Movie Review: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

It has been a long time since we heard from Indiana Jones. In the interim, Harrison Ford changed, the world changed, cinema changed, but Steven Spielberg set out to deliver a movie as if it were old times. He waited nearly two decades to film the fourth installment, but if the wait between sequels is a positive boon for a movie maker, I would suggest he did not wait long enough. Perhaps he should have waited an additional two hundred years.

Set in 1957, when Indiana Jones would have been about as old as Harrison Ford is now, the fourth movie of the series replaces Nazis with Soviets, and the bulk of its action takes place in South America. The evil Commies are looking for a weapon, just like Hitler was in the two previous movies that matter, and they think they have found it with a strange artifact, thousands of years old, made of crystal and carved by unknown methods into the shape of a vaguely humanoid skull. Indiana gets caught up in all the fuss, and along the way meets up with some characters from his past while performing death defying stunts and such.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a diseased movie whose manifold infirmities have caused dozens of symptoms which ravage the celluloid. One disease is certainly George Lucas, who, if the tales are true, had too much of a hand in developing the movie. Another disease would be a rich, successful director with little reason to push himself and switch off the auto pilot. A third sickness would be a certain actress who one would swear has not acted since 1981 and failed to get all the rust off before stepping in front of the camera.

The symptoms of these diseases, to paraphrase Shakespeare, maintain such a politic state of evil that they will allow no good parts to intermingle. I say this with only the faintest trace of hyperbole, because in the entirety of the film there is almost nothing worth praising. The first act is an attempt to squeeze every single iconic fifties cliché and scrap of popular history into about a twenty minute time period. Other than Marilyn Monroe getting her panties revealed by an updraft, I think they managed to include them all. I found it distracting and entirely too cutesy. The first three movies were set in the thirties, and that was about it. Costumes fit the time period, at least as far as I could tell, but they never made a fetish of it. For some reason, the filmmakers decided that Harrison Ford, in the fourth film, needed to experience the entire decade in less than a half hour, and the result is distracting and entirely inappropriate for setting the mood of an Indiana Jones movie, on the order of a laugh track for Terminator II.

The characters that we knew from Raiders of the Lost Ark are gone, replaced by caricatures, as if lifted from a third rate sitcom. The banter that passes between them is as uninspiring and hackneyed as can be imagined, with entire exchanges bereft of the slightest mark of distinction, the merest hint that this is a conversation that belongs to these characters and not to any of a million underdeveloped roles languishing, never to be produced, on dusty shelves around Hollywood. These words are not the dialog of artistic inspiration, but merely an average of all the other conversations on like topics, an average that fits as well in your film as mine, but belongs in no film at all. That David Koepp, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, men with a combined total of over a century of experience in the industry, should make characters and scenes and dialog like this at this stage in their careers pleases me very little.

If David Koepp could not muster the energy to fashion a decent script, one can hardly credit Spielberg with a significantly better effort. His action sequences are glossed over, run through with ease, and Harrison Ford and the other actors take their cue from him. At no time does one feel that Indiana Jones is actually in danger, like we did during the magisterial truck sequence in the first movie, or during any one of dozens of sequences from Raiders and Grail. There is no effort to delve into the action and make it feel exhilarating. It feels as safe and secure as if it had been rehearsed a hundred times, like a dance number in a Broadway musical.

There is a moment when Indiana and Mutt (Shia Labeouf) are riding a motorcycle and being chased by bad guys. Indiana gets pulled from the motorcycle into a car, Mutt steers the bike to the other side of the car, and Indy pops out the other window and back onto the bike. It is accomplished in about five seconds with maybe five or six different shots and has no greater effect than that of a moderately clever sight gag. Contrast this with the aforementioned truck fight in the first movie, which is its own miniature film with a good beginning, middle and end. Along the way we feel every bump and bruise, we feel Indy being dragged along the ground, we fret when the grill on the front begins to bend and we see no way out for him. But this can only be achieved with an effort, which apparently Mr. Spielberg could not be bothered to spare.

As damaging as anything else about the movie is the lack of restraint on display, a lack which makes mystery and awe wither. When the credits roll after Raiders, the Ark is still an enigma, still awe-inspiring, still not completely knowable. Crystal Skull manages to turn its artifact and the beings behind it into something mundane. Too much is revealed about them; too much is made explicit and obvious. What a director does not show is every bit as important as what he does show, and Mr. Spielberg did not restrain himself enough.

This problem of restraint is also evident with the action sequences which, when shown in the trailers, made me uneasy from the outset. When Indiana Jones was entertaining back in the 1980's, it was with far more modest action pieces that were marvelously well directed at their best. Spielberg even managed to create a successful sequel with the third movie, but the intervening years have done something to him. Where before the action was grounded in a certain amount of believability, it is now absurdly exaggerated, well beyond the bounds of good taste. Pushed to a certain extent, an action sequence can be thrilling. Pushed too far, it becomes commonplace and boring. The trap of the sequel has ensnared even Steven Spielberg, who, in trying to outdo himself, has instead undone himself. Crystal Skull will take its place next to Alien Resurrection on the shelf of sequels that, I am prepared to swear, never happened.

