Movie Review: Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull

You know how it goes…the whining, the crying, the pleading and the begging….simply ignore it and it goes away…well after much of the above, my wife finally relented and let me go to the midnight showing of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skill

My initial problem, even before I got to the movie was that the trailers didn’t really show me much ‘new stuff’ – it looked like every Indiana Jones movie I had ever seen – I was hoping that after such a long delay, Spielberg may have had time to rethink the franchise and come up with something fresh, something that wasn’t heavily reliant on explosions, whips and silly one line humor. The trailer demonstrated that Spielberg may have failed in his endeavors as it was full of explosions and a ‘silly’ one liner. I really shouldn’t pre-judge a movie from a 30 second clip, but I’ve generally found that film makers like to put the juicy bits in the trailers. Well, being a huge Indiana Jones fan I decided that I’d give the movie a chance.

Straight away I’ll tell you that I was a little disappointed – although the movie is action filled and set in an intriguing and wonderful world, it simply doesn’t take me to the ‘next level’ I required – hard to explain what I mean, but as you read my opinion I hope I can convey more. It was if Spielberg ‘the robot’ had simply regurgitated all his previous Indiana Jones scripts, stirred them around a little, added a little age-centric humor and produced a movie that he knew would be a blockbuster and therefore didn’t really have to do anything but write a script and voila there’s your movie. The movie had a stagnant feel at times as if the characters themselves were searching for something original…maybe the next movie should be called “Indiana Jones and the Original Script”.

Set in 1957 about 20 years after the ‘Last Crusade’ – kudos to Spielberg here as this meant that the obvious age increase of Indiana was explained, although I always thought of Indian Jones as being ‘ageless’ – some American soldiers arrive at Hangar 51 – you know, the one where all the dead aliens are – well of course they aren’t soldiers but are some Russian spies – the nasty evil spies have Indiana Jones tied up in their trunk of course. Irina (Cate Blanchett) the leader of the Russian spies is intent on forcing Indiana Jones on assisting her on finding a strange magnetic object.

Well despite being a lot older, Indiana Jones still is able to escape and head of to South America in search of a lost professor who is searching for the Crystal Skulls in the City of Gold. Hmmm…..flash backs galore? Where’s the rolling rock? So then there’s the usual assortment of bad guys, traps and tribulations, bugs and scary things, beautiful yet creepy ruins, mystical things and well you know the usual Indiana stuff…the plot gets a little convoluted and often seems to stutter..

Are you still with me, or has your mind started to fade? This is where I began to get disappointed with the movie – the plot is very unoriginal – well from an Indiana Jones point of view that is!! If you really analyze it, replacing the skull with an Arc, replacing the Russian with the Nazis, replacing…etc. etc…..you essentially have a re-hash of the original movie….and as far as that goes, it’s not a particularly great re-hash.

Well without killing the whole plot (there is one and it is quite complicated), Indiana gets into his old mode of world traveler, seeking mystical object, jumping over cars, into cars etc, through explosions, avoiding the natives etc etc….as I said before this movie takes the tried and tested formula that the previous movies used very successfully and relies on them to make the movie a good one….

Spielberg tries to set the 50s scene very quickly, showing how the Russians have suddenly become the evil bad guys as apposed to the Nazis – now as I am British a lot of the 50s references in the initial 20 minutes were totally lost on me – I noticed the audience reacting a little, but I was generally dumb to the references – I guess this is to be expected, but it really doesn’t help build the atmosphere for people who aren’t American.

The feeling of the old CCCP really comes to force and tries to set the ‘cold war’ type feeling immediately – to me this came of a little too much like a ‘stereo type’, and is more down to the perceptions we expect of a CCCP cold war, rather than the reality – not knowing too many Russians from that time, this is just a feeling. Whether this ‘cold war’ feeling really works is hard to judge – I had been so used to the Nazis being the bad guys that this was a very strange diversion for me.

