Dear George & Steven…What Were You Thinking?

My first experience with a “blockbuster” movie was Raiders of the Lost Ark, the original Indiana Jones movie. I was exactly 11 years old, and it was my first time waiting on a really long line by myself to see a film. I saw the film at the now defunct Dutchess Mall, and I remember saying to myself as the line inched forward, “This better be good.”

It was.

Since then, I’ve watched it, beginning to end, at least 150 times. This past weekend, I went to see the new Indiana Jones movie, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, hoping it would be good.

It wasn’t.

Like Temple of Doom, another Indy movie that shouldn’t have been made.

Initially, in the post-FX haze that accompanies such movies, I found myself defending the film, saying that while it wasn’t this or that, it was entertaining. It was entertaining. But unfortunately, Lucas and Spielberg set the bar so high with films 1 & 3 that merely entertaining isn’t good enough. Sh-t, Shoot ‘Em Up was entertaining; but it still sucked.

Once the adrenaline rush wore off, however, I woke up yesterday morning wishing they hadn’t made the film and knowing exactly why I hadn’t liked it. Without spoiling the plot for you, I’d like to tell you exactly why Crystal Skull was bad and how it could have been better:

• First, the stakes were never high enough. In fact, it wasn’t clear at all why the crystal skull was so important. What was needed was another short scene with Cate Blanchett’s character in the U.S.S.R., conferring with Stalin on her experiments. Maybe show her engaging in a mind-reading/mind-control experiment and then explaining to Stalin what she could do with the crystal skull, and how they had to capture Indiana Jones (one of the world’s experts) to find it. The bottom line is, I needed to be worried that the Soviets might actually capture the thing, and I never was. (By contrast, in Raiders it’s literally a tug-of-war to the very end as to who will get the Ark.)
• The entire father-son and Indy-Marion subplot was hokey and contrived. More importantly, these things lowered Indiana Jones’s lone wolf status, making him like every other American guy. Great. Now my last image of Jones is going to be him married to Marion and playing Daddy, not battling Nazis.
• There is a total lack of inevitability in the scenes in Crystal Skull. When you watch Raiders closely, one thing you see is the Aristotelean concept of inevitability in plot. Character Action A inevitably, inexorably leads to or causes Event B. In this new film, what you have instead are a pastiche of scenes that seem to have been created around set devices, traps, gimmicks and such—not because the previous scenes made them inevitable. Another film I felt this way about was the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie.
• The digital effects. I’m sorry, folks, but in what is supposed to be a live-action film, I can tell the difference. Digital effects are great with animated films like Bee Movie and the like. But in films that center around an action-based character getting himself in and out of jams, the digital stuff only draws attention to itself, jarring people like me out of the film. When you watch Raiders closely, you’ll see there are only 2 shots in the entire film that look slightly fake—the Jeep-off-the-cliff shot and the melting-faces shot. But because everything else up to that point has been real, the eye forgives them.

  A scene in Raiders where you see the virtues of live-action over digital effects is in the wide shot of the great dig at Tannis. Those guys wielding pickaxes in the background are flesh-and-blood people, not digitally rendered quasi-humans, cut and pasted 10,000 times into the frame and mindlessly performing the same actions. Each of those extras in Raiders brought a tiny bit of individualism to his little character; I can imagine that each of them invented a tiny backstory for their characters, explaining why they swung their pickaxes a certain way or shoveled out dirt. The result is a beautiful shot that looks real.

The main thing I don’t understand is why Lucas and Spielberg felt compelled to make Crystal Skull at all. There’s nothing particularly unique about the plot, and the legion of writers they went through to come up with a decent script shows in the final product, which is little more than two hours of interesting, humorous stunts. All I can say is, thank God they made Raiders. That film is a masterpiece and will, in my opinion, go down as one of the best movies ever made.