Final Grade: D+

Movie Review: I Am Legend

We revisit the genre of the last man on earth with Will Smith’s latest, I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence directing). It’s a genre that holds so much promise, and yet very rarely does it bear fruit. The latest attempt falls in line with the majority: entertaining premise, mundane execution.

A new virus is genetically engineered to cure cancer and meets with initial success. But the virus gets loose and wreaks havoc on the human race, turning the vast majority into mindless vampire-like creatures with no tolerance for sunlight. Will Smith, playing Colonel Robert Neville, is, as far as he knows, the last human being on the planet. A scientist as well as colonel, he spends his days maintaining his solitary existence and searching for a cure. His nights he spends bunkered down in his home with his faithful canine companion, praying the physically enhanced vampires do not discover where he lives.

There is nothing really wrong with I Am Legend, but there are so many minor flaws, missed opportunities and poor decisions that the premise, no matter how much one likes this sort of thing, has little hope of saving the enterprise.

Once again we are treated to, or rather made to endure, more CGI creatures. I find myself repeating the same thing over and over on the topic: CGI has its place, but a director has to know where that place is and must guard against overusing the technology. In a movie like I Am Legend, a serious endeavor with creatures that are meant to scare us, CGI is a poor choice to represent the monsters. A CGI vampire is not scary for the same reason the Smurfs aren’t scary: IT’S A FREAKING CARTOON! It might have been difficult, perhaps impossible, to get a human to move with the force and speed that the vampires in the movie have, but that would have been a small sacrifice in exchange for the gripping presence of a real looking vampire. Makeup and costumes still trump computer graphics, and it’s not even close. If you don’t believe me, watch portions of Alien 3, then go back and watch Alien.

Another poor choice is the lead character. Will Smith, reprising the same role he has played in every movie I’ve ever seen him in, plays a brilliant scientist, a dashing hunk, and a super athlete all at once (Yes, the specifics change, but the persona is the same). It might have been interesting to see, say, Paul Giamatti playing the role of intellectual scientist in search of a cure, a scientist with all the quirks and idiosyncrasies that great minds often have who must use his brain to compensate for his average or even frail physique, something that hampers him in his struggle against the vampires. Or, staying with Will Smith, it could have been just as interesting to watch an athletic man with an average mind using his brawn to survive, but always treading water, getting by until the sun rises again, lacking the cerebral capacity to grasp the bigger picture and discover a solution.

It would have been even more interesting to see these characters meet halfway through. But instead what we get is a character from an Ayn Rand novel: flawless both physically and mentally. It’s a perfection which snuffs out any sympathy we might have felt for the man as his sad back-story is revealed to us. I have a difficult time accepting movies where the female characters, no matter who they are supposed to be, look better suited for lovemaking than whatever it is they are doing. It is equally hard to accept Will Smith.

Implausibility is another affliction that curses this film. Sometimes the implausible thing is only a minor irritant, such as when the sets show New York City streets, only three years removed from the outbreak of the virus, already choked with weeds pushing through the cracks but the posters for the Broadway musicals are not even peeling at the corners. Other times, the implausibility is more damaging to the project’s integrity. Examples of this include the fact that Will Smith is still eating food from a jar that – unless he has found the time and know-how to master all the different jobs spread throughout the division of labor and therefore grow, harvest, process and jar his own food – must be at least three years old. Will Smith’s home has running water, water which he apparently believes to be pure enough to drink. It also has electricity. Either show us exactly how he is able to maintain this living standard – and still find time to hit golf balls off the wing of a fighter jet when he isn’t searching for a cure – or show us how life would really be without extensively divided labor like we now have.

Show him boiling his water after collecting it from buckets on his roof. Show him tending his garden, using his own feces to fertilize his crops. Show him mending his own clothes. Show him in agony as he must cut out his own decaying tooth. The movie does show him hunting – albeit in a sleek looking car as, incredibly, he cruises New York City looking for deer – but it doesn’t give us a reason for him to be hunting. Rather than all the jarred and canned food he has, show us a bare pantry, or a half-eaten cured leg of some beast hanging from a hook in the ceiling. And if you must show him driving cars, at least show him coping with gasoline which has degraded for the last three years. Does gas last that long? How well does it work after thirty-six months? It would have been interesting to find out.

There is a hint of something more interesting in the movie which is introduced but left undeveloped. The colonel hunts the vampires during the daytime to use as guinea pigs in his search for a cure. As he makes notes of his observations, he remarks that the social humanity of the vampires is almost entirely gone. However, it soon becomes apparent that he is wrong, and the vampires may even be hunting him. But instead of pursuing this potentially interesting cat and mouse game, the movie breaks down into fighting and screaming and explosions wherein even greater implausibilities await.

I will give the movie credit for taking its time. Despite the CGI and dubious actions of the lead character, and despite everything else that was missing, the movie does at least concern itself with setting things up. It certainly doesn't push headlong into something, anything, to get some action started. But when all is said and done it is still a tantalizing but ultimately unfulfilling trip down an avenue of unrealized possibilities and disappointing decisions.

Final Grade: C