After 19 long years of waiting, we finally get the fourth film in the Indiana Jones saga, with the big premiere of the film finally being unveiled this weekend at the Cannes Film Festival. The steady stream of news and reviews will begin to start in earnest, leading up to the U.S. premiere date on Thursday, May 22.
I'll start this thread off with the latest from Cannes regarding this weekend's premiere. ---------------------------------------
Will Cannes be a Temple of Doom for ‘Indy’? With anticipation high, Spielberg tries to keep film's secrets under wraps
ASSOCIATED PRESS
CANNES, France - Indiana Jones doesn't give up his secrets lightly, and neither does the man pulling his strings.
Director Steven Spielberg has tried to keep chapter four of the archaeologist's big-screen adventures, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," under wraps as tight as an ancient mummy's.
The stealth approach has whipped up a frenzy of expectation — and doubts about the movie's quality — as he prepares to unveil it in front of the world's toughest audience, critics at the Cannes Film Festival. The film premieres here Sunday, just four days before it opens in theaters worldwide. In an era of Internet spoilers, fan blogging and online video diaries where filmmakers show off their tricks, Indy returns with the old-fashioned covertness Spielberg always has favored.
"He is the only one in the world who keeps his cards face down on the table until the 11th hour, 59th minute, 59th second, and nothing deters him from doing that," said Jeffrey Katzenberg, Spielberg's partner at DreamWorks.
Revealing their cards at Cannes, with its notoriously snooty press corps, is a critical risk for Spielberg, executive producer George Lucas and star Harrison Ford.
Hollywood trade paper Variety quipped that Indiana Jones was entering the "Kingdom of the Critical Knives," and reporters have joked that Cannes might prove a new Temple of Doom for Indy.
Two years ago, the first press screening of "The Da Vinci Code" drew open laughter from Cannes critics, whose harsh reviews spoiled the film's premiere a day later and set the stage for a worldwide critical drubbing.
Of course, "The Da Vinci Code" went on to gross $758 million globally. As the first movie in 19 years for one of cinema's biggest adventure series, "Crystal Skull" is virtually assured of blockbuster results, too.
Possibly to shield "Crystal Skull" from a similar critical backlash, Spielberg, Lucas and distributor Paramount weren't letting critics see the movie until hours before its Cannes premiere.
In an unusual move, the few cast and crew interviews at Cannes were scheduled Saturday, before reporters had even seen the film. The movie's profile is so high, the filmmakers figure it doesn't need the usual publicity.
Spielberg has been hush-hush from the start. Co-star Karen Allen, reprising her "Raiders of the Lost Ark" role as Indy's old flame Marion Ravenwood, said Spielberg initially wanted to keep it a secret that she was even in "Crystal Skull."
"Even after the film was announced, people would call me. ‘Oh, it's too bad you're not going to be in the film,'" Allen said. "I had to go along with it and say, ‘Yeah, it's a shame.' When it was finally announced I was in it, it was a huge relief. I was having to make up stories for why I wasn't in it, and I was finding it excruciating to have to do that."
In its earliest incarnation, Lucas proposed an all-out alien flick called "Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men From Mars." Spielberg and Ford didn't like that idea, and it took more than a decade of wrangling to come up with a story all three could live with.
A trailer showing a crate marked "Roswell, New Mexico, 1947" — a mecca for UFO buffs — hints that the movie retains traces of its extraterrestrial origins. Remarks by Lucas that the new film took its cue from 1950s sci-fi tales backs up that notion.
"The B-movies of the '50s were crazy science-fiction films, ‘It Came From Outer Space' and ‘Them!' and I said, ‘Well, gee, I could use that as the basis of the genre that I was using as my reference,'" Lucas said.
From the trailers and studio press materials, the basic story line is out there — Indy and Soviet agents led by Cate Blanchett pursue a crystal skull that can bestow fantastic power on those returning it to a city of solid gold in the Amazon from where it was stolen.
Secrets remain, such as how Indy and Marion are reunited and whether co-star Shia LaBeouf is playing the love child of their "Raiders" romance.
Spielberg was incensed last year when an extra leaked plot details, and the filmmakers have scrambled to maintain the mystery.
"It's been insane," said Frank Marshall, producer on the "Indiana Jones" movies. "I've spent a great deal of time on this movie just trying to keep things off the Internet. That's totally new for us. There seems to be some kind of sport out there now to see who can put up a spoiler, which is not fair to the audience. We really tried to keep the lid on the story just for the audience's sake."
