THE HIGH-PITCHED WHINE OF DAN O’BANNON’S COFFIN: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Yes, that high-pitched whine you hear is Dan O’Bannon’s coffin spinning out of the grave and into low orbit. I watched the second half of the ALIEN: EARTH TV show. (From episode five on, I wrote escape capsule hit-pieces as episodes aired, just so you know.)
   In my earlier blog post on the first four episodes, I wrote that the key feature of any story featuring the ALIEN franchise is this: at some point, smart people in space must do dumb things for the story to move forward.
   Damn it. Episode five acknowledges this in the script itself. Proof of how stupid smart people can be. It’s built into the story. Too close to the alien bone?
   Now…I glossed over a whole bunch of things from the first four episodes. Take episode four, for example. In which Battle Angel Alita Wendy Darling becomes an alien snake-charmer. Or something. She can talk to the animals.
   But it is time to return to those earlier episodes in talking about smart people in space doing dumb things. In episode one, you get the idea that something goes horribly wrong on the spaceship that looks awfully like Ridley Scott’s idea of a spaceship on the inside.
   But we aren’t shown that story.
   We see glimpses of the set.
   A load of viewers believed…if you build a whole set and don’t show the story in full, then there’ll be a flashback episode later. Explaining all of that nasty stuff in gory detail. As sure as chest-bursting follows a meal, that’s what we got in episode five. Must use the set. Built it for something. Use it.
   There were hints in earlier episodes of what went down. But we really must see the whole thing. And this is the point at which Dan O’Bannon’s coffin achieves escape velocity.
   Here’s the flashback set-up. Two aliens escape their containment pods. They hug faces. One member of the crew dies in an ill-advised surgical procedure. Acid, baby. The other is placed in a cryogenic suspension pod.
   Oopsie.
   The alien bursts out of that chest and flees the pod. Glass breaks when the plot demands. Hiding in the vast ship, somewhere, the alien creates the perfect set-up for an alien jailbreak. This li’l alien can sneak through vents and ignore holes in the plot or some shit, and reaches the other aliens in their safe glass containers. Mm.
   That would be okay. Believable, if you squint hard enough. One alien slithers in, fucks shit up, and slithers out again. I’d buy that. But I’m not purchasing what actually happens. The aliens in the lab stage a jailbreak by opening their prisons from the inside.
   They’re smarter than the average bear, see.
   This is dumber than a box of moon rocks. Use the alien that already fucking escaped. Let it wreak havoc in the lab. It’s the alien, for fuck’s sake. But…no. When these other aliens aren’t solving the Times crossword or Mr Rubik’s fiendish cube, they are staging a jailbreak. By…
   Now this bit is the worst bit in the episode. Breaks all the rules. It is drummed into anyone who ever sat in a science class. And it applies to the lab. NO FOOD AND DRINK IN THE LAB. Ever. True, this is an ALIEN gig…so smart people must do dumb things in space for the story to move forward over a cliff.
   There’s a lot in earlier episodes set up to pay off in this flashback, and then advance the story by switching to the here and now. But the golden opporchancity was there, and they blew it. Let the alien, from ALIEN, do its alien thing in fucking shit up. Then the new aliens can cut loose and do their alien thing. Don’t keep sidelining the original monster.
   Instead, we see the Skullfucker Octoball try to take on the adult alien. But there aren’t any eyes to pluck out. As fucking expected. At the end of the episode, we dip back into BLADE RUNNER territory with the appearance of Lady Yutani…and, for once, she isn’t on the phone to Mr Morrow the cyborg. She’s there, in person, with a bunch of mad-looking corporate samurai dudes. Send in the clones. Don’t worry. They’re here.
   The ALIEN movie gave us an alien horror with a dose of corporate evil thrown in. Here, the corporate comedy hijinks take the main BLADE RUNNER stage. In flashback land, there’s a saboteur on board, ooh, blasting bits of the spaceship into the cosmos.
   I’m surprised the alien didn’t just turn to the camera and ask the audience what the fuck it was doing here. In Michael Caine’s accent.
   You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.
   It’s one of those TV shows. If you can’t work out which of these characters we are meant to care for, root for the alien.
   Am I meant to care for Mark Musk Elon Zuckerberg and his obsession with Battle Angel Alita Wendy Darling? I’d have preferred a woman in the role of the trillionaire. Blonde. With a roll-neck sweater and a fixation over Steve Jobs.
   Her company, being in the ALIEN universe, has to be called Theranos Thanatos. I still wouldn’t care about the character, but there’d be far more scope for comedy. Yes, it’s true. I’ve watched these episodes, and…I only care about the original alien. Neglected. Ignored. Forgotten. Sliced up. Missing in action. And then lit brightly in a fucking fish tank.
   When we reach episode five and a flashback containing some xenomorph action, we are treated to microwaved leftovers from an earlier cinematic experience. A flurry of half-hearted positive reviews out there in the dark all mutter out of the side of the mouth when declaring…
   You know, we’ve had worse out of this franchise.
   And so on. This is, at heartless heart, The Emperor’s New Skinsuit. The only thing connecting ALIEN to BLADE RUNNER is the director who used similar production techniques and items in both films.
   So why turn this ALIEN TV show into BLADE RUNNER by another name? Yes, it has been strangely watchable. I could be at the top of a skyscraper, on the corner, looking down on a police chase on Fucked Up Street…while a petrol tanker’s brakes fail over on Beyond All Recognition Avenue.
   Strangely watchable. And there’s nothing I can do about it except look away. But I look. Would this show reach physical media? Disney releases are patchy and unpredictable, that way. Would I buy a 4K set? No. This is one…and very done.
   There are loads of ALIEN and PREDATOR films out there that I didn’t buy. I’m pretty sure I didn’t even watch a bunch of the PREDATOR ones. ALIEN should never have been a franchise. Luckily, HIGHLANDER was never a franchise. Fortunately, THE MATRIX was a one-off. And INDIANA JONES. A trilogy, thank fuck.
   BACK TO THE FUTURE stuck to the plan. No more movies after the third one. Sadly, over my dead body might apply here once Zemeckis hangs up his director’s hat for the very last time. No one is going to remake that story with the main character as Marsha McFly. The crush sub-plot was icky enough with Marty.
