Two weeks prior to its release, I wrote a review of Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. My pre-release review was equal parts contempt and resignation, swirled around with a jigger of blogger’s snarkiness. It was a sophomoric stunt, to be sure, but one with a point: that this is a movie so predictable one doesn’t even need to see it to comprehend it. Sadly, I was right.
The review was educated speculation, and extrapolated from the inert trailers and lavish pre-release hype. Vanity Fair’s puff piece “Keys To The Kingdom” was particularly noxious and fawning. The coverage in Entertainment Weekly was so single-mindedly rah-rah it seemed Paramount’s PR department had taken up residence in the editor’s office.
In the blogosphere, reactions have ranged from bemused to apologetic. The short-tempered hotheads rush to defend their embrace of mediocrity. “It’s supposed to be entertainment, not high art,” they’ll clamor. What a stirring defense. Paramount and a troika of mall cinemas’ most decorated icons invested $185 million dollars for 120 minutes of lowest-common denominator pabulum. Legions of bleeding hearts and press-kit plagiarists posing as critics trip over themselves to apologize for it.
What’s worse? The studio’s cold calculations of how much revenue can be extracted from a fourth Indy picture, or the blind enthusiasm of movie-goers who race to the theaters to reward those calculations, in naked defiance of quality? We’ve already seen large portions of Indy copied off in National Treasure and Tomb Raider, which were just copies of the original Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
Now that I’ve seen Crystal Skull, let’s see how the reality of the film compares to my pre-release review. Here’s the opening:
Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull is like that awkward drink you have with your ex-girlfriend years later. You smile, you laugh, you tell a few jokes and try too hard to act cool, but your heart isn’t really in it. After it’s all over, you smile through the half-hearted hug, but deep down inside you know it was a bad idea, and you’ll be happier when it’s all forgotten.Nothing to correct here.
Coming nearly 20 years after the last Indiana Jones sequel, Crystal Skull wheezes across the finish line about 10 years too late, the occasional sparks of charm dying off in an airless script that talks too much and manages to explain nothing at all. The whole venture is a schizophrenic mess, a patchwork of half-ideas held together with autopsy stitching. A-list writers such as Frank Darabont, M. Night Shyamalan, and Tom Stoppard all took a pass at the script, each getting shot down by George Lucas who used his digital wizardry to graft his favorite pieces together into an ungainly whole.Again, nothing to correct. The film zips about like a child in desperate need of Ritalin, flitting madly from one underdeveloped thought to another. The Russians. The aliens. The missing son. The missing father. The missing love interest. The double agents. The skull. Weird Amazon tribesmen. There is no coherence or continuous thought, just reaction and distraction.
Article comments
1 - Brad Schader
Great and original review. I like the approach of writing a review based on what you think going into a movie and comparing it to what you think after. I would love to read more like this actually. I smell a feature =D
2 - Paisley and Plaid
I agree. But my shallow reaction has to do with age: Jones, Marion -- three decades of "experience" makes for interesting people, but not necessarily the appeal a film requires. Sorry.
3 - El Bicho
Very good and funny review, JW.