Accustomed to fan gripes from his "Star Wars" prequels, Lucas has downplayed expectations for "Crystal Skull," saying audiences will be disappointed if they're anticipating a cinematic Second Coming.
Such remarks could just be part of Lucas and Spielberg's strategy to keep fans guessing.
"There's a little P.T. Barnum in both of them. They know how to get you interested," said "Crystal Skull" screenwriter David Koepp. "There's nothing more interesting than saying, ‘You can't see what's under here. I'd love to show you what's behind there, but I just can't.'"
Even a short behind-the-scenes segment on the official "Indiana Jones" Web site doesn't show much from behind the scenes. It focuses mainly on Spielberg in generic filmmaking mode, revealing virtually nothing about the action, ending with a close-up of Spielberg finishing a shot.
"And cut," Spielberg says. "Very nice."
The tough crowd at Cannes will have something to say about that Sunday.
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Posts: 4756 | Location: Florida, USA | Registered: March 28, 2003
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull One of the most eagerly and long-awaited series follow-ups in screen history delivers the goods. One of the most eagerly and long-awaited series follow-ups in screen history delivers the goods -- not those of the still first-rate original, 1981's "Raiders of the Lost Ark," but those of its uneven two successors. "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" begins with an actual big bang, then gradually slides toward a ho-hum midsection before literally taking off for an uplifting finish. Nineteen years after their last adventure, director Steven Spielberg and star Harrison Ford have no trouble getting back in the groove with a story and style very much in keeping with what has made the series so perennially popular. Few films have ever had such a high mass audience must-see factor, spelling giant May 22 openings worldwide and a rambunctious B.O. life all the way into the eventual "Indiana Jones" DVD four-pack. As has been well chronicled, Spielberg and exec producer George Lucas went through no end of writers and story concepts before plausibly updating the action precisely the same number of years as have elapsed since "Last Crusade," to 1957, smack dab in the middle of the Cold War. U.S. versus USSR dynamic spurs the dynamite opening action sequence, in which a convoy of Russian soldiers camouflaged in American army vehicles rolls into a remote desert nuclear testing base in search of a coveted object. Helping them in this effort will be their prisoner, Indiana Jones.
With an energy and enthusiasm bespeaking years of pent-up desire to get back to this sort of fun filmmaking, Spielberg sets the period spirit with a rock 'n' roll-fueled drag race and, with the characters' entry into the legendary Hangar 51, intimations of an other-worldly presence. As the aging issue is tossed off with a joke or two, the sixtysomething hero quickly proves that the passage of time will not be an inhibiting factor all these years later, as Indy trades smart remarks with the formidable Soviet officer Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) before jumping into action the equal of any of the great setpieces the entire series has previously offered.
In Spalko, the film has a villain worthy not just of Indiana Jones but of a James Bond film, one who's madly intelligent as well as appreciative of an opponent she views as a near-equal. With her trim gray uniform, silver rapier, Louise Brooks haircut and piercing blue eyes, Blanchett provides a major treat whenever she's around.
The 20 nonstop opening minutes include a striking variation on the many cookie-cutter middle-class housing tracts featured in Spielberg films, this one populated exclusively by plastic figurines enacting a cliche of a '50s Yank lifestyle while awaiting the nuclear test to come, one Indy must quickly figure out how to survive. Even that's not the end of the scene, which runs the length of the sort of Saturday matinee adventure serial that inspired the series in the first place.
Like the bravura opening sequence of "Saving Private Ryan," this smashing launch sets a standard the rest of the film has some trouble living up to. When Professor Jones returns to his university, he's informed by his dean (Jim Broadbent, replacing the late Denholm Elliott) that he's being suspended due to FBI doubt over his loyalty. Indiana Jones suspected of commie sympathies? And this after he's already told Spalko that "I like Ike."
Another iconic aspect of the decade rolls in with a kid named Mutt (Shia LaBeouf), a leather-jacketed biker who travels with comb and switchblade. Between a contrived fistfight and extended motorized chase around the leafy college campus, Mutt sets the grand adventure in motion by offering evidence of the possible location of the Crystal Skull of Akator, an object of great archeological and, possibly, psychic and other-dimensional fascination.
In a nostalgia-producing air travel montage like those in previous series entries, Indy and Mutt make their way to Peru, where the action relaxes in some rather rote creepy-crawly cave shenanigans before the guys lay their hands on the crystal skull itself, an oddly shaped clear cranium that all agree is not of human origin. But it's shortly snatched by Spalko, who believes the skull possesses psychic power that would prove decisive in mind warfare, no doubt ending the Cold War then and there.