   (Also, technically, the main character in BACK TO THE FUTURE is the most important time traveller – the dog.)
   What of ALIEN: THE WILDERNESS YEARS as a franchise? Battle Angel Wendy. FAUX RUNNER. Do Androids Dream of Monsters Under the Bed? I should go on, but you get the point. Oh, very well. ASLAN VERSUS ALIEN VERSUS PREDATOR VERSUS CALVIN AND HOBBES: MA’AM, THIS IS A WENDY’S. Now I’m done.
   We have Wendy the snake-charmer or The Alien Whisperer. I suspect a lot of the show is going nowhere. And no more is this evident than in episode six. The Fluff. It’s an episode about padding and nothing much going on. If that.
   Once more, we question basic lab techniques. No one should be alone in the lab. And the aliens should all really have a lab each. Think the show missed a trick, there. Each alien needs its own unique lab.
   Yes, give each lab a sense of character and an alien in it. At least then the show would have some character. But no, we’ll keep these lions in one room and in glass cases. Yes, if you were paying attention in the previous episodes that didn’t lull you to sleep, then you’d know there’s this other alien. Awaiting a slow tease of an appearance.
   And we get to the goods in this episode. Not worth the wait. The central plank of creating your superhero team, those lost boys and girls, is giving the audience synthetic characters who aren’t affected by the aliens. Creating synthetic characters. There’s an idea that’s a hostage to fortune.
   Superheroes aren’t affected by the aliens. Except…this is an ALIEN franchise offshoot, and so we’ll be fucking around with that expectation more than once. Battle Angel Wendy got into a tussle with an alien and lived to tell the tale. She’s all better now.
   In this episode, we see feeding time at the zoo go horribly wrong for a synthetic character we don’t have energy to care for. Dolly the sheep just sheeps in, fucks shit up, and sheeps some more.
   The Skullfucker Octoball in charge of the sheep is biding its time, playing tenth-dimensional chess, and shit. Oh no. The CGI fly eats wobots for bweakfast. For a top secret research facility, I notice the cameras on Fantasy Island become quite useless and unwatched when the plot demands this.
   Characters stumble around in and out of various situations. The Veronica Cartwright Veronica Cartwright character was damaged but she’s all better now. They gave her a mind-wipe, but didn’t warn anyone else on the island about not telling her that. So now she knows she had a mind-wipe after being told. Would have been better off with a facecloth and some mild soap.
   Inevitably, after much padding, and more fan service out of focus in the background, we reach the hugging of a face. And when this face was hugged, I found it hard not to laugh out loud. I half-expected the actor to start moonwalking, and I just couldn’t take it seriously.
   What’s that? The guy who was fired in this episode didn’t make it off the island? Instead he was dragged into one of those standard air vents large enough to fit several plot holes through? Explain why the secure lab needs a massive ALIEN AIR VENT™ at floor level. Or, indeed, at any level. Explain. Show your working.
   There were so many other ways to build up to SOME CHARACTER WE DON’T CARE ABOUT™ being hugged in the face by an alien. I say we take off and nuke the entire show from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
   Damn.
   It’s sad seeing the alien in a well-lit glass cage doing sweet fuck-all. Not an ALIEN moment. The same is true of the actress playing Lady Yutani. She finally gets her teeth into a scene. Regrettably, it’s a scene from a BLADE RUNNER show no one asked for.
   All the padding, all the waffle, questioning what it is to be human…the fluff belongs in another type of story. Is there a place for it here? There is. In small doses. But not as padding. So much for episode six, which, in the closing seconds, attempts to make the Skullfucker Octoball the star of this show.
   IT ISN’T.
   What stays with me in this episode? Pointlessness. There’s a talk about what Wendy will do. She could be family to her brother. But there are loftier goals. She should develop travel faster than the speed of light, and explore the universe. Wendy must make the right choice.
   Except…there’s nothing to stop her eternal self being family to her brother until he dies of old age. Then she can explore the universe after. She can have it all. It isn’t EITHER/OR. The show flounders arse-deep in too many moments like that.
   And then there was episode seven.
   Two of the Very Lost Boys lead their pal the scientist dude into the jungle. Basically, Lennie is being taken to see the rabbits. (Spoiler for another story.) The Peter Pan framework should have been referenced with a light touch. Too late for that. The whole show lumbers along, top-heavy with enforced symbolism.
   You’d be better off watching The Lost Boys. That’s a movie about rebellious Kiefer Sutherland being all rebellious and shit.
   The different spaghetti strands of storytelling veer off and converge just about as messily as you’d expect. Those behind the show have certainly seen the movie Predator. So it is time to throw in a bit of that in the jungle. But not too much, lest the show be accused of turning into Predator.
   Normally I’d say Wendy’s plan comes across as one of the worst plans in the history of science fiction television. But I can’t stop there. Wendy’s plan is one of the worst plans in the history of plans.
   I’ll release my tame alien as a distraction, so we can escape Fantasy Island.
   Again, we come back to this thing of the alien in a glass cage, sidelined by the shenanigans elsewhere. Characters queue up in slow motion, waiting for death. When death comes, it arrives with CGI rapidity.
   They know, making this show, that scenes of the alien escaping and killing lab techs in bright light…well, those scenes are just not going to cut it. So we’ll switch to the security cameras, for a more obscured look at the CGI tomfoolery.
   And so it goes, again, when in the jungle. An instant problem arrives. Soldiers. An instant fix arrives. Predator. The alien. This time the fight is in broad daylight, so we have to obscure our alien by using the bushes.
   Perhaps more than any other episode, this episode feels like it is about to (chest) burst into being a musical. Soldiers with bad timing turn up to miss the main event. Characters with no planning flit in and out of sight.
   It takes a very long forty minutes for Wendy, Veronica Cartwright Veronica Cartwright, and Communist Manifesto Guy from ANDOR to reach the boat, the boat, and we don’t even have Mr Roarke or Tattoo standing by to wave them farewell.
   There’s one episode to watch. Before it airs, I wonder what it sets up. This whole show is about a mission to bring alien samples back for study. But even that mission was off the back of an earlier unseen sequence in which a whole bunch of people died. We were told this.
