
Where was I? Just make what worked part of
your plan. And do stuff with it. Don’t sideline it, remove it utterly,
diminish, belittle, or berate it. We’re going to need the Roman numerals for
this one.
Episode VII. THE FORCE
AWAKENS.
Before the meeting can take place, they find themselves surrounded by
space pirates on the Blood Red Moon of Bantonnay.
This is no chance encounter, but an ambush arranged by sinister forces
hoping to overthrow the Republic and bring about the return of THE GALACTIC
EMPIRE.
Now, Ben Solo, Jedi Knight, and his smuggler father Han race across the
galaxy aboard the Millennium Falcon, with the mighty Chewbacca, to haul Luke Skywalker’s
feet from the flames one more time….
It’s better to
start with Ben as a good guy and then be tempted by the Dark Side. We would
care, then. Also, Han would never admit to hauling Leia’s feet from the
flames…but he’d gloat a bit over Luke, just for the nostalgia value. Han would
also call Leia sister as a joke.
As a Senator, Leia could reasonably sneak
away from politics for a time. The New Republic is still rough around the
edges, and Han smuggles supplies to good causes when bureaucracy stands in the
way of decency.
Those new characters come in to create
factions. You’d look for at least three factions of good guys, duelling and
blasting their way across the end of the movie in typical STAR WARS style. Drop a bunch of Darths in there for innovative
duels, and you are all set.
ANYWAY. This shit about the characters
getting together only to be split apart by the next movie just to get back
together again…is really fucking annoying. But we haven’t talked about the
mummified corpse in the room.
The
Mummy, from 1999, may give you that Indy fix for the ’90s. Its roots lie in
the movie by Karl Freund, so maybe you are getting that Indy fix for the ’30s.
There’s a game cast, sand, action and humour aplenty…
And a couple who get together in this movie
only to stay together, married, with a kid sidekick in the sequel. Well, isn’t
that something? Okay, the actual mummy has a fucking tragic love-life, but come
on – he’s the villain.
Back to the CRYSTAL SKULL. It’s definitely not alien. The shape of it nods in
the direction of H.R. Giger and Ridley Scott, but we’ll gloss over that. Truck
convoy. Indiana Jones. Marion is with him. Hell, her theme is playing in the
background.
And then. We have a clunky combination of
live stuff blended, in a blender, with the computer mulch. Where’s Vic
Armstrong when you need him? Well, he was fucking available when he was fucking
available, but you took too long to make this one so he wasn’t available for
any stunt coordination on this one.
Yes, Vic Armstrong is listed in the crew for
that third Mummy movie that kept him
away from Indiana Jones, but, as we all know, there is no third Mummy movie. Spielberg had the annoying
habit of shooting down ideas based on films that were just released, but
another four years would go by before any meaningful progress. It’s so tedious.
They would lose actors from these lumbering projects and just have to make do
later.
Still waiting for Even More American Graffiti. Maybe Harrison Ford could come back
and sink that franchise as well, completing the fucking run and scoring bonus
points for shits and giggles.
The jungle sequence is green, plastic, and
cheese-laden. However, the music performs far more valiantly at this point in
the movie than the on-screen action does. John Williams turns up for the job,
no matter the failings in this chase.
I am not here to root for the music in the
chase, though. Music may compensate for certain technical deficiencies. If your
rubber shark is broken, just show underwater sequences set to music and let the
editing help you through.
But the jungle chase sets the tone and mood
for the declining half of this film. Long before we reach the scenes with the
ants, we must contend with the business of the monkeys. Monkey business? Spielberg
should have hired the Marx Brothers.
Mutt is left behind in the jungle. He
catches up by heading everyone off at the pass. This involves the use of vines.
When Chewbacca impersonates Tarzan in the STAR
WARS universe, it’s brief and that makes it funny.
And then there’s this shit. Not Shia’s
fault. Even when Mutt heads everyone off at the pass, he still sees them far
ahead. So he has to head them off at the pass all over again. Woeful pacing. It all ends in tears, except that it
all ends in ants.
Computer generated ants. I don’t even know where to start with this. In
other movies, there’d be snakes. Or a lion. Here we’ve reached the point at
which computers are capable of generating swarms of ants. True, The Mummy movie gave us swarms of insta-killer
beetles. Not the best part of that movie. Never mind all that.