All this gibberish is merely designed to justify the battle of wits and weapons, which continues apace as the Russians collect two further prisoners, Indy's old cohort and crystal skull expert, the now insane Professor Oxley (John Hurt), and Mutt's mom, none other than Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), Indy's flame from "Raiders" and clearly the woman he was always meant to be with.
Coming at pic's midway point, it's a welcome reunion, although written to escalate too quickly into intense bickering; a few more initial beats of mutual recognition, to permit the resonance of their relationship to seep back into the characterizations, would have give the rematch more heft.
But it's off and running again, with a race through the jungle as the good guys and bad guys jump between vehicles, duel with fists, sabers and machine guns, are assaulted by monkeys and ravenous giant ants and, in an undoubted preview of a forthcoming theme-park ride, plummet down three imposing waterfalls. For pure action thrills, this sequence rates close to the first one, yet there's one more to come, a mixed-bag wrap-up that transports the Indiana Jones series into a realm it's never occupied before but is well familiar to Spielberg and Lucas.
For all the verbiage expended just to keep the story cranking forward, David Koepp's script accomplishes the two essentials: It keeps the structure on the straight and narrow, and is true to the character of Indiana Jones himself. Thanks to this and Ford's full-bodied performance, Indy comes through just as viewers remember him: crafty, capable, impatient, manly and red-blooded American. He looks great for his age, although it's never pretended he's younger than he is, and Mutt pays him the ultimate compliment when he says, "For an old man, you ain't bad in a fight."
Allen also looks real good and radiates the same winning smile and tomboyish enthusiasm that made her "Raiders" characterization so critical to the film's complete success; her Marion is perhaps the greatest Hawksian female performance in anything other than a Howard Hawks film. LaBeouf eventually earns his stripes after a somewhat forced beginning, and Ray Winstone, along with fellow Brits Hurt and Broadbent, fills out the roster of newcomers as a duplicitous mercenary who switches sides with each change of fortune.
Technically, film is every bit as accomplished as one expects from Spielberg and the series. Of the director's key original collaborators, editor Michael Kahn and composer John Williams return in full form. Production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas provides some striking creations, particularly the ancient circular chamber that houses the climax. First three series were lensed by the great British d.p. Douglas Slocombe in bold, clean images, and while Spielberg's now-regular cinematographer Janusz Kaminski has mostly succeeded in reproducing this look, which is very different from his usual style, he still can't prevent himself from letting in some characteristic flared light and hazy backgrounds.
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Here is another review from Cannes by film critic David Germain of the Associated Press.
'Indiana Jones' Is Back in Action By DAVID GERMAIN, AP AOL.com
CANNES, France (May 18) - Indiana Jones received louder applause going in than he did coming out.
His latest adventure, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," earned a respectful — though far from glowing — reception Sunday at the Cannes Film Festival, the movie avoiding the sort of thrashing the event's harsh critics gave to "The Da Vinci Code" two years ago.
Yet Indy's fourth big-screen romp is not likely to go down as one of his most memorable. Some viewers at its first press screening loved it, some called it slick and enjoyable though formulaic, some said it was not worth the 19-year wait since Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Harrison Ford made the last film.
"They should have left well enough alone," said J. Sperling Reich, who writes for FilmStew.com. "It really looked like they were going through the motions. It really looked like no one had their heart in it."
Alain Spira of French magazine Paris Match found "Crystal Skull" a perfectly acceptable "Indiana Jones" tale, a sentiment echoed by the solid applause the movie received as the final credits rolled.
It's good. It's a product that is polished, industrial, we're not getting ripped off in terms of quality," Spira said. "You know what you're going to see, you see what you get, and when you leave you're happy."
The applause was louder at the outset, though. Fans at the early afternoon showing, which preceded the film's glitzy formal premiere with cast and crew Sunday night, cheered and clapped wildly at an announcement that the screening was about to start. Some even hummed the Indiana Jones fanfare as the lights went down.
The applause at the end was more subdued.
The film received none of the derisive laughter or catcalls that mounted near the end of the first press screening for "Da Vinci Code."
There were a few titters from the "Crystal Skull" crowd early on over co-star Cate Blanchett's thick, Boris-and-Natasha accent as a Soviet operative racing against Indy to find an artifact of immeasurable power. The movie's rather corny romantic ending also drew a chuckle or two.
In between, the film packed a fair amount of action, though some viewers found the middle portion dull. Conchita Casanovas, of Spain's RNE radio, said she was "bored to death."
The new movie hurls archaeologist Jones into the Cold War in 1957. He survives a nuclear blast in the desert in typically creative fashion and is reunited with "Raiders" flame Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen).
