Blu-ray Review: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Written by El Fangorio

This film sucks. I hate it. I gave it three chances: once in the theater on opening day, once at a drive-in, and this last time on Blu-ray. Each and every time, I hated it (with the drive-in being the most painless). And let me state for the record that I love the franchise almost as much as I love the Star Wars trilogy. I love them in the order that they were made (yes, Temple of Doom over Last Crusade; I am willing to fight over it) and find them pretty much flawless. Granted I was the perfect age for them but then so was everyone (parents included) and you would think that if Lucas and Spielberg decided that after 20 years, it was worth bringing Indy back, that it must have been for a hell of a good reason. Why did I think the man that used to be “George Lucas” (seriously, who is this hack imposter?) would be capable of pulling this off? He sucks. He takes great pleasure in taking something beloved and making it totally asinine. Did I mention yet how much this film sucks?

Let’s start with the mandatory-to-the-series opening shot where, in all three prior films, the opening Paramount logo (the mountain) dissolves into the opening shot of the film, matching it perfectly. In Raiders, it segues into a mountain in South America; in Temple of Doom, it’s a gong in the Club Obi-Wan; and in The Last Crusade, it becomes a cliff in some landscape from Indy’s past. This one opens up on a fucking CGI groundhog hill (you know because it costs so much to build a real one these days) and out pops a fucking CGI prairie dog (because apparently they’re extinct now) to let us know that from here on out, this film is going to blow.

Still, this apparent crossover from Over the Hedge is only the tip of the digitally manipulated iceberg. There are CGI monkeys (because real ones are invisible to the camera eye and cannot be filmed) and CGI giant ants (because real ones don’t exist because God knew how damn stupid they would look). There’s a big CGI triple-decker waterfall and everyone goes “whoooaaaaa” every time they go over a level, each time surfacing from the 500-story foot drops onto the jagged rocks below, unscathed and laughing. There’s also a CGI warehouse, a CGI Russian camp, a CGI jungle, a CGI plane, a CGI Classroom, a CGI Library, a CGI Mountain, a CGI temple with a big CGI entrance…the only thing that isn’t CGI are the actors which would have all been better off computer generated.

Article Author: Cinema Sentries

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