   So we may yet see another prequel. Where are we, by episode seven? Number of deaths so far? Don’t care. Number of characters worth caring about? Don’t care. Trillionaire-ism is bad. Corporations are bad. People are no better. Just bet on the alien for the win.
   What else didn’t I care about on the show? Screens. They flashed up with information on the aliens. We live in a TV age of visuals that are clear enough. You can pause the data dumps and read snippets of what the aliens are all about.
   And I just didn’t care. We’re told about the Skullfucker Octoball. And we’re told about the really fucking boring plant thing. I’m waiting on the base being overrun by plants when the inevitable fire/explosion sequence kicks in. And then the killer plant can really go to work. Presuming it crawls into a handy ventilation shaft where it can survive the fire/explosion.
   No, I didn’t care about the text screens. They could have flashed Surprised in the Butt by Ripley’s Xenomorph Lover: a Chuck Tingle Dinosaur Romance on one of those screens for all the difference those screens made.
   And so. To episode ate eight. The scenewy’s pwetty. Be vewy vewy quiet. I’m hunting humans wabbits humans wabbits for a story. We go a li’l bit Predator, a li’l bit country, a li’l bit rock ’n’ roll, and a bit Terminator 2.
   Two Terminator machines go at it in a lab, in a rather inconsequential fight…in an inconsequential episode. This is the last episode in the show, and I expected the deaths to mount up. Instead, we had a whole lot of nothing.
   Okay. There were deaths. Soldiers, on the island, dying under the alien’s teeth and claws. Don’t forget the tail. There’s a good story here, stumbling through the ruins of other stories. I can see what they were trying to go for. Alas…
   The entire episode does, indeed, act as set-up for the next series. I expected a whole bunch of characters to die. You have practically the whole bunch in a room. One bomb and it is done. But no.
   Yutani doesn’t even get to phone in her performance here. She’s flashed up on the screen as a reminder of her existence. There was so much noodling around, too much padding, for the late arrival of her army to make a difference.
   That army should have arrived earlier in the story, full force, with chaos the result. Chaos in which the monsters get to feed. Here’s an idea. In the future, just have jail cells that are locked the old-fashioned way. With a physical key. Don’t operate the cages by electricity.
   It’s the dumbest thing. All the creatures, and the other prisoners in this narrative, are locked in electrically-powered jails. What if the power goes? There’s a back-up. What if the back-up goes? NOTHING. The fucking doors stay locked, you cunts!
   Wait. Let me tell you how I really feel.
   Welcome to Fantasy Island. What’s the plot? THE BLACK HOLE. That’s the hole the story fell into. At least the robots on that Disney production were amusing. Welcome to Fantasy Island. But, hey. The scenewy is pwetty.
   Everyone is in a rush to be the next model, rendering the last model obsolete. That notion does a few handstands and backflips as characters manoeuvre around each other…to no great effect.
   The Peter Pan stuff sputtered out episodes ago. Boy Genius isn’t Peter Pan. He’s a symbolic coded fictional watercolour painting of Elon Musk refusing to accept an autistic trans daughter. Misunderstood. He’s misunderstood. And irritating. We don’t even get his plan out of his lips.
   He sends the minds of children into artificial bodies. They’ll have access to the whole of human learning. And they can then improve the process so that adult minds can transfer into human bodies. That’s when Elon Zuckerberg makes his move. But that isn’t even a plot here.
   There’s a movie worth watching to reach a conclusion about the handling of the Boy Genius in this show…
   The Dirty Dozen. In that film, one of the dozen is the character you love to hate. You cannot wait for Archer Maggott to die. When’s he getting shot? That’s Archer Maggot’s story right there.
   And so it should be with the Boy Genius. He serves no purpose beyond being set up as an evil doll-figure who is bitch-slapped by an alien at just the right time. Boy Genius deserves to be on the way out by episode three.
   Even that Veronica Cartwright Veronica Cartwright character, who appeared to die in episode seven, made it back for episode eight. The two mad scientists assisting the Boy Genius are still in play by the end of this show. And, spoiler, one of them is dead.
   Adrian Edmondson, as some sort of cybernetic Odd Job henchman, minus the bowler hat, is still ticking along merrily by the end as well.
   Yes, the killer plant finally makes its move, and this is as underwhelming as you’d expect. That played out like a random encounter with a Dungeons & Dragons monster in a killer dungeon.
   All dungeons are killer dungeons, whether science fiction or fantasy. In this killer dungeon, though, the usual suspects make it through. It’s almost as though there’s some evil hidden agenda. An evil corporate agenda. To produce another series.
   You had one job, television. One job. To make sure the alien would kill a whole lotta people (and synthetics) in a show that sidelined the alien in favour of letting a whole lotta people (and synthetics) live. The final episode could’ve done with being a bit more final.
   This TV show sounds a bit like an earlier spin-off. ALIEN: EARTH isn’t a comic book series. ALIENS: EARTH WAR is. I enjoyed the raw energy of those comic book stories. This TV blip has a hard task, true…
   There shouldn’t be a franchise, yet there is. So what’s the problem? Trade on the original story. Add something new. Avoid fan service. Remember when? We fucking do. Stop reminding us.
   We want the familiar, but it must be different. Advance on it. But not too different. So you won’t satisfy any audience. There are people out there in deep space, declaring there is only one ALIEN movie. There certainly shouldn’t be two television shows.
   We don’t need to see Ian Holm’s acting dug up from the vaults in some nonsensical scene. (I know I’ve seen that travesty, but I refused to believe it.) If you must give us something, give us something of substance. Evil Trillionaire Boy Genius could have experimented on the alien and realised that – if you solve the acid problem – then the alien blood might cure cancer.
   That would be a better twist than anything, everything, on this show. Was there a scrap of merit? Discovering the lost boys and girls had their own graveyard on Fantasy Island. Aaaaaand…that was about it.
   Imagine watching a TV show and then turning to Mark Verhieden’s comic books for something bright, fiery, and with its own peculiar atmosphere. Those comics had the same hard task. Give us more of the same, but not too samey. Verhieden was allowed to use the characters of Newt and Hicks…
   Until a shitty movie sequel came along and killed them off. Then the names were changed to protect the indifferent. They were changed back for the collected editions.