As speculated, the film has an alien connection, though far more subdued than the "Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men From Mars" story Lucas once envisioned.
There are melancholy nods to Sean Connery, who played Indy's dad in 1989's "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" but declined to return for the new movie, and the late Denholm Elliott, Indy's college dean in two of the previous movies.
And the film reveals the relationship between Indy and his new sidekick, an angry young motorcycle rebel played by Shia LaBeouf.
As with "Da Vinci Code," which went on to gross $758 million worldwide, "Crystal Skull" is so hotly anticipated that it will be virtually immune from critics' opinions. The film is expected to put up blockbuster box-office numbers as it opens globally Thursday.
"The movie was absolutely effective enough to score with audiences everywhere," said Anne Thompson, deputy editor of Hollywood trade paper Variety. "This played way better than 'Da Vinci Code.' No one was gunning for it. They were excited going in, hooting for it in a positive way."
Dozens of fans prowled outside the Palais, the Cannes headquarters, holding signs saying they needed tickets for "Crystal Skull."
Amelia Sims, a 19-year-old University of Georgia student studying abroad, held a sign reading "I (heart) Indy." She managed to get a pass to the press screening and loved the movie.
"I guess I've been waiting 19 years for this," Sims said. "You could say I've been waiting my whole life."
But Christian Monggaard, who is reviewing "Crystal Skull" for Danish newspaper Information, said he grew up with the "Indiana Jones" films and came away from this one disappointed, finding the climax an "overblown special-effects extravaganza."
"Talk about a woman scorned," Monggaard said. "A fan scorned is even worse."
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Posts: 4756 | Location: Florida, USA | Registered: March 28, 2003
From TIME Magazine and CNN.com --------------------------
Indiana Jones: Smart, Sleek, Familiar by Richard Corliss TIME/CNN.com
Early in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — which had its tumultuous world premiere today at the Cannes Film Festival — our hero (Harrison Ford) and his sometime pal Mac (Ray Winstone) come up against a convoy of tough Russians. "This ain't gonna be easy," Mac says, and Indy replies, "Not as easy as it used to be."
The old-guy jokes are as true for director Steven Spielberg and producer George Lucas as for the star. It's 27 years since Raiders of the Lost Ark started the Jones boy on his adventures, 19 years since the most recent Indy movie, The Last Crusade, and 30 years this month since Lucas and Spielberg sat on a Hawaiian beach and made a handshake deal for an action film that one would produce and the other direct. They'd be stupid to ignore the toll that time takes on moviemakers and movie stars. All were in their 30s when they made Raiders. Now Spielberg, Lucas and Ford are, respectively, 61, 64 and 65. And don't forget two other crucial collaborators, composer John Williams and editor Michael Kahn, who have given all the Indy films their cheerfully martial sound and cut-to-the-bone fury.
There are scenes in the new movie that seem like stretching exercises at a retirement home; there are garrulous stretches, and even the title seems a few words too long. But once it gets going, Crystal Skull delivers smart, robust, familiar entertainment. Ford looks just fine, his chest skin tanned to a rich Corinthian leather; he's still lithe on his feet, and can deliver a wisecrack as sharp as a whipcrack. Karen Allen, 56, who was Indy's saucy love Marion Ravenwood in Raiders, still has that glittering smile and vestiges of her old elfin swagger. They needn't break a sweat keeping up with the (relative) kids: 39-year-old Cate Blanchett, the movie's villainess, and Shia LaBeouf, who plays the young lead Mutt Williams, and who may be tapped to continue the series after Ford's retirement — at least that's what Lucas hinted a few days ago here in Cannes.
Crystal Skull is intended, and works effectively, as instant nostalgia — a class reunion of the old gang who in the '80s reinvigorated the classic action film with such expertise and brio. So don't expect the freshness of the what-one-man-can-do plot in Iron Man, or the oneiric visuals of Speed Racer. Spielberg and Lucas, and screenwriters David Koepp and Jeff Nathanson, are looking not forward but back, to the first three films. They know that moviegoers would be disappointed not to see the talismans of Indys past reappear here. Shall we itemize?
1. The Paramount logo dissolves into some kind of mountain. Every Indy films opens this way, from one monument to another. (As Veronica Geng wrote in a review of the first movie, "Spielberg" is German for "play mountain.") In Raiders the logo became a mountain in South America; in Temple of Doom, a bas-relief on a Chinese gong; in The Last Crusade a big boulder in Utah. This time, suggesting more modest aspirations, or maybe kiddingly deflecting the audience's gargantuan expectations, it's a weeny prairie dog hill, from which a critter emerges just before being nearly run over by speeding cars. We're in Nevada, near Area 51, and it's 1957, a time of rock 'n' roll (Elvis's "Hound Dog" on the soundtrack), fear of the Soviets (and why not? they've just penetrated a U.S. military base), fear of The Bomb (hey, what's that mushroom cloud on the horizon?) and mass sightings of UFOs (coming right up).
