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Raiders of The Lost Franchise
Indiana Jones Returns in Paint-by-Number Style
BY STEVEN D. GREYDANUS May 25-31, 2008 Issue |
Posted 5/24/08 at 3:00 AM
Like the Paramount logo mountain peak in the now-famous
opening dissolve that started it all nearly three decades ago, Raiders of the
Lost Ark towers over the surrounding landscape. My friend and fellow critic
Jeff Overstreet considers it the greatest action movie of all time, and I tend
to agree.
On the one hand, while Raiders pays loving homage to the
swashbuckling serials of the past, it transcends them as decisively as Star
Wars transcended the adventures of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. On the other
hand, while Raiders, together with Star Wars, essentially created a whole genre
of popcorn-adventure imitators still going strong today, little if anything in
the past 27 years has come close to even rivaling the original.
This includes the imitators that happen to have Indiana
Jones in the title. As I’ve written elsewhere, there never was a persuasive
series here; there’s just Raiders, followed by a couple of Indiana Jones
flicks. The sequels may have imitated that famous opening shot with the
mountaintop, but it was just homage to homage. The real peak was never reached
again.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull seems
aware of this from the very first shot, which of course begins with the
Paramount logo, and then dissolves to something considerably smaller than any
of the previous pinnacles in the earlier films. This shouldn’t necessarily be
taken to suggest that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the least consequential
of Dr. Jones’ adventures, but perhaps it is the most aware that it will never
rival the original.
The 19 years since the last Indy film are both a limitation
and an asset. As with other recent ’80s nostalgia sequels like Live Free or Die
Hard, Terminator 3 and Rocky Balboa, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull comes so late
that it feels more like legitimate homage than an effort to continue the
franchise per se. Where a real sequel asks what happened next, these latter-day
homages ask, “Where are they now?”
With that different question come different expectations. We
might hope for a superior achievement, but we know better than to expect more
than popcorn entertainment, pretty much disposable except for nostalgia value.
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull delivers what we expect. Don’t hope for more.
Like John McClane in Live Free or Die Hard, Indy can’t
pretend to be the same man he once was, and Lucas and Spielberg have allowed
Indy to age into the Eisenhower era. Russians, obviously, are the new Nazis,
but it’s more than that. Indy’s roots are in 1930s pulp fiction; the pulp
fiction of the 1950s had different concerns, from science fiction to spy
stories.
Accordingly, the iconography of 1950s culture is here, from
the startling image at the end of the bravura first act to the
sense-overloading special-effects extravaganza of the finale. The soundtrack
includes Elvis and the Everly Brothers, and hot-rodding, anti-Red
demonstrations and references to espionage and McCarthyism all put in
appearances. Indy’s youthful sidekick, the oddly named Mutt Williams (Shia
LaBeouf), is a leather-jacketed biker overtly, if entirely superficially,
recalling Brando in The Wild One. Yet the title itself signals that Kingdom of
the Crystal Skull is still a 1930s Republic serial at heart. Ancient temples
and deathtraps, vehicular fight scenes, lost cities, creepy-crawly vermin and
literal cliffhanging remain very much the order of the day.
The title, alas, also points to the film’s key weakness, a
mystical artifact du jour — like the sankara stones in Temple of Doom — that
doesn’t ring any bells for the average moviegoer. Raiders and Last Crusade were
both set in a Judeo-Christian context, lending them an aura of importance, even
spiritual significance. With Raiders, they had us at “Lost Ark”; and of course
the Holy Grail is, well, the Holy Grail. After that, perhaps almost anything
would have been anticlimactic, but surely they could have done better than
going back to mystic stone artifacts from some tribal culture.
At least Crystal Skull basically avoids the potential
pitfalls of New Age gooeyness lurking on all sides of the subject matter.
Crystal skulls really do exist, though they don’t look like the ones in the
film. The real ones are touted by enthusiasts as mystic pre-Columbian
Mesoamerican artifacts, exceeding the capacity of pre-modern craftsmanship and
possessing psychic or healing powers — claims connected with New Age beliefs in
ancient visitors from the stars, pre-modern super-technology, and the
paranormal properties of crystals. (Experts believe crystal skulls are of
modern origin.)
The movie plays with this iconography, with black-bobbed
Russki villainess Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), a Soviet parapsychologist
researcher searching for magical MacGuffins with potential military
applications against Western democracy. But here doesn’t seem to be any
particular worldview hiding in the wings, even when Spalko sneers, “Belief, Dr.
Jones, is a gift you have yet to receive.”
“Oh, I believe, sweetheart,” Indy shoots back, meaning, as
far as I can tell, that he believes that his adventures tend to end in
paranormal pyrotechnics, and it’s best to stay out of the way of that sort of
thing.
The one way in which Crystal Skull does hark back to Raiders
is the welcome return of Karen Allen as Indy’s one true love, Marion Ravenwood.
The rapport of their scenes together, even when they’re bickering, represents
all that was lacking in earlier sequels with their inconsequential female
leads.
In other ways, though, the film continues the trajectory of
the sequels, which got progressively sillier and more over-the-top. Last
Crusade does have some rollicking action scenes, but without the restraint and
minimal sop to realism that make for real excitement. Ironically, the more they
ramp up the action, the less exciting it is.
Crystal Skull’s best scenes are more low-key. I love the
sequence with Indy and Marion sinking into a pit of sand, which makes the
situation about the characters rather than the crisis. I also appreciate a
brief exchange between Indy and Mutt about the latter’s dropout status,
allowing Indy to be a real person with opinions, values and an outlook on life,
not just a swashbuckling grandpa.
What could be Indy’s last bow ends on a nostalgic, fan-pleasing
note, and for a moment playfully flirts with the notion of the fedora passing
to Shia’s character. But the movie is smart enough to know that there will
never be another Indy — and, even in his 60s, Indy has too much panache to pass
the torch to some wet-behind-the-ears wannabe. The fedora belongs to him, now
and forever.
Steven D. Greydanus is editor and chief critic of DecentFilms.com.
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