   So, yes, there was a bit of fan service in the comic books. But Verhieden tried to give us the atmosphere of an ALIEN story. Not a BLADE RUNNER one or a TERMINATOR one. Or Peter Pan with robots thrown in.
   The television show feels sterile. Airless. Unloved. It feels unwatched even as you watch it, and that’s no good. My view, after watching? I turned to the comic books for a better experience.
   What surprised me? That I watched every episode. Please. For fuck’s sake. Don’t make a second show.

EMPTY STAR WARS TELEVISION: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

There is no spoon, and there never was one. Second and third spoons need not apply. (Plays ROGUE ONE soundtrack in the background. That’s not commentary or subtext. ROGUE ONE has its faults, its high points: I just chose a soundtrack at semi-random.)
   Fans of THE ACOLYTE …look away, now. If you enjoy the show, enjoy it while looking away from this area.
   Where to begin with a non-show in which nothing much happens? Nothing much happens. That’s a non-spoiler non-alert. I was waiting for the show to start when it reached its predictable end in episode eight.
   THE ACOLYTE. We need a bit of background. Not much. This show is set in a galaxy that’s long ago and, oh, so far away. I fell in love with you before the second show. (Shout out to Darth Coolidge, Darth Bramlett, Darth Russell, and Darth Carpenter for the song tie-in.)
   That’s true. STAR WARS is my thing. But I didn’t fall in love with THE ACOLYTE before the second show. Typically, almost a law for Disney STAR WARS, the TV show dropped with more than one episode on release day. And it kept on dropping.
   Spoiler. I didn’t fall in love with THE ACOLYTE after the second show. By the eighth, I wondered if I’d just seen the first zero-content TV series connected to STAR WARS. You may argue that other zero-content shows preceded this one. Who am I to stand in your way…
   To the deep space background, then. STAR WARS gives us a story about the Jedi: interplanetary hippie peaceniks who will, on occasion, dish out death-pain with big sticks of buzzy light.
   The Jedi are in decline, all but extinct, roundly beaten up, and stomped down by the Sith – enemies of all the good things Jedi believe in. A once great Galactic Republic turned into an Evil Empire™ overnight. With a little help from Sith operating in the shadows, you understand.
   Yes, the Jedi are done. But it’s time to fight back. And so, we get STAR WARS movies. At first, three of them. And the word Sith isn’t mentioned once. The actor Don Henderson says the word in a deleted scene from the first movie. I find the lack of its inclusion disturbing.
   Later, that first movie became episode four. And we had three more movies set before it. Easy as 1, 2, 3. Except, there’s a spin-off that links episode three to episode four: ROGUE ONE. That makes it episode four, even though it has ONE in the title, and the first movie that became episode four is now the fifth film in the series.
   To watch them in order, that’s 1, 2, 3, ROGUE ONE, 4, 5, and 6. I have them in 4K and still can’t bring myself to watch 7, 8, and 9 again. It’s going to take an effort. I feel they have to follow on from all the other movies, and that’s a hell of a binge.
   There’s another spin-off with the character Han Solo. That should be after 3 and before ROGUE ONE. It sits off to the side.
   No one counts those Ewok movies. On television, there are many many episodes of spin-off shows. They flit in and out of the main history. Basically, the primary space thrust of the timeline is…
   Okay, 4, 5, and 6 tell the story. Then 1, 2, and 3 fill in the gaps BEFORE. The concept of BEFORE is important. Jump back around a hundred years before the movie series to the televisual time of THE ACOLYTE. The evil Empire does not yet exist. There are no Sith, and there haven’t been any Sith for a long time, a long time.
   The Jedi preside over the Republic as peacekeepers. Cops. Space Samurai. You get the idea. Oh, and there are no Sith. Did I mention a complete lack of Sith? This is what the Republic believed. Before the Dark Times…before Darth Lucas sold the property.
   But they were all of them deceived. For another ring was made.
   Hang on…wrong saga.
   Everyone was deceived. If the Jedi are Space Samurai, and they are, then the Sith are interplanetary spies. Robbers. Space Ninja. You get the idea.
   I’d never heard of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. On this side of the Atlantic there’s the Health and Safety Executive. HSE is also a virus that’ll fuck you up. It’s nasty.
   Anyway, I think HSE looks like just the right sort of name for a Sith character. Greetings, Darth Hse. And you brought the ruins of the battle-droid, I see. Your little joke. We Sith are known for our humour, after all.
    Insert EVIL CACKLE™ there.
   But THE ACOLYTE went with Osha instead. She’s all about health and safety in the workplace. This isn’t generally true of STAR WARS. The saga is full of high walkways with no safety barriers or railings. It’s a science fiction scandal. I’ve asked fellow delegate Binks to arrange emergency powers in the Senate. That should fix a lot of upward mobility problems.
   So. This television show is STAR WARS way before STAR WARS. That’s been done. There’s a whole prequel trilogy covering old ground, remember. But this goes way back before all that. It’s an even longer time ago in the same galaxy we’ve seen already. Before the before.
   If the Republic is doing well, and it’ll be a Republic for a science fiction lifetime yet, then what are the stakes in a story set in the deeper past? Where’s the risk? Can you point me in the direction of the drama? So many options here. Let’s not go with a limiting choice…oh.
   There’ll be Jedi. And they will investigate criminal stuff. Not the regular crime beat. The tough cases. Crime Scene Investigation: Scum and Villainy. But what are the stakes, though? Where’s the conflict? Will we see any operatic drama in our Space Opera? (There is no conflict.)
   This is a hundred years before STAR WARS. You aren’t going to change history, here. Yes, made-up STAR WARS history, but, y’know, still history. We are going to see the Jedi investigate things. Don’t quite know what.
   And there will be Sith. Except that there aren’t any Sith.
   Shock horror, the Sith were around the whole time. Lurking. Skulking. Sneaking. Gollum wasn’t sneaking! Er…maybe he was, after all. We’ll get to that bit.