2. International conspiracies. Nazis in the first and third Indys, Indian Thugees in the second. But it wouldn't be the '50s without Commies, in the chic person of Irina Spalko (played by Blanchett with the severe demeanor of Cyd Charisse's Ninotchka in the 1957 MGM musical Silk Stockings and the black bob Charisse sports in The Band Wagon). Rather than the simple matter of conquering the West militarily, Irina is part of a Soviet plot to cloud our minds by getting access to some secret technology that is concealed either in an Area 51 warehouse or in the remotest jungle mountains of Peru. "We will change you, Mr. Jones, all of you, from the inside," she proclaims. "We will turn you into us." Ewww, creepy. Glad that didn't happen
. The Fedora, the bullwhip... the snakes! We see the hat just before we see Indy; brown headwear is still in style in 1957. As for Indy's bullwhip, it's still faster and deadlier than a bad guy's gun. In the opening Area 51 scene, he uses it to disarm about a quillion Russkies, and to swing in Errol Flynn style from one warehoused beam to another. (Mutt will later show the same swinging derring-do on Peruvian jungle vines.) As for the snakes, there's just one, but indy is readier to die in quicksand than to use it as a lifeline. The nifty new predators are South American red ants, which Spielberg and Lucas may have remembered from the 1954 movie The Naked Jungle, and which can swarm over a man by the millions and drag him into their formicary for a nice fat meal.
. A cool car chase. A lot of the elements in Crystal Skull may feel like mandatory reprises of the old tropes, but the high-speed two-vehicle fight between Indy's team and Irina's goons is up there with the Raiders jeep sequence, more complex and sophisticated in its engineering of physical action. (In the post-film press conference this afternoon, Spielberg said, "I believe in practical magic, not digital magic," and in "real stunts with real people.") If there's a scene that film students will be poring over, decades from now, this is the one.
5. Family revelations. Spielberg movies are often about the separation and reconstituting of a family, and the last two Indy films are no exception. In Last Crusade we met Indy's father (Sean Connery) and learned that Indy's real name was Henry Jones, Jr. Indeed, "Junior" was Dad's apparently derogatory form of address for his son. That gag is repeated here, since — as everyone who's paid the slightest attention to pre-release scuttlebutt knows — Mutt is Indy's son by Marion. (Why is he called Mutt? Presumably because, as we learned at the end of The Last Crusade, Indiana was the name of the Jones family dog; Mutt's just extending the breed.) He enters on a motorcycle, in the leather-jacket regalia Marlon Brando sported in The Wild One, and soon displays some of the athletic skills he must have inherited from his absent dad. Whether the smooth-visaged LaBeouf can grow into Ford's craggy machismo — or even whether he can top the teen Indys that have been played by River Phoenix (in The Last Crusade) and Sean Patrick Flannery (in the TV series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles) — is a question later Indy installments will have to answer.
6. Archaeology! Recall that our hero's day job is as a professor of archaeology. On vacations he goes out, makes trouble and saves the world. Or does he? Indy's job, basically, is plundering indigenous cultures for treasure, in capers that will cost hundreds of lives and add exactly nothing to the lore of civilization. (And, in three of the four movies, he comes home empty-handed.) But heck, it's an adventure movie; leave all ethnic scruples home. Scholars of antiquity will be pleased to know that Crystal Skull — with its runic inscriptions, vanished languages, hidden caves and dreadful secrets — is the archaeolog-iest Indy film yet. In fact, the movie is a little plot-heavy around the middle. It seems more determined to tell a complicated story than to use a story as the excuse for a convulsive. nonstop thrill ride.
7. Start with a big bang, end with terrifying mysticism. The creation of these movies always has this method: start with the opening and climactic sequences — in Raiders' case, the South American cave with the rolling rock and the opening of the Ark with the melting skulls — and work inward. (Or as Spielberg says on the new Last Crusade DVD: "How do we fill in the middle?") Here, the bang couldn't be bigger. The 12 min. opener takes Indy into Area 51, where he escapes into what seems to be an ideal Levittown ... except that the people are mannequins, a nuclear bomb is about to be detonated, and Indy has exactly one minute to find a safe place to hide. (That place is one of the film's smartest inspirations.) As for the ending, well, we're not giving everything away. Let's just say that Indy and Marion could be The X Files' Mulder and Scully on assignment in Peru.
