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?
No comments:
Post a Comment