   Okay. We know from STAR WARS movies that, near the end of the Republic, Sith haven’t been seen for AGES. True story. From a certain point of view. We have the word of the cone-headed Jedi. So it must be true. I searched for cone-head Jedi to reach video clips confirming this.
   If a STAR WARS character in a STAR WARS movie isn’t named aloud in a STAR WARS movie, any name attached to the character is only listed in the closing credits to plug the merchandise related to that character. A tale of many action figures. That’s an old song. If lucky, the character is named eventually on film, somewhere down the line.
   A world-weary view, you say. I don’t make the merchandising contracts.
   Ki-Adi-Mundi, Mr Cone-head, tells us the Sith have been extinct for a millennium. He does this in a movie. His emphasis on the timespan is irrelevant. There was a time when the Dodo had been extinct for five minutes. Dodo ain’t coming back unless someone pulls some Jurassic Park shit with…actual preserved Dodo shit and questionable midichlorian sperm samples.
   Once the Empire is a thing, the Imperials go around announcing the Jedi are all but extinct. Everyone keeps messing this up when considering absent enemy forces. We haven’t seen any. They are clearly dead. Most sincerely dead, as averred by the coroner. What’s the point?
   The point is this. In STAR WARS history, the Sith are gone. They were hiding. The Sith agents make a surprising return and create an Evil Empire™ out of confusion and chaos. So far, so good...concerning the bad.
   And so…in the before the before part of this history, back a hundred years you go into television land, you have a problem.
   In THE ACOLYTE, way before the Dark Times, before the Empire, you can’t throw Sith into the story that’s set ages before all the upheaval. UNLESS. You show Sith skulking in the shadows, being Space Ninja Bastards. (This gets too literal at the end of the show, when Gollum turns up and does a bit of sneaking.)
   What if the bad guys are discovered? As a writing choice, you must then wipe out all the good guys who discover the bad guys. This is a basic building block of any story you attempt to tell in that manner, just to preserve the (made-up) history.
   Reminder of that history. The Sith were destroyed. Then they turned up and created an Empire of pure EVIL. They used the element of surprise to plan a load of shit, before they were discovered too late to stop huge events already long in motion.
   Setting a story before they arrive on the scene is okay…as long as no one knows they’ve arrived on the scene way before.
   Just do Ninja Missions. Have close calls and dramatic escapes under the distracted eyes of the pesky Space Samurai. Make the show heavy on the viewpoint of the Sith. It’s about the baddies as the main characters. Yes. Do that.
   Setting the story BEFORE the other bit BEFORE, you have one job. If anyone spots a villain wearing a Sith label, no one gets out alive. Job done. Can you make it entertaining, though? Please make it about the characters. Conflict. Drama. Upset. Sacrifice.
   Lights. Camera. Inaction.
   Our story opens in the closing seconds of episode eight. That’s my view. Episode eight is a set-up for another series. That’s all it could be. So I thought. And it was, when it arrived. That’s what I found predictable. Not the only problem. But, yes, that.
   Never make your show into a trailer for the next show. That’s liable to get the first show cancelled, so there is no second show. The main symptom of this diseased error is a primary story clearly in the captivity of the secondary story you haven’t told yet. Nor will you tell it, thanks to the symptom of story weakness spread across your meandering tale.
   Part of the problem is this: I want an hour of STAR WARS TV so you can develop characters I could care about. But the longest episode is listed at 49 minutes. Then we knock off the opening titles, recaps, and apocalyptic levels of end credits…
   Okay. You made it shorter. Go for the unexpected bonus. The erosion of screen-time should give us a slam-bang science fiction serial jam-packed into a half-hour serialised format, right? Think Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers. Hell, I’d take King of the Rocket Men in a pinch.
   Give me chapters full of Plunging Death, Dangerous Evidence, High Peril, and throw in a Molten Menace or a spot of Ten Seconds to Live for good measure. Republic Pictures would repackage these super-short efforts into longer features. I’d take Republic Pictures over the Republic depicted in this STAR WARS TV story, any day of the week.
   Nothing is going to happen. In the trailer we see a masked figure with a red lightsabre facing a Lone Jedi Dude. So. There’s your Sith and Jedi problem in the trailer…
   If you preserve even a hint of STAR WARS by staying true to previous movies set long after this moment in history, if you hope to save the basic integrity of the overall saga, then as storytellers, as TV writers…
   You do so by silencing those characters who witness the mere existence of the masked figure with the red lightsabre. Rocks fall. Everyone dies.
   STAR WARS never cared too much about continuity, scientific accuracy, or avoiding holes in the plot. But we’re talking about a basic bitch chunk of storytelling here. What do we know about this deep past? Nothing. Surprise us. But to connect it to the movies, you must deal with this Sith problem if you show Sith waving Sith weapons around.
   You could have done a story set in the past all about smugglers. No Jedi. And no Sith. Or maybe hints that some people are Sith. Make it a crime/spy story, in space. Test loyalty. Pull the rug out from under the characters. No blasters! Well, no. Loads of blasters. No lightsabres.
   Crime/spy story in space. No Jedi. As far as we know. But ANDOR, hell that’s been done.
   The Sith aren’t there at all, even if they are there. This is how we roll. Beyond preserving that, what do you have? Little, unless you stray from the usual Jedi tales. The stakes, then, are murky.
   Keep the hidden existence of the Sith hidden. That’s it. And so it goes. Phew, that was a close one. After a hell of a high-wire walk, we did it. Spread over eight episodes. We made it. All the way to the end. Which is more than a lot of the audience did. We made it. One job. Success. Until near the end of episode eight and…
   For fuck’s sake. You had one job. Over eight episodes.
   Ah, the episodes…
   They barely pass half an hour of TV each. In at least one case, we were offered just under half an hour. I checked once. Once was enough.
   So, essentially, we’re looking at what amounts to four episodes that run for an hour each. And even looking at that level of the equivalent of two movies, you still ask where the money went. It didn’t turn up on the TV screen.
   Short episodes. And yet, they drag. There is no unexpected bonus of cramming loads of action into a brief episode. The opporchancity is frittered away. Instead, there’s this faffery about hiding the Sith. And little else, beyond the tinny jangling of well-worn keys.
