Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull

Post by **droosan** » May 28th, 2008, 5:05 pm

Ben wrote:It lost me the second time the boat-car-thing went over the waterfall. Indy's usually lucky by accident...not by simply inviting danger like that.

Also recall that in Temple of Doom, Indy, Willie and Short Round survive a plunge from an airplane onto a mountain using an inflatable life-raft .. which then itself plunges into an Indian river from an even greater height than the waterfalls in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, with no ill-effects suffered by the trio, save having the wind 'knocked out' of them .. so, such feats are not without precedent in the series. :idea:

/yes, I realize that ToD is generally the 'least-liked' of the sequels .. but it was the first one I saw, and I still enjoy it. Actually, of all the IJ films, I consider ToD to be the episode with the most 'authentic' pulp/adventure feel.

Post by **Meg** » May 28th, 2008, 9:34 pm

I also really get a kick out of Temple of Doom. C'mon, it's fun!

Post by **Whippet Angel** » May 28th, 2008, 11:35 pm

Totally! I watched it over and over when I was about 6 or 7. It's still my favorite Indy flick to this day. ^___^

Post by **eddievalient** » May 29th, 2008, 2:15 am

Last Crusade is my favorite. I've always loved "quest" movies (Willow, The Black Cauldron, etc) and LC has to be one of the best ever made. Ya gotta love the Young Indy opening scene and the music is some of the best that John Williams has ever done.

Post by **Ben** » May 29th, 2008, 3:42 am

Said it before and I'll say it again...the opening 22 minutes of Temple Of Doom are perhaps the most exhilarating 22 minutes of action ever put on film.

Temple Of Doom is perhaps my favorite Indy...it's at least as good as Raiders, but it probably beats it a bit, for me at least, because Indy doesn't do anything at the end of Raiders, whereas in TOD he's really in there and involved (and the effects are just great).

I saw KOTCS again last night and I know why things didn't work for me. I actually found a bit more in Ford's performance, which was good, and even though the middle really is talky and nothing happens, the reason some of the more outlandish moments in the originals work and didn't work for me here is because of the score.

There's a lot you can get away with when you have John Williams lifting you up and carrying you over, as he does in many of the crazy elements of the first three, but here he was just using older cues from the previous films or putting in very weak approximations of his older stuff.

It's the sole reason KOTCS didn't come over like the old ones. Williams' music has always made Spielberg films Spielberg films, and this one didn't feel like it. It was an interesting look ahead to what we might feel is a Spielberg-copy when the great composer does finally pass away. But, for me at least, seeing the movie a second time revealed this to be the reason it didn't quite pull me through the bike chase and the over the top jungle scenes.

Post by **Vernadyn** » May 29th, 2008, 5:01 pm

Yeah, Williams definitely seems more inspired by more serious films these days (years). Though, as I said, the more I'm listening to the Crystal Skull score, the more I'm finding to like.

As long as we're playing "favorite Indy films," I'm going to go with Raiders. Though, in my opinion, you can't really go wrong with an Indy film.

Post by **EricJ** » May 29th, 2008, 6:32 pm

Like Star Wars, I'm now at the age where I can say "Whaddya MEAN, you've never seen Raiders?...Oh, right, 1981. :/ "

Which, like SW, makes it harder to explain to the Trilogy-On-Video generation just why the first film had its own artistic ambitions, and the other two sequels just beat character shticks into the ground--
Raiders was a film-genre tribute to Everything We Imagined 40's Aventures to Be (Without Ever Having Actually Seen One); it's only after we cared about the characters' names that the series started going off the rails....Fourth movie especially included.

Post by **James** » May 31st, 2008, 11:47 pm

Finally saw it. And if you want to label me a hater rather than admit there were serious problems with the film go ahead!

Throw out the bored actors and the over the top cartooniness. My biggest problem was the plot. No one who saw that movie one time (without the benefit of spoilers) could explain the storyline. Is was a jumbled mess.

Fun movie, but disappointing after all these years.

Post by **droosan** » June 1st, 2008, 4:31 am

I've seen the movie just once .. completely spoiler-free .. and I understood what was going on, just fine.

I wouldn't necessarily call it a 'jumbled mess', but I will concede that there were a number of scenes that either didn't lead anywhere constructive (such as the quicksand escape), or that weren't satisfactorily explained (like the graveyard/temple 'guardians'). The 'puzzle solving' was also much 'talkier' than in previous IJ films .. and Indy seemed to actually be willingly helping the Russkies, more often than not .. but beyond that, the plot really didn't bother me too much.

I will say, and have said, that I consider KotCS to be the 'least' of the Raiders sequels .. but I still had a fun time at the cinema, and Harrison Ford managed to make me believe he was Indiana Jones, one more time. That's really all I ever wanted from this movie, and is perhaps why I wasn't terribly disappointed.

.. hater!

(j/k)

Post by **droosan** » June 1st, 2008, 4:39 am

EricJ wrote:Like Star Wars, I'm now at the age where I can say "Whaddya MEAN, you've never seen Raiders?...Oh, right, 1981. :/ "

Which, like SW, makes it harder to explain to the Trilogy-On-Video generation just why the first film had its own artistic ambitions, and the other two sequels just beat character shticks into the ground--

This still happens today .. one need look no further than The Matrix or the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogies.

Any unexpectedly-successful film which was made as a complete 'stand-alone' story -- without a 'franchise' planned ahead of time -- is bound to have this problem. :idea:

---------

And I 'missed-out' on Raiders of the Lost Ark during its original theatrical run, despite being 11 years old at the time. What can I say, my parents weren't big film-goers -- we saw maybe two or three movies per year, when I was a kid -- and from what I knew about the film at the time (most of which, I'm a bit embarrassed to reveal, came from the CRACKED mazagine parody comic

), Raiders didn't seem like the kind of movie I would've enjoyed at that age .. mostly because it didn't take place in outer-space.

My tastes had changed quickly during the next four years. By age 15, I was voraciously reading comic-books like The Rocketeer and The Shadow, and old Doc Savage pulp paperbacks .. so Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was a film that I embraced wholeheartedly, and went back on my own to see a second time (to the consternation of my thrifty parents). I also rented Raiders shortly afterward .. and found that I loved it, as well.

Though I recognize that RotLA is a far superior film, I'm glad that I saw ToD first. Not just because (as it turned out) it was the correct 'chronological' order .. but because Temple turned out to be just the right film for me, at just the right age. I might not have enjoyed it as much, had my expectations been raised by seeing Raiders first (I noticed that most of my high school friends felt 'let down' by Temple of Doom).

Post by **Ben** » June 1st, 2008, 7:46 am

I too "missed" Raiders theatrically...first time out.

By the time Temple Of Doom came along, I was the right age for this stuff and luckily a few cinemas in London were showing double bills of Raiders and Doom.

I'm not quite sure which way around they showed them, but I'm pretty sure it was Raiders and then Doom...so I saw them both the same time, in a theater, and Doom left more of an impression on me.

Glad to hear James' thoughts on KOTCS at last. I think I mentioned bored actors and a talky script...the phrase "going through the motions" has never seemed more appropriate. There is fun to be had in the movie, but a return to form this is not.

Interesting that, while no-one is really going out and complaining this The Phantom Menace of Indy movies, no-one is really