The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015. Remaining movies: 45 Days to go: 34
Movie #395: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Let’s be clear: I wouldn’t own this if it didn’t come part of the Indiana Jones blu-ray collection. That’s probably the only way they could get people to buy it, really, because it’s not very good. Or actually, it’s okay as far as action-adventure films go. There are certainly far worse ones out there. It’s just not very good for an Indiana Jones flick.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a great example, actually, of a film that should’ve worked. It had all the pieces, or nearly all the pieces, that made other Indiana Jones movies great. It’s directed by Steven Spielberg, featuring the music of John Williams. Harrison Ford is back as Indy, twenty years longer in the tooth than he was for Last Crusade, but still feisty (when he’s not sounding off like a crotchety old man). They even brought back Marion (Karen Allen), easily the best and most substantial romance of Indy’s any of us ever knew about. She’s older too, of course, as are we all. And this was filmed before Shia LaBeouf went crazy, when he was still considered a good actor. Plus it’s got Cate Blanchett as bad guy Irina Spalko, and she’s usually spectacular. So many great pieces, and yet none of them really fit together.
Spalko, for example, is supposed to be eastern Ukrainian KGB, but Blanchett’s accent frequently drifts back to jolly old England, I don’t think intentionally. And most of the dialogue is stilted and awful. Even the story is awkward. We’re used to Indy battling Nazis, and even though Communists were considered a formidable opponent in the Fifties, to our modern sensibilities, they just don’t stand up. Not only that, but while technically Indy is still dealing in religious artifacts and myths, aliens and legends about Roswell and Area 51 are a lot more sci-fi than the Indiana Jones of yore. Indiana Jones is about the past, about being grounded in our history. That’s why he’s an archeologist. It’s not about futuristic “interdimensional beings” from somewhere not of this Earth. (Even Christian myth is a myth of, about and for our world and our world only.) That sounds like a personal taste thing and a minor quibble, and maybe it is, but when you combine it with the fact that by and large Indy’s friend Ox (John Hurt) is just carrying around a magic crystal, mumbling in incomprehensible poems and riddles, instead of Indy interpreting clues and solving puzzles with his knowledge of history and using his ingenuity to get out of booby traps and to the treasure, it falls incredibly flat. Incredibly. Flat.
I joke around a lot about really wishing I could see across the boundaries of stories I love — to see how a character came about in the past or to see where they go in the future — but often stories aren’t meant to work that way. We’re not supposed to find out who Indiana Jones is in WWII or that he’s a big Dwight Eisenhower supporter who hates Commies, when he’s long outgrown the nickname Indiana. We’re not supposed to think about how Marion wound up pregnant and deserted or how Indiana Jones is an aging man with a grown son. The point of fictional characters is that they can stay forever at the age we fell in love with them, and they don’t have to get old and sore and boring or settle down or die or any of that. They can just stay as they were, and we can leave the unexamined to our imaginations, where it’s always better anyway.
Or maybe I can just say I hate this movie and leave it at that.
Viable Option 