We’re in a race to reach the place. The
refrigerator sequence is on the same level of absurdity as the waterfall
sequence that follows the ant sequence. All that matters is reaching this lost
kingdom with crystal skulls in it.
Get there before the commies do. Is this
important? Let the commies brave all of the tricks and traps first and then mop
up after. But no, we’ll have our heroes do all the work for the villains this
time around.
I’m not sure about the guardians of this
lost place. Either…they crawl along tunnels to reach thin walls that they burst
out of…or they are imprisoned in the walls. You know, maybe they live in the
spaces between dimensions, courtesy all that alien technology. It isn’t alien.
No. It’s from somewhere…don’t know.
Basically, all you have to do is open the
doorway using the crystal skull. Then you reach the control room of the alien
spaceship. It’s from another dimension, damn it. And the movie delivers on a
mystical ending.
By that point we’ve had Indy declare that
this is intolerable, in a nod to an earlier movie. He also spouts the line
about a bad feeling that you’ll find
repeated over in STAR WARS. So who
cares if an Indy movie gives you another mystical ending to a movie with Indy
in it.
It is an ending that seems pretty harsh on
everyone who lived in the immediate area, protecting the immediate area, but
the movie glosses over that one. Rosa Klebb’s stand-in seeks the knowledge that
is too much for Indy and friends.
They
escape from CGI hell, and we head off to the wedding. Ah, the wedding. As
originally scripted, I guess Henry Jones Senior and Sallah were to be
bridesmaids or something and that pleased neither actor.
The hat passes from Indiana to Mutt
and…Indiana promptly takes it back. Everyone lives happily ever…there’s another
belated sequel. Well, fuck. On the bonus side, this movie comes in at just
under two hours and then they roll credits.
Half of the film is worth watching. The
first half leads you to believe that you are having adventures with geriatric
Indiana Jones. Not true. That’s for the sequel. A sequel not directed by
Spielberg and with no story input by George Lucas.
I’d likened Sergio Leone to George Lucas.
What’s the right order in which to watch these films? You could watch TEMPLE OF DOOM, RAIDERS, and LAST CRUSADE in that order just to keep
the dates right. Chances are, you are just fine watching RAIDERS first.
You could view The Good, the Bad and the Ugly before A Fistful of Dollars and For
a Few Dollars More. Try it. You’d be watching a film set during the
American Civil War and then two films set after. Leone makes this quite clear
by having the Clint Eastwood character do something very obvious at the end of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly to tie
the other movies into a later timeline.
There are dates on gravestones that also
confirm this. But you can’t totally trust time in a Sergio Leone movie. His use
of guns from crazy time periods is quite deliberate, as he evokes an atmosphere
related to events beyond the Wild West. That’s how you can spot the MG 42 in A Fistful of Dynamite, even though the
gun wasn’t invented at the time. Leone liked to draw the viewer’s attention to
other wars, other massacres, and other revolutions in that film.
We’re glossing over Indiana Jones attempting
to blow up the lost ark with an unbuilt Russian weapon in RAIDERS. That brings me back to Belloq, in the end. In the end,
there’s a fifth Indy movie. The DIAL OF
DESTINY. My soul is prepared. How’s yours?
Do you want to know the plot? It’s right
there in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.
Belloq explains it to Indiana Jones. And the makers of the DIAL OF DULLNESS were listening. You can see the director, James
Mangold, having the spark of an idea appear above his furrowed brow.
Look
at this. It’s worthless. Ten dollars from a vendor in the street. But I take
it, and bury it in the sand for a thousand years: it becomes priceless.
Belloq is talking about a watch. And that is
pretty much the plot. I’ve written at length about this movie without writing
about this movie. Length. Yes. It overstays its welcome, running well beyond
two hours.
Part of the blame lies with the extended
opening flashback to the war. An orc steps in from The Lord of the Rings to tell us the good news. Looks like Nazis are back on the menu, boys.
Indy is hunting for a mystical object. Forget all that. It is nonsense of the
worst kind. There’s a fake mystical object. But there’s a much better real
mystical object. And…
Why the fuck are you dithering over this
multiple choice essay on which magic item the hero is after? Pick one and stick
with it.