We'll see how David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson cope with middle age in their X Files movie later this summer. They may suffer from the occasional creaking joints of Crystal Skull. (And, truth to tell, there was more applause here at the beginning of the screening than at the end.) But they'd be hard-pressed to inhabit the sleek, satisfying adventure that three septuagenarians and their pals dreamed up here. There's a moment in the film where Mutt sees Indy negotiate some really cool bit of action, and the kid can't help mouth a "Wow." That's the right response to this inevitable summer blockbuster. Lucas, Spielberg and Ford ain't the Over the Hill Gang yet.
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Posts: 4756 | Location: Florida, USA | Registered: March 28, 2003
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull Bottom Line: Whatever the story there is, gets swamped in a sea of relentless stunts and CGI.
By Kirk Honeycutt May 18, 2008
What do you know, the film billed as a return of Indiana Jones, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," turns out instead to be a sequel to "Close Encounters of the Third Kind!" Extraterrestrials and a space ship mix it up with well-lit caves, tumbles over waterfalls and swings through the jungle that would make Tarzan gape. Director Steven Spielberg seems intent on celebrating his entire early movie career here. Whatever story there is, a murky journey to return a spectacular archeological find to its rightful home - an unusual goal of the old grave-robber, - gets swamped in a sea of stunts and CGI that are relentless as the scenes and character relationships are charmless.
"Crystal Skull" will have its huge audience when it opens worldwide May 22. Indeed it had that audience the day the project was announced. What is disappointing to those who fondly remember "Raiders of the Lost Ark," lo those 27 year ago, is the loss of wit and romance. This film feels like work, whether it's poor Harrison Ford straining to keep pace with his younger self or Spielberg and writer David Koepp piling on the thrill-ride acrobatics that have only scant connection to the plot.
In the first 22 minutes, old Indy survives a kidnapping, shoot-outs, auto crashes inside a mysterious warehouse, a ride in a desert rocket and an A-bomb detonation. Spielberg is only getting warmed up.
The film never pauses to let these characters enjoy a drink or take each other's measure. Indy's original flame Karen Allen's Marion Ravenwood also makes a welcome return -- she even has a surprise for Indiana -- yet this moment is lost in the forward momentum. Losing his job during the Red Scare of the '50s, Indy is persuaded by a young Mutt (Shia LaBeouf) -- who to keep those iconic '50s images flowing arrives on a motorbike like Brando in "The Wild One" -- to take off on a vague adventure in South America to save his mother and retrieve the Crystal Skull of Akator.
This trip hooks the duo up with a spy played by Ray Winstone, who changes sides every half hour; a Soviet villain played by Cate Blanchett with close-cropped hair, black skin-tight fencing garb and absolutely no point in her villainy; and a crazy loon played by John Hurt, who like Kurtz in "Heart of Darkness" has been in the jungle too long.
Once the group possesses the Crystal Skull -- it does keep changing hands between Indy and the Soviet army -- no one seems to know quite what to do with it. But it has its uses: At different times, it opens doors, triggers cave machinery, wards off giant red ants and scares hostile natives. For all anyone knows, it may pay the bill at a fancy restaurant.
After about an hour, the film abandons any pretense of story for a rush through fights, chases, machine gun fire, scorpions, quick sand, monkeys, huge snakes and finally a secret city, part Mayan part Aztec, certain to become both a video game and amusement park attraction.
At no time does any of Indy's gang seem in real jeopardy. Bullets splash all around but not even the brim of his fedora gets nicked. Waterfalls are mere dips in the water, collapsing ruins an excuse for free-exercise tumbles and the villains mere annoyances.
The actors are asked to do little more than look reasonably alert. This proves to be Indiana Jones' greatest challenge.
'Indiana Jones 4': Here's your hat, what's your hurry? by Lisa Schwarzbaum
It's a measure of the unique panache of the aging guy in the fedora that people started lining up hours ahead in the full midday Cannes sun for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. And in the few moments of silence and dark screen before the Lucasfilm logo appeared, uncontainable devotees in the balcony began singing the famous four-note theme — dahhh-di-duh DAH — that's as much a part of the Indy experience as the expectation of a bullwhip well used.