   Keeping the Sith secret could have worked. Maybe it all worked for you. That’s your business, not mine. I wish you well. If the focus of the show had been with the Sith from the start, and the relentless threat of discovery at every turn…then you’d have had tension.
   We’d be on the side of the Sith as they hide out. Almost uncovered. Maybe uncovered, but they laugh it off or throw down some ruse. Hell, I’d be up for a Sith sacrifice to preserve the secret. Would’ve been something.
   Darth Carbonara was awesome. Using those funky moon boots to walk up the walls of the doomed space station as it fell from orbit, I thought she’d jump to the Jedi ship at the last second.
   But leaping into space and taking her secret lightsabre with her, burning up in the atmosphere, was a legendary sacrifice.
   Cue twenty YouTube videos on how Darth Carbonara survived the freefall using her Sith Skillz, based on the type of lightsabre she wielded and a half-remembered bit of advice on attuning to your surroundings she picked up from the deathbed of her old master.
   Instead, we had this series with no content. If you liked the show, you liked the show. Not my business.
   Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.
   Spoiler. It was really sad when Jedi #4 and Jedi #5 died to preserve the integrity of admittedly shaky STAR WARS lore. Maybe they were Jedi #5 and Jedi #6. Let’s not trivialise that. Just as sad, really. Whoever they were.
   #TRULYMISSED.
   #GONEBUTNOTFORGOTTEN.
   #TOTALLYFORGOTTEN.
   #IFNOTICEDATALL.
   #SADFACE.
   #SUPPORTTHECHANNEL.
   #BUYMEACOFFEE.
   #UTINNI!
   Here’s the basic tale. Jedi are being hunted. The trailer tells us so. This is a problem with STAR WARS: dialogue is often indirect. The passive statement tells you the Jedi are being hunted. An active statement comes across as dramatic. Someone is hunting Jedi. Hell, now I am interested in someone hunting these Jedi.
   It turns out there are these two sisters. Identical twins, by the look of them. One grows her hair longer, we’ll say. She has a cult tattoo, as well. Covered by her longer hair. Cults feature heavily in the story.
   I feel remiss in not having mentioned Basil the Space Beaver. He’s a merchandising gimmick.
   Once upon a time, on a planet far away, several years ago, there was a cult. That cult was steeped in the lore of the Dark Side of the Force. This is the magical mystical religious scientific stuff that gives Jedi and Sith access to mad funky space powers.
   Too lazy to pick up that coffee cup from across the room? Use the force and levitate the damned drink to you. Communicate across space using telepathic interplanetary Skype calls. And so on.
   Right now, the story is about someone who wants revenge against a particular group of Jedi over an incident that happened sixteen years before. So, in the flashback scenes I guess we’re 116 years before STAR WARS.
   Yikes.
   We’ll get there. Basically, the Jedi turned up years ago and mishandled a mission to recruit two young girls who were very strong with the Force. One twin sister died. For reasons of drama and action, we learn both sisters survived.
   Cue Darth Vader muttering about a twin sister. On second thought, nah, forget that.
   The “dead” sister went off to train with a Sith Dude. And the living sister went to train with the Jedi. It didn’t work out at Jedi HQ. She left the Jedi to become a member of some kind of galactic repair team. Your spaceship is still under warranty and she, Osha, turns up to fix the broken thing.
   Osha has a cute robot that’s a merchandising opporchancity.
   Someone is going around flat-out murdering Jedi fools. She looks like Osha. Therefore, she is Osha. It isn’t long before the Galactic Cops go after Osha. But there must be a better explanation for this. Surely Osha’s Evil Twin™ is still alive and she’s the killer…
   Come on. That’s too obvious. Osha must be the killer. Take her in for questioning.
   I should introduce a spoiler for The Matrix…
   There’s only one Matrix movie. Thank me later. Second and third spoons need not apply. There sure as fuck isn’t a fourth one. Spoiler alert. In The Matrix, Trinity – actress Carrie-Anne Moss – gets into a bonkers fight right there at the start of the movie. She’s trapped in a room.
   Then she’s off and running. She is up against supervillainous agents: Men in Black™. Dramatic shit. She hurtles herself across the rooftops...only to face what looks like certain death.
   EXCEPT. That’s part of the plot. To understand what The Matrix is you really just have to see it for yourself. Or watch videos online, explaining it, I guess.
   Now. Imagine you want to start THE ACOLYTE on a high. Carrie-Anne Moss gets herself into this Trinity-style fight. It’s Carrie-Anne Moss. With a fucking lightsabre. Well, hell, Jeeves, sign me up to that shit.
   And now imagine the start of The Matrix, but Trinity doesn’t make it out of the room alive. Bummer. That’s what we are treated to. And you can hear the committee it took to make this TV show squealing into their ersatz coffees…
   That means, right from the start, no one is safe.
   NO ONE IS SAFE. They tell us that in the fucking trailer. I know no one is safe. Anyone who catches a glimpse of the Sith must die. Of all the stories to go with, you went with a severely limiting tale.
   You gave us Carrie-Anne Moss for a fight knowingly referencing The Matrix, and she dies? This show cost a fortune. You couldn’t pay her for more than that?! Spoiler alert for THE ACOLYTE.
   There’s a whole thing about flashbacks. We’ll be seeing more of Carrie-Anne Moss later in the show and earlier in the timeline. More flashbacks. Too many flashbacks. In one case the flashback-too-far, what else to call it, serves as an extended recap of previous episodes for people who have the attention-span of no attention-span.
   We view what should be a great set-up. Someone is hunting Jedi. So we’ll bring in a character who follows the trail. The good sister. Osha. Your sister is hunting Jedi. It’s revenge for how you were all treated sixteen years ago on that far-off planet with the pretty tree.
   There’s a planet with a pretty tree.
   We see subtitles telling us the names of these planets. Unless you are on an UNKNOWN WORLD. If it’s an unknown world, how did anyone know to go there, or give it a subtitle? Well, the world was so unknown that they didn’t know it was an unknown world: kinda sorta blundered across it. But the subtitle droid stepped in and plastered letters across the screen.