Of all the people involved in the movie, the
actor who appears to be having the most fun is Toby Jones in the flashback.
What to say of Indiana Jones and the
Rubberised face of Youth…
Harrison Ford’s face is de-aged for the
movie. But not his voice. He’s too grumpy to alter digitally. Isn’t it great to
see younger Indy battling Nazis again? If they’d treated it as a James Bond
franchise and made one every few years, we’d have had movies set during the
war.
Would a full series have deflated and
diluted the action? Eventually, any series tires out. I think I’d have
preferred that to the fits and starts and sputterings of the way it all went.
Am I going to explain this last movie to you?
Too much CGI. Overlong movie. Ke Huy Quan
should have come back in for the fifth film. Short Round would have handled the
fight scenes, protecting Doctor Jones. This is the cry that went up. But he was
better off out of it, I guess.
The Nazi American Eagle has landed on
the moon. It is the year 1969 and Doctor Jones is living in some sort of
twilight existence, teaching disinterested students who would have been born
after the war. Yes, bored feckless Baby Boomers. That’s the people he’s
teaching in the seconds leading up to his retirement.
TONY SOPRANO: It’s a retirement community!
Indy is saddled with a trouble-prone force
of nature who is also an instant character from his past. There’s a kid
sidekick who almost knows how to fly. This will be important later. In a
lumbering way.
We could care, but the movie doesn’t go out
of its way to help us in that direction. Disposable characters are murdered by
disposable thugs. The chief villain of the piece would appear to be the writer.
But we’ll settle for a budget version of Wernher von Braun in the form of a
Bond villain who was a better Bond villain when he was in a real Bond movie.
It’s not Mads Mikkelsen’s fault that he has
this unerring ability to locate Indiana Jones. The chief villain is the writer,
remember. The plot concerns a dial, or half of it. And an item that can locate
the other half of it.
So there’s…
I am rapidly losing the will to type. That
fucking digital train sequence at the start. Go and watch The First Great Train Robbery. That’s really Connery on top of that
train. The train is real, too. It’s too much to ask Harrison to do that at his
age. I get that. But does so much of the train sequence need to be faked?
Anyway. Nazi flashback. Cut to 1969. There’s
a lousy set-up that cannot possible pay off. Indy, in his apartment, puts a
fridge magnet over the photo of Marion. Yes, you guessed it. They photocopied
the STAR WARS thing and shoved it here.
Just a reminder, for you…
Harrison Ford plays a character who had a
happy ending with his Princess wife. Now, we find that they’ve split up
over the thorny issue of their wayward son. Also, Lucas Spielberger has fucked
off somewhere.
The thorny issue of the wayward son, in this
case, is the off-screen death of Mutt. Did they? Wait. Did they just Admiral Ackbar the motherfucker? Foul
set-up: Indy and Marion are no longer together AGAIN.
Payoff? There isn’t one. They get back
together at the end of the movie. That’s the plan. It lumbers into view the
moment Indy pulls the fridge move. He’d have been as well climbing inside it
and waiting for another nuke.
If the set-up is lousy, I couldn’t care less
about the resolution. An older Short Round or Mutt could have been here to
handle the fights. And the quips. No level of nostalgia could save this
overlong movie.
Various villains cycle through and there are
chases, I’m sure. Basil Shaw and his daughter Helena could have been so much
more in this film. Sadly, not the case. Basil was obsessed with the dial, in
much the same way as Henry Senior was fixated with the Holy Grail.
This obsession has passed down to Basil’s daughter
who is also Indy’s goddaughter, Helena Shaw. But it isn’t enough for this
movie. After faffing about chasing around New York on a horse, Indy…that was
his stunt double with a computerised face…I started to suspect that Ford just
standing and sitting down might be computerised as well. Where were we?
Indy is on the trail. The Nazis are on the
trail. Helena is on her way, one step ahead of everyone else. There is a nice
flashback to more of Toby Jones and a younger actress playing Helena. And there
is a great shot of both Helena actresses as the older one remembers the past by
staring at her younger reflection fading from an aeroplane window.
If the movie had the promise of that one
scene, damn it.
This was the first thing I’d seen Phoebe
Waller-Bridge in, though I’d heard her in the movie about young Han Solo. The
promise of the characterisation was there in that aeroplane scene. She is
playing to a movie type. The troubled character who gets into scrapes, and who,
at some point, breaks through into a sheen of positivity that lasts for the
rest of the film.