I felt like singing, too. And I burst out in a laugh of pleasure when Henry Jones II first appears — rumpled, grimy, his gray hair thinning, within sight of his iconic topper but not within reach. (Indy has been kidnapped by Russians posing as U.S. military personnel in the New Mexico desert — long story — and brought to the feet of Cate Blanchett, in rich Natasha Badanov mode as a Soviet mind-control expert in hot pursuit of the title skull.) There's joy and a middle-aged playfulness to the best of Steven Spielberg's unlikely sequel. And I mean that as a full compliment: All the movieman's themes are here, his interests, obsessions, trademark strengths as a cinematic storyteller, and Spielbergian "tells," too, with hubcap and sideview mirror reflections dating back over 35 years to Duel.
Harrison Ford? Terrific — and re-energized after too many recent action roles he has appeared to sourly resent. This older, creakier (but still spry) adventure hero wears his worldly wryness with even greater earned authority. Shia LaBeouf? Inspired, channeling one-half James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, the other half Spielbergian Everyson.
The "but" that dangles in this instant reaction (a longer, more archaeological review will follow) is that The Crystal Skull threatens at times to crumble under the weight of all the impersonal zigging and zagging loaded on for the sake of special effects. The precious ancient cranium itself — where it came from, how to keep it out of the hands of the Russkies and get it to where it belongs — is of little interest, no matter how many waterfalls loom, monkeys swing, and locks unmesh. The first bravura action sequence is kickass, the 11th or 12th is industrial filler that makes swaths of the two-hour running time drag.
I love Indy, and his long-lost son, and Karen Allen as his rediscovered old flame, Marion Ravenwood, too. As with every Spielberg movie, family psychology drives the story, while skeletons, extra-terrestrials, jungle tribesmen, and foreign villains make the most noise. I get the rudimentary, mass-audience political jokes and allusions, from the bomb-shelter-era quaintness of old-style Russkies to the tweedy dean who says, "I barely recognize this country anymore." I also think time has not dulled Indy's survival instincts, but neither has it inspired any risk-taking on the part of the franchise-owners.
This is a 90-minute story pumped up to 123 minutes, not so much on steroids as on Frappucino, and the chance sing the old four-note tune again.
Indiana Jones paved the road for dumb box-office thrill rides
By Carrie Rickey Inquirer Film Critic
Largely by cracking jokes and his bullwhip, Indiana Jones snared American hearts in the 1980s. Ever since, the indefatigable finder of incomparable objects in improbable places has continued to astound and amaze. From Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), where the guy in the fedora hung by his cuticles over a pit of poisonous snakes, to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), where he eluded rats of the rodent and Nazi persuasions, Indy has defied death, and gravity, with a shrug and a smile.
See him outrun a crushing boulder! Watch him cling to the rails of a mine cart hurtling to hell! Gasp as he commandeers a Nazi plane! Indiana is manly, rakish, wry. Who does not love Indy Jones?
I don't. Sorry to say, I'm a bit of a Raider-hater. And I don't think I'm alone in dreading the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the fourth installment of the fourth most popular movie franchise in history.
Didn't totally hate Raiders. Appreciated Steven Spielberg's direction and Harrison Ford's nonchalance. Couldn't help but be propelled by its hold-on-to-your-snap-brim energy. Apart from the roller-coaster spills and thrills, found it uninvolving.
Given the subsequent installments, it is hard for me to muster enthusiasm for a franchise that has done so much to dumb down movie scripts, ramp up movie tempos, perpetuate colonialist stereotypes, and, yes, marginalize women.
Most egregiously, the films in the Indiana Jones cycle have grown increasingly shallow and preposterous. Some might say that's part of their charm.
Some describe Raiders as the precipitous thrill ride that Spielberg made between his early career peaks of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982).
But after Close Encounters there was another movie, 1941, the desperately unfunny World War II comedy widely dismissed as "Spielberg's Pearl Harbor." It was a critical disaster and commercial disappointment. Before Spielberg could make another movie from the heart, the director who had gone over budget on Jaws, Close Encounters and 1941 had to demonstrate fiscal reliability.
He said yes to his pal George Lucas' offer to direct Raiders, a "James Bond movie without the hardware," in part because with Lucas holding the wallet, Spielberg figured he could make a movie on time and under budget. Raiders, as Hollywood analyst A.D. Murphy noted at the time, amounted to the director's professional "rehab."
It might not have a particularly high IQ, but Raiders boasts a sky-high FQ, or fun quotient. Leaping from set piece to set piece like the 1940s-era Saturday-morning serials it celebrates, the film wanted nothing more than to be escapist frivolity, and for the most part it succeeded.