   The planetary subtitles are never explained. Do they have to be? No. But they are bound to be used in YouTube videos telling you why every dead character in STAR WARS secretly survived to come back as a Jedi/Sith or the Bendy Jesuit from the DUNE movies.

KID VADER: I hate sand.

Osha should be the ideal candidate to lead the team in search of Mae, her twin sister. Or I should say “twin” sister. Maybe I should say “twin sister” instead. What would be better than having Osha leading the charge against evil forces?
   Oh, I don’t know. Maybe skip this storyline and show elements of the Republic going after smugglers and scoundrels and rascals, and the like. Show that there are evil factions operating from the shadows, as a precursor to the Empire that’s on the way. Robot armies. Early clone technology. Space werewolves. Hell, at this point I’d accept FINDING SPACE NEMO.
   STAR WARS is A Disney property. I thought we’d be in for an identity switch along the lines of FREAKY FRIDAY. Instead, another Disney production loomed into view: THE PARENT TRAP.
   Fuck, you’d get more mileage out of TWINS OF EVIL, and that’s a Hammer movie about identical twins. One’s a vampire. The other isn’t. Yes, it’s absolute nonsense.
   But you’d be better spending your cinematic time in the company of Jodie Foster on a Friday, Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills trapping some parents, or the Collinson sisters maybe kinda sorta being evil twins, as you’d expect from their movie’s title…
   The big problem with THE ACOLYTE is the reluctance of the twin characters to get involved. If only at least one of them went off on a damn-fool idealistic crusade…
   Your character can refuse the mission at the start. In the first (fourth) STAR WARS film, Luke Skywalker is interested in the idea of taking action. But when he’s presented the choice, he turns that offer down. Then the plot gets in his way and he’s all fired up for adventure. He goes off to the wars out there in the stars.
   But THE ACOLYTE…gives us identical characters who don’t want to travel the path on offer. Spoiler alert. The good one is tempted to the bad path and the bad one is tempted to the good path.
   You see the obvious identity-switch coming from light years away. It ain’t no spoiler. There’s a whole cast of characters, but I’m trying to keep this blog post down in size. Something below the length of a Space Slug.
   Yes, the Jedi are Space Cops. And they have a Space Cop Cadet along for the ride. She’s all about restoring public order and arresting people and clapping cuffs on wrists and taking names.
   On the way to grandmother’s house in the woods, she glimpses a Sith. We’re going to need a bigger spoiler. I should say something about Obvious Bad Guy. How does that go? Obvious Bad Guy is Obvious. What do you call a Plot Twist that runs in a straight line? You don’t call it a fucking Plot Twist, that’s for sure.
   And I have to reference Admiral Ackbar. This fish guy turns up for the defeat of the Empire at the end of the main saga. When not realising it’s a trap or concentrating all firepower on that Super Star Destroyer, he’s a pretty chill dude. A late arrival to the movies, he’s there at the end and that counts for a lot.
   Except…the saga goes on for a few more movies beyond the end. He’s there once more, out of retirement, I guess, for one last hurrah against a new generation of villains.
   Admiral Ackbar dies so fast that you blink and miss it. His death might as well be off-screen for all the difference this makes. There then follows a tragic announcement that he’s gone.
   Not dead. Gone. To the shops, perhaps, for…whatever intergalactic fish guys go shopping for. A space vape. I dunno. Anyway. To casually dismiss a character in an off-screen death, or near as damn it, is to Admiral Ackbar someone.
  With this in mind, I’ll turn to the Wookiee Jedi. Holy flying fuckballs, there’s a Wookiee Jedi. And the Sith Chippendale is sure to hunt him down. This is going to be fucking awesome.
   Wookiee is hiding out in the woods, in his fucking element, while the villain closes in, all Sithed up with no place to go. The clash is going to be absolutely fucking awesome. You’ll see a Wookiee Jedi go full-on prime-fucking-eval on this Sith Bastard and you…
   You fucking wha?!
   Wha?
   Seriously. Wha the fu?
   Did the story just…Admiral Ackbar the Wookiee fucking Jedi?!
   What’s the point? The point is the point of a lightsabre that slashed the Wookiee while he was sitting in his chair. Outstanding action scene of the decade goes to…well, not to that fight, obviously. Off-screen bullshit.
   There’s a lot of cape-flapping, key-jangling, lightsabre-ism, and the truly awful resurrection/reassembly of lines from better STAR WARS products. Ooh, the character said the thing. Wait, saying the thing in that context is absurd. Don’t worry. Another thing will come along shortly, and someone will say that.
   (No, I am not touching that fucking abysmal ALIEN movie, Crapulous, and its recycled mangled characters and recycled mangled lines. Get away from the franchise, you bitch. I prefer the term artificial sequel, myself.)
   Money? I was stunned to learn the average cost of an episode was almost $29 million dollars. And I struggle to see where the money went on the television screen. The huge event in this show is the arrival of the Jedi chorus line in the woods. Need to talk to that Wookiee.   Oh, too late. Killed off-screen in your chair, watching the Twi’lek formation swimming event on the Galactic Olympics. Farewell, Wookiee Jedi. You will be remembered. Who the fuck am I kidding? His name was…
   Toast.
   Everyone is sad. Then the Sith Dudebroguy turns up. Masked, of course. He looks like a serial killer from a slasher movie. Then he sparks up his red lightsabre and the battle is on.
   He’s there to kill all of the Jedi. Any of these Jedi could remember, from training, that the Sith used to be around back in the day and they had red lightsabres. So the Sith are back in town. Except, in the woods.
   Which means…
   Everyone who fights in the woods must die. They can’t report to Jedi HQ that the Sith are back in town, the Sith are back in town. Shout out to Darth Lynott for the musical reference.
   I don’t want to dwell on the cost of an episode and a bunch of unknown Jedi weaving in and out of the woods…but they’d have achieved the same effect filming in a park at night, waving neon tubes around.
   One by one, and sometimes two by two, the Jedi fall to the Sith. And this works. So keep doing this. Wipe out all those who know. You’ve destroyed any hope of suspense, but, hey, you have one job in telling this story. Everyone who realises the bad guy has a red lightsabre…everyone dies.
   What about Space Cop Cadet Blondie? They wouldn’t dare kill off the blonde…if you believe that, I have a Hitchcock movie to sell you.
