Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull

In another run of very-lucky-stuff-what-amy-has-done, I ended up at a preview of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull last night. Since to be honest most of my jabberings get published now, this blog has been pretty darn neglected. So sorry about that, but its not like anyone reads it. anyway, to say sorry, I thought I'd pop a review up right here.

First of all, this is not a black and white discussion of the new Indiana Jones film. There are many shades of grey here. Yet I had several warnings concerning Indiana Jones & the Crystal Skull this week.

When on Sunday night, the Beeb screened Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade followed by Six Days, Seven Nights, I suddenly started to feel worried, a bit sweaty round the ears. Harrison Ford is not renowned for his acting skills, but if you look at his performance in Raiders, Crusade, Blade Runner; its actually incredibly subtle. He says very little, and expresses a great deal. While I’m not about to give him an Oscar, (I’ll leave that to his 1985 Witness nomination), I’d go as far as to say that Harrison had a very realistic acting style in his younger years. Yet Six Days, Seven Nights showed very little of this. Lines were clumsily reeled off with the air of a guy who knows his box office power means he just has to show up to get this thing going. He can still pull out the stops, but for every Hollywood Homicide there’s an Air Force One. In short, it appears that these days, Ford needs a good director to power him up, to help naturalize himself. And despite what any film critic says, Raiders of the Lost Ark is the perfect film. It contains every possible element a film viewer would need – go read Tom Shone’s Blockbuster if you need further proof.

But we’ve got Spielberg on board so surely he’ll take care of us. Surely he’ll focus on this problem. This man knows about balance and subtlety; well overall. When 20 mins into Star Wars Episode One I was nearly crying because the dialogue was so bad, I finally realized the truth about George Lucas as a film maker. A man with galactic ideas who needs to be contained in some sense, and Spielberg is a perfect man to do it. It’s clear after watching Star Wars: A New Hope, that it’s the ideas and the effects that carry the plot along. The dialogue is lumbering, but you don’t care because there’s a robot and a giant dog wondering around. Magic! Madness! Yet in the next two films, when the skills of two different directors come on board, the difference is profound. Jedi’s intimate moments are clumsy, but overall, both films are stronger than the one that paved the way. The three new Star Wars films illustrated perfectly that Lucas was too wrapped up in his fan-boy world to wade through it with clarity. My C3P0 button fell to the floor, the stilted Russian alien dialogue placing us oddly in our own twentieth century Cold War echoed over our heads.

I know, sad times. But back to the subject at hand, the new Indiana Jones film has a lot to live up to. But I had faith, faith in Spielberg, faith in Ford knowing how important this role is to so many.

Opening scene, we are plunged into a film with great action but odd dialogue. Indy and Mac (Ray Winstone) are quick to let us know that they’ve been working together twenty years and have got out of bigger scrapes before. Warning bells are ringing – people don’t usually talk as conveniently as this. One of the beauties of Raiders is that not everything was resolved. What was it that Indy did to Marion? Why was she so mad? What happened with her father Abner? People don’t communicate with each other with this useful lets-fill-in-the-other-listeners exchange. It happens again later when a frustrated Marion screams at Indy about his leaving her at the altar.

It’s very good of the characters to fill us in so blithely about events that have gone on in the past 15 years, but the thing is we don’t have to know. In the same fashion, Alan Dale’s cameo lets us know that Indiana Jones is in fact a Colonel and a war hero. Our protagonist doesn’t have to be so boringly good, and given that he is essentially a grave robber who occasionally murders people for various talismans, it important that we see him as multi-facetted. The character dynamics are sliced through machete like, leaving us bumped and bruised by the action. And while the action is terrific stuff, the cartoon like formation of characters leaves us nauseated by it. Mac is a two-dimensional sidekick, driven by the highest bidder. He two-times Indy in the opening scene, yet when he re-enters Indiana’s fray, Indy doesn’t ask why he tried to kill him before, and seems particularly shocked when Mac double-crosses him again at the film’s climax when it seemed pretty damn obvious to everyone else. The re-arrival of Marion should open a chasm of emotion between her and Indiana. This is the most interesting relationship in the film and yet it is scanned over. Later in the film the couple try to share a kiss, yet it is flat in its presentation, with the pair puckering up until Mutt (Shia LaBeof) separates them; a caricature of a kiss. Moreover, the two have not had any sort of discussion to lead them up to this point. The only declaration of affection he makes is when Marion points out that Indy must have had other women in his life, Jones woodenly announces to a packed van, “Honey, they just weren’t you.” In this third-rate way, in the manner of some of the worst Bonds, we see a relationship that was created with pathos and realism twenty years ago, crashing in so as to make sure someone gets the girl.

Mutt however, captured by Shia LaBoef, is a great addition to the cast. Indeed his interaction with Indiana is the most interesting in the film. While he is a little obvious in some of his actions, his attempts at being too cool provide some humour and realism. He and Indiana have extended dialogue with each other that recaptures some of the camaraderie that we were supposed to assume occurred in Indy’s relationship with Mac. The stunts look great – thank god not all directors have succumbed to CGI. The final supernatural effects take on that fake illustrated look CGI often has that makes you wish the SFX team had blown up more things- its hard to be so scared of something so obviously animated.

It’s easy to go into detail about the film’s shortcomings however. John Hurt is having a wonderful time dancing his way through the wilderness, the Crystal skull driving plot is pretty dandy, and the main concern of an older Indiana set in the ‘fifties, actually works quite well. Yet like a giant cartoon with the characters spilling out of the top, larger than the adventure the script grapples with, the film struggles to contain the different personalities in it. Cate Blanchett is a pantomime baddie, lacking in danger, yet doing well with what she is given. With a 19 year wait that was frequently put down to the perfect script, you find it hard to believe that this is the end result. While as an audience I hoped that Spielberg would reign in any problems and make sure this was a movie worthy of its predecessors, I get the impression that instead it became a money making exercise. Spielberg, man, I feel a little bit let down. A fun film in the normal run of things, but a pale animated skit of what came before.