I’m not defying anyone to play that part and
overcome the script problems. Close, though. Phoebe was given stuff to do, but
not enough of it and not enough of the right things for a movie about Indy and
his supporting cast.
It isn’t enough to think that the first half
of the CRYSTAL SKULL is a movie about
Indy doing Indy stuff. If the second half of the movie slides down the shitter,
the overall movie dies. I feel that this is the case with people who frothingly
tell me that the first half of Full Metal
Jacket is great and this news alone makes it a great movie.
Hmmm.
DIAL
OF DULLNESS. What is the plot? Just watch. Or. It’s just about a watch. It
is not really watchable. Helena Shaw is there to pull a heel-turn in reverse
and finally endear herself to the audience. Well, the end credits rolled…and I
am still waiting for that bit.
Indiana should have recognised his
goddaughter. On the other hand, he was told that Mutt’s mother was Marion and
he didn’t take that in. Anyway. There’s a sub-plot about a guy who was going to
marry Helena. And she owes him money. Lots of chases. None of them memorable.
And then Antonio Banderas shows up as one of
Indy’s instant character friends. He should have made big Puss-in-Boots eyes. Spoiler alert. This whole sequence was shit.
Spielberg directed JAWS, written by
Robert Benchley’s son Peter. Peter Benchley wrote The Deep. That was a movie featuring JAWS star Robert Shaw.
I’m playing six degrees of ten variations on
something to do with Kevin Bacon. Basically, the idea of a treasure ship being
concealed by another treasure ship above it…that’s been done before. We don’t
quite get that here, but the earlier movie features a moray eel. And there are
CGI creatures in this timed-mission level that Indy must face…
Maybe it’s all the cartoony CGI from the
start of the movie. Indy looked like younger Indy as long as he didn’t turn his
head. But that train sequence was like a level in a computer game. And the
build-up to this underwater action sequence was…to tell us that they only had
three minutes.
After which, it’s back to the surface
and…Antonio Banderas fans, look away now.
I’m reminded of the villain’s ability to
keep turning up. Audiences didn’t turn up. The film took hundreds of millions
at the cinema and still rolled over and flopped.
Escape. Learn a few things. Oh, the
villain’s breathing down your necks again. Raid a tomb. Well that’s not very
ethical in the fifth movie in a series about thieving archaeologists. And then.
The hard part of the movie.
There are many variants of the Heinkel
bomber, so I suppose you could add one more to the pile without being noticed.
Of the thousands of aircraft built, there is a handful in existence today. Even
with his connections, where did low-rent Wernher von Braun grab a Heinkel from?
Did he just roll up to an air museum with a
bag full of thousand dollar bills and wink in a full German accent at the
museum curator? I’ll have it back by the
weekend, Mein Herr. Actually, that would work on the basis that you aren’t
coming back to this time. You are headed off to change history entirely.
So it is off to the past we go. And then
this ludicrous CGI battle in ancient history. With a bit of noodling and a load
of anti-climaxes. With one mighty punch, our hero was free. In the future
again.
There’s the payoff. Marion turns up for
reconciliation. When the actress starts bitching about how her role was
reduced, you know there were twenty-five-plus scripts for this shit. There’s
Sallah again. Blink and you miss him. Sallah’s contribution to this movie
starts to make the bridesmaid cameo in CRYSTAL
SKULL look appealing.
Spoiler alert for the end of the movie. Indy
hangs up his hat. But takes it back as the movie fades. It’s not the years.
Definitely the mileage. The tyres are gone and the wheels are worn down to
wishful thinking. Even the fumes in the tank are running on fumes.
Who thought this was a good idea and can we
use the dial of dullness to rewind? Normally, I write around 1,500 words in
these blog posts. But the computer tells me that I’ve exceeded 8,000. I cannot
apologise for my rambling rant. When the movie itself has no structure worth
reporting, I am forced to veer off into other things.
This film ends with Indy and Marion united
all over again. The payoff did not match the set-up. Faces did not match
bodies. Length of movie did not come close to original length of original
movie. The people involved in producing and directing this were snakes. Why did
it have to be snakes?