   After much faffery, we follow Lone Jedi Dude from the trailer, back on the ship and heading off to fix things. And the writing comes in and smacks the story up the side of its fool head. I hate it when the writing comes in and does that to a tale.
   Sadly, the interplanetary telephone isn’t working. It can’t work. Mustn’t work. If a Jedi survives the slaughter, which he does, then he can’t fly back to HQ or even phone home like Spielberg’s Extra-Plastic-Terrestrial.
   You see how tied to the concept the whole narrative is. No deviation. Can’t avoid it, swerve, stumble over, or dodge. The Jedi Team died a fucking death. Leaving this guy to inevitably go up against the Sith Dude once more…and die in the process...later.
   For a whole bunch of characters set on running away, they spend an awful lot of time stopping in the middle of a chase. It’s a thing. A whole thing. But I never got around to the music…
   Heavy spoiler. Come on, you’ve seen clips on the internet. Is there a place for songs in STAR WARS movies or TV shows? Yes. There are musical numbers. Aliens playing in the cantina band back in episode…four. And Jabba’s Palace hosts a musical number in episode…six.
   Is there a place for musical numbers in AGATHA ALL ALONG…yes. That works. It’s riffing off The Wizard of Oz musical. But the musical bit in this STAR WARS show just reinforced the cult theme. You see, kids, the Jedi and the Sith are all about recruiting powerful youngsters to their respective causes. And that narrative paints all sides as horrible.
   The grand notion of a flawed yet benevolent Republic, with its ancient order of magical guardians, the Jedi, is shot down in flames, painting the Jedi as little more than a step removed from being child-enslavers. Or worse.
   Yep. That’s the heavy hint in the narrative.
   Remember this, if nothing else. No one killed STAR WARS. It is still there, on my shelf, ready to watch whenever I feel like it. Even if Disney takes it off the streaming service for eternity.
   I didn’t make it past the first episode of that Willow TV show. And it is gone. Show needed a sense of urgency. More urgent than the one Disney provided. The original movie shares a lot of midichlorians DNA with STAR WARS.
   Plucky adventurers. Mad characters. Encroaching evil. Not a Darth Vader character, honest, guv. And not an Evil Royal behind it all. Madmartigan isn’t Han Solo and he doesn’t fall in love with the princess who happens to be the daughter of the evil one.
   So that’s okay, then. No, the show wasn’t urgent enough. But to kill it off by removing it from the streaming service. Now I know who really fired that shot at the start of Bambi.
   Spoiler alert for Bambi and Finding Nemo. There will be blood. Anyway, look at that interesting thing over there…
   I don’t want to take this over ten pages, so let’s skip to the very end. Ultimately, why can’t we all just get along? There are Sith to fight, that’s why. We reach a point at which all of the Jedi who go up against the Sith…they are taken care of.
   Yes, they went to live on a nice moisture farm in the country. It’s too far to visit, out there by the Dune Sea. But Uncle Owen, the farmer, writes regularly to say everything is going to be okay. We’re all fine here, now, thank you. How are you?
   No, I didn’t mention the Jedi woman with the green skin and the laser-whip. Indiana Jones in Spaaaaaaaaaaaaaace. Turns out, she whipped the Sith Dudester when he was young, and left scars on his back. And she puts the whole mystery together like an episode of MURDER SHE WROTE on fucking steroids.
   There’s a heavy reference to shifting the Balance of the Force. We didn’t need that, or the idea that anyone else could be a pupil of mine, before he turned to evil. Sure, strip-mine scripts that are set in the future if it makes your typing sessions easier on the fingers. Understand, though, that I will hunt down the people who taught you how to read and write.
   But the context, mutter-mumble. Here is the green Jedi, who had an evil pupil thought dead. She discovers that her pupil is alive. He has to be Sith. So, remember, you have one job. Every Jedi who learns of the Sith must die, to preserve the fucking story.
   Instead, she lives, and she takes her peculiar problem to the head of the Jedi order…Yoda. We see a glimpse of Yoda here, and more of Yoda in later historical documentaries.
   That’s it, though, right there. Fucked up beyond all recognition. You did what you set out to do. Introduce Sith to Jedi for a lively session at the dance in the old barn. And that would have worked, if you’d killed all the Jedi who were up dancing.
   No. You had to go and do that bit at the end, where the green Jedi goes to reveal all to another green Jedi. And I have few words left, beyond raw expletives, at this point.
   Update. I should’ve said the Wookiee had a fight in a flashback, but the damage was done. He couldn’t die in the flashback. Just in the here and now, in a chair, watching synchronised Twi’leks aim for gold in the Space Olympics.
   Oh, and a character showed up, skulking in a cave. It was Gollum, looking for the One True Ring. But it fell through the TV cracks into another show that caused J.R.R. Tolkien’s rotating body to give off a high-pitched whine that fells birds on the wing to a distance of five miles out.
   THE ACOLYTE bows out disgracefully by plundering a scene from the end of another STAR WARS property, giving us the oddball hope that setting this show up for a sequel automatically killed off any chance of making a sequel.
   As for finding faults in ROGUE ONE, here’s a classic: they had Billie Lourd right there. Should have hired her to dress up as her mother instead of giving us CGI Carrie Fisher. If you haven’t seen ROGUE ONE, that’s a spoiler. I haven’t ruined it for you…merely prepared you for that moment.
   With the right hair, makeup, and costume, Billie Lourd would have served as younger stand-in for her mother long enough to make the scene work. Carrie Fisher looked like Debbie Reynolds and Billie Lourd resembles both of them. Why head down the Uncanny Valley™ of face replacement for so short a scene?
   Luckily, I am not in charge of making STAR WARS. Unluckily, it appears no one is. But that’s okay. No one killed STAR WARS. Right there, on my shelf, any old time I want to watch it. Don’t give in to hate. But, also, you don’t have to like sub-standard fiction.

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.

 It is a period of fragile peace in the New Republic. Sneaking away from endless politics, Senator Leia Solo plans to meet Jedi Master Luke Skywalker to finalise plans for a new and dynamic Jedi Fleet.
   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?