INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the second installment in the Jones series in which our hero finds himself leaping from a plane on an inflatable raft, going psycho after drinking the dreaded Blood of Khali, and winning a fist fight while dangling from the strands of decrepit collapsed bridge, has long been my favorite in the series. Still stuck on Star Wars and Saturday morning cartoons when Raiders came out in ‘81, and too high on Burton’s Batman and the anxiety of my upcoming freshman year of high school to find the more mature themes of Last Crusade to my hyper sensitivities in ‘89, Temple of Doom was a blessing for an 8-year-old who’d just recently discovered the joys of horror cinema - hearts ripped from chests, snakes teeming with eels, and aaahhh…chilled monkey brains. So imagine my surprise to grow up and find out that Temple of Doom has long been considered by many the weakest in the series - moreover, by Spielberg himself. The argument seems to be, for the most part, that Temple of Doom is silly, or ridiculous - that for all the grand adventure in Raiders and Last Crusade, there is a realism to both that is lost in Temple of Doom.
Hooray, then, for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls! Finally a foil to hold up against Temple of Doom to illustrate just how ridiculous and over-the-top a movie can be! Heart-ripping Thugee cult? How about man-eating giant (and painfully, obviously CGI) ants! “Impossible” escape from a plane on an inflatable raft? Okay - how about the sudden, seemingly clandestine ability to vine swing? And to vine swing with enough skill and dexterity to use said vines to get you to exactly where it is you’re heading! Oh, and apparently to vine swing so well that it commands the wills of monkeys, too!
Say nothing about the refrigerator… I don’t want to post spoilers here, but for those of you who’ve seen this movie, did your fellow audience groan as expressively as mine did during the refrigerator scene? Or, for that matter, during the vine swinging scene? Aren’t those moments where audiences are supposed to cheer? Or, for that matter, aren’t those moments reserved for the Stephen Sommers heroics of The Mummy movies, and not from the more intellectual and restrained command of a filmmaker like Spielberg?
But then I remembered The Lost World: Jurassic Park, with its notorious gymnastics sequence. And War of the Worlds, where not only does Tom Cruise ultimately arrive at a Boston that stands intact (and ridiculously well-lit) despite a prolonged mass destruction, but guess what - his son’s there too! Driving home from Crystal Skulls, I tried to wrap my mind around what’s happened to Spielberg, whose early classics like Close Encounters and E.T., despite the fact that they were seeped in fantasy, never gave cause for one to groan - on the contrary, they were textbooks in how to fill an audience with wonder. And one could argue, well those were fantasy, and Jones is adventure, but Jaws was adventure, and I didn’t see Sheriff Brody escaping a shark attack by skipping across the backs of helpful turtles.
And maybe it’s this simple - Spielberg has become Spielberg! Lucas has become Lucas! And in a world where their legacies have been solidified - long gone are the struggling years of trying to defend 1941, or trying to pitch Star Wars to disinterested studio executives - they can do whatever the hell they want to do, and people will come and money will be made. Which is not to say they’ve abandoned the call to provide their fantasies with quality - certainly Crystal Skulls isn’t all bad, and Revenge of the Sith at least came close to redeeming the Star Wars pre-trilogy (though credit script doctors for much of that…), but the need for quality may be gone. For these men, the external demand to produce a good film is nonexistent - their films will do well. And if they don’t? Who cares? - it’s Spielberg and Lucas, and their careers (and their pocketbooks) are set. As far as their movies go, anything goes. Anything can happen - as an audience, we’ll just have to live with it.
I realize this is less a review of Crystal Skulls as it is a treatise on the death of artistic Innocence (how painful is it to watch the original Star Wars and then even consider watching Phantom Menace?), but this is what watching the latest Indy flick has done to me. It’s easy to say “I liked it,” “I hated it,” etc., but I’m far more concerned about what’s happened to one of my favorite filmmakers. Can we only count on Spielberg to be reliable if he’s doing one of his serious movies? Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Minority Report - though all three of them couldn’t escape moments of Spielberg sentimentality, they’re all spectacular films, and no doubt Lincoln will be a masterpiece and score boatloads of Oscars. Fantasy? We’ve gotten War of the Worlds, A.I., The Lost World… These movies weren’t completely reviled, but they were generally torn apart, and I’m personally not a fan of any of them. I wanted to be - they were all technically astounding and visually mesmerizing - but alas, also all very, very Spielberg…
So back to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls… Did I HATE it? No, it’s actually a very fun movie. But that’s pretty much where it ends - it’s fun. Some good acting - Cate Blanchett makes a great Natasha, the reliable John Hurt is fun as an insane former professor, Karen Allen effortlessly revives Marion Ravenwood, and Shia LaBeouf actually avoids becoming the latest in a string of annoying Spielberg kid tagalongs (Hook…) by turning in a fun performance and joining up with the great Short Round as a bonafide Indy sidekick. The plot is decent - once again Jones is racing international goons in the quest for a relic, this time the Ruskis! and in search of the Crystal Skulls! And yes, there are some exciting action sequences - the stand-out is a car chase through the jungle.
…but you lose something when there’s no sense of danger. You lose something when there’s no sense of reality. It’s thrilling to see Cate Blanchett slam her car against Indy’s, but less so when your thinking, “This all looks so fake…” It’s amusing to see Shia LaBeouf swordfight on the back of a moving car, but less so when you’re thinking, “This is fucking daft…” And when the monkeys and man-eating ants show up, you realize with a sigh that Fun does not equal Quality. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls is a lot of fun - in my opinion, even more so than Last Crusade. As a film, though, it’s a disappointing and arguably the weakest in the series.
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