INDIANA JONES & THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL – steven spielberg – 3.8 / 10

Though it begins with a strange prologue where a bunch of kids in a Ford roadster race a group of GIs, once The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull gets going, it’s really really good for about fifteen minutes (maybe even twenty) and threatens to actually be about something. Of course, then the plot proper kicks in and everything goes downhill from there.

I had hoped, knowing a little about this film’s backstory and the idea that Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford had rejected George Lucas’s absurd notion that the fourth Indy film should be Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men From Mars, that everyone had come to their senses and realized that Indiana Jones hunting alien relics isn’t really the Indiana Jones people wanted to see. Even after the opening sequence that involves some artifacts from the Roswell crash in 1947, I held out hope, thinking that maybe this was a sop to Lucas and the rest of the film would be about something more Indy-esque.

But alas, it was not to be. No, Indiana Jones does indeed go after an alien relic in The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Not only that, he visits a whole alien city and sees a real life alien and its spaceship. And so the whole thing comes off, to my eyes at least, as a blatant cash grab by a bunch of people that really don’t have any need of that cash. Maybe they just like the attention.

And that’s really too bad because the first twenty minutes of the film show what might have been. In those twenty minutes, there’s a whole bunch of stuff about the Red Scare that swept America in the 50's and how a man like Indiana Jones could get caught up in that. There’s a terrific sequence set in a model town moments before it’s blown apart by a nuclear weapons test. And a wonderfully ominous shot of Indy standing in front of a mushroom cloud as the world as we knew it up until then suddenly changed.

That sequence and that shot are so portentous and so loaded with ideas that it takes a really dedicated hack to squander them. And sure enough, George Lucas is up to the task. Over the next bloated hour and a half, the film is overloaded with nonsense about crystal skulls that control minds, psychic Russians, capital-C crazy academics and flesh-eating ants. And the real flaw is that there is just so much talking about nothing that there’s no way for the film to develop any kind of propulsive energy or momentum. Even Spielberg, the master of the old-school chase sequence, can only do so much when between those chases are twenty minutes of people talking about nothing that ends up mattering in any way.

I can’t really say that I’m disappointed with this film because I didn’t expect all that much going in. But the first half hour so raised my hopes that the complete failure of the last two thirds of the film stings that much more. And as the final (completely ridiculous) scene played out, I started to understand those morons on the internet who yelp about George Lucas having raped their childhood because my hopes for this film had been similarly toyed with and then brutalized. Oh well, there’s always the Shia Lebeouf starring sequel to look forward to. (And anyone who doesn’t think we’ll be seeing that film in a few years is giving Lucas and Spielberg an awful lot of credit they have continually proved they do not warrant.)

INDIANA JONES & THE TEMPLE OF DOOM – steven spielberg – 1.9 / 10

Leaving aside Kate Capshaw’s howlingly anti-feminist portrayal of Willie Scott (as getting into that would enrage me much more than I feel like being enraged right now), the film has myriad problems from start to finish. First of all, what happens to Lao Che, the person who tried to kill Indiana in Shanghai at the start of the film? We never here from him again. Doesn’t he still want Jones dead? There’s no resolution there.

Then Jones, Willie and Short Round (another ridiculously offensive element of the film I’m not going to get into at the moment) end up in India. And when they meet a tribe of villagers, Jones asks for a guide to Delhi. But since he was asleep on the plane that took them into India, how does he know how close they are to Delhi? Maybe Delhi’s a thousand miles away. And why does the chief of the village speak English? Where did he learn it? (That last question is particularly interesting as the behind the scenes featurettes reveal that the actor that portrayed the village chef didn’t really speak English and was feed his lines off camera by Spielberg.)

Then there’s the nonsense with the blood that turns Indy into a crazed Thuggee warrior and the voodoo doll the Maharajah uses to inflict pain on Indiana. Leaving aside the fact that Hinduism (the Maharajah’s supposed religion) has nothing to do with voodoo, what point does all this mystical nonsense serve? The whole thing’s just really racist and completely tone deaf.

And why is this a (unacknowledged) prequel? The events in this film take place a year earlier than those of Raiders of the Lost Ark but for really no purpose. The Last Crusade takes place in 1938 because it has a major piece of the story set in the Republic of Hatay which only existed from 1937 to 1938. But the events of this film could have taken place any time during the 1930s. It’s just a weird, unexplained thing that this film comes before the first one.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK – steven spielberg – 8.6 / 10

Although it’s been rechristened Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark on the cover of the DVD, it’ll always be simply Raiders of the Lost Ark to me. I’ve seen this film almost ten times by now but every time I return to it I’m surprised by how good it is. Maybe that’s because of the less than stellar position Spielberg has in my estimation but then I suppose that would still be more my fault than his.

And to be sure it is easy to hate on this film. Because so much of what made it so intoxicating back in 1981 has been imitated and copied so many times since then that it’s easy to forget how unique the picture really was. The most duplicated element of the film must surely be the overall tone, more specifically the hero’s wry sense of humor in the face of life-threatening danger. This flippant manner, basically invented by Harrison Ford in Star Wars and perfected here, provided the template for the eighties action hero. Following in Indiana’s footsteps audiences were soon to be treated to John McClane, Cobra Cobretti, John Rambo, etc. on down to Vin Diesel’s XXX. And mostly because of these lesser imitators, this ironic detachment from the danger the hero faces has come to represent everything that was wrong with the action film in the eighties and nineties. But that’s not the fault of Raiders of the Lost Ark. And if you as a modern viewer can see past all that extratextual weight, you’ll be treated to a rare cinematic treat,

The most noteworthy plot element in this film is just how often (and consistently) Indiana Jones fails. In the opening sequence Indiana swipes a sacred idol from some South American jungle only to have it swiped by the evil Beloq. Once the plot proper begins, Indiana is responsible for the destruction of Marianne’s bar, loses her to the bad guys in Cairo, finds and loses the Ark in the desert and on a boat. Even at the climax of the film, Indiana fails. His ultimate victory comes when he is tied up to pole. It’s hardly the resounding victory you’d expect.

Although all the failures that have lead us to this final moment were fun and everything, this last “failure” does strike the wrong note. Maybe it's the modern perspective from which I'm writing about this film but the fact that the hero's triumph comes from doing absolutely nothing is pretty anticlimactic. In fact, it's really the only sour note in the whole film. Unfortunately it happens to come at the very end of the movie and thus can leave you thinking it wasn't as good as it really was. Maybe that's the reason I'm surprised by how good this film is every time I put it on.