Trying to cope with the loss of the Nazis and the introduction to the new enemy was difficult – there really needs to be another movie in between showing the demise of the Nazis and how this affects Indiana Jones – this would make this more real to me. It would have also been nice perhaps to see a Nazi or two in the movie – or more like a war criminal that had escaped justice…just a thought.

OK so there’s a saying ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ – this formula has worked over and over again and Spielberg has never failed to deliver – I just found that somehow this was a movie too far. It is a thrill trip, there are some pretty spectacular action sequences that are refreshing at times, and really make the movie fun to watch at times, but the depth of character, and the subtleties of the plot seem more forced than in previous movies. There are a lot of parts of the movie where it simply almost stops – this the 2 hours+ actually becomes too long for a change – there’s a lot of plot to digest, but the stagnant ‘pauses’ almost are distracting…..

Part of the problem for me was probably Harrison Ford – while he is a very good actor, and will always be Indiana Jones, it just didn’t feel like an Indiana Jones movie – he makes comments about how everything is more difficult now he is older, but from some of the side shots, you could really tell that he is getting old, and this somehow managed to the movie seem less real to me – perhaps I need my ‘Indiana’ to be young, vibrant and very physical – the new ‘Indiana’ didn’t quite have the sparkle of the 20 year younger Indiana.

It’s an indefinable ‘something’ that is missing – the actor looks like Indiana Jones, does all the same jumps, fights and explosion avoidance that Indiana Jones does, makes the same one-line quips just before biffing a bad guy in the nose – there’s just something intangible missing – it’s almost like Indiana is simply going through the motions……

While I did thoroughly enjoy the action, and the one-liners were typically funny, I felt that the movie was pretty poor when compared to ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ – it has lost a lot of its polish, and has simply turned into another action-adventure with a complicated plot that isn’t particularly new and has lost a lot of the conviction that the earlier movies held.

The performances of the actors were solid – despite Harrison’s obvious age, he was still professional. Personally, I don’t think Cate Blanchett was right for the movie – she played the character well, in a smoldering, sexy way in a similar vein to ‘Nikita’ from the Elton John song – and I always felt there was a certain S&M feel about her – but something about her didn’t make the character believable for me. I can’t really put my finger on why, as she is a very good and professional actress – perhaps all the acting simply felt like that – professional – it lacked a certain inspirational flash, a showing of pure emotion that seemed evident in all the previous movies. Perhaps the lack of a stand out character didn’t help.

Overall the movie was ‘adequate’ for me anyway (See below for my comment about how it will appeal to new watchers probably) – die hard fans will probably love it, as it contains many of the elements that made the previous movies so successful – action, adventure, romance, danger – but the lack of intrigue, the lack of something new….OK so Indiana Jones is an archeologist, but why must every artifact he goes after have mystical powers….I guess it is needed to make the bad guys want the artifact for their own nefarious needs, but surely Spielberg could have come up with something different after 20 years….and there’s the crux of the matter for me – Speilberg simply went with a formula that has always worked.

Undoubtedly there will be a fifth movie, but after watching this and now being extremely tired, I doubt I will go to the theater to watch it. Don’t get me wrong – the look and feel of the movie is great- the atmosphere is excellent, very similar to all the other movies – the attention to detail is still there and you do feel that you are back in the 50s (perhaps this is a little artificially set up) – as a purely action movie it does a good job, and overall isn’t really that bad – it’s just that I had come to expect more from Spielberg and quite frankly from Harrison Ford – the sparkle seems to have faded, the characters almost seemed jaded to me – in a way I felt almost as if Indiana Jones was saying ‘Oh no not again’ rather than ‘Woohoo here we go again’ – it’s that almost negative feeling I got that just didn’t ring true to me.

As I re-read through my review its hard to actually rate this movie – if you have never seen an Indiana Jones movie in your life then you will probably thoroughly enjoy the movie – but if like me, you’ve been anticipating this for almost 20 years then it is a huge let down, and an unexpected one at that…

Go see the movie and judge for yourself, but don’t say I didn’t warn you….