The whips, the snakes, the daredevil stunts amount to a week of dessert, froth without food value. I'm OK with that, though at the time I thought even Jaws and Star Wars, those twin templates for the modern action/adventure film, managed to serve up at least a few morsels of thought about valor and honor.
Raiders is a fairly innocuous piece of entertainment. It's what came after that is pernicious: Raiders helped pour the foundations for the Temple of Dumb (think The Goonies, Gremlins, WarGames): thrill rides made solely for the purpose of pumping up the adrenaline, plumping up the box office, and dumbing down scripts to reach a lowest-common-denominator audience.
Stateside, Pauline Kael charged Spielberg with infantilizing the audience; Brits routinely complained of his "juvenilisation" of moviegoers. After Raiders, every third movie, or so it seemed, was made expressly for 12-year-old boys.
Spielberg frequently gets blamed for accelerating movie action beyond the speed of comprehension. (The result? See The Bourne Ultimatum.) While this trend was already under way, as film scholar David Bordwell notes, what Spielberg created with Raiders is a model for the Gen ADHD flick - a movie paced 25 percent faster than his other films, one that influenced the bullet pacing of so many inferior imitators.
Raiders, released in June 1981, clocks in with shots that average 4.5 seconds in length, says Bordwell, who goes to movies with a stopwatch. At the time, average shot duration was six to seven seconds, which is what Spielberg's Jaws, Close Encounters, and War of the Worlds average.
With the exceptions of the Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park movies, Spielberg - like Woody Allen, P.T. Anderson and M. Night Shyamalan - is a proponent of the long take. He knows that the more extended the shot, the more the audience bonds emotionally with the characters. The shorter the shot, the more the audience is propelled by the rhythm and action.
Raiders, released two months before the launch of MTV and blitzkrieg-paced music videos, had its boot on the accelerator - both reflecting the culture and helping to boost its pace. And it influenced such Jerry Bruckheimer/Don Simpson movies as Flashdance (1983) and Top Gun (1986).
Underlying the Raiders series like rotten fruit is ethnic stereotyping consistent with 19th-century British imperialism.
Weirdly for a movie series critical of Nazi master racism, its antagonists and villains are largely designed to present a world in need of saving by the white hero.
Recall the Arabs of Raiders - famously, the one who menacingly draws arabesques with his sword before Indy just shoots him? Remember the Indian pagans of Temple of Doom - notoriously the Thuggee priest Mola Ram (Amrish Puri) who rips a beating heart from a human chest? Remember how the Middle Eastern Nazi henchmen in Holy Grail are swarthy and oily?
Joseph McBride, one of Spielberg's more sympathetic biographers, denounced the first two pictures in the Indy Jones cycle as "fantasies of American cultural dominance over Third World primitives." No wonder that India initially banned Temple of Doom.
While Indy, adventurer/archaeologist, conquered the global box office, what of the women who conquered his heart?
In Raiders, gin- and gunslinging Marion Ravenwood is an adventuress whose daredevil-may-care aplomb and leather bomber jacket are a match for Indy's own. Temple of Doom featured Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw), a spangled nightclub singer screaming for help and a manicure. Finally, Last Crusade offered up svelte Nazi spy Elsa Schneider (Alison Doody), who seduces, then betrays, Indy and his dad, Henry (Sean Connery), in a movie where the real love affair is between father and son.
You might say of the Indiana Jones cycle that Indy's gal is, in the initial movie, his helpmeet. In its second, she is helpless. And in its third, she is his enemy. You also might say the series is an index of the diminishing importance of women in the '80s, when action/adventure conquered Hollywood.
In 1980, the year before Indy hit the screen, the biggest box office hits included Coal Miner's Daughter, 9 to 5, and Private Benjamin. By 1984, when he returned in Temple of Doom, the only big-screen heroine left among the top 10 movies was in Romancing the Stone.
Even so, it's encouraging that Crystal Skull has two significant female roles - Karen Allen returning, happily, as adventuress Marion Ravenwood, and Cate Blanchett playing the Soviet heavy.
What makes a great movie franchise? Wall Street measures greatness in dollars. By that metric, the Indiana Jones franchise is a whopping success.
Main Street measures greatness by emotional fervor. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, each subsequent film deeper and richer than the previous one, was great. The Matrix, where the first installment was phenomenal and the second two cashed in on the phenom, got more irrelevant as it went along.
Indy Jones? The first was OK; the second a nightmare; the third a sick joke.
I don't blame Indiana Jones for transforming Hollywood from a moviemaking town into a synergized marketing town - Star Wars did that. But on so many other counts, the guy in the fedora has a lot to answer for.
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"I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons." Lorianne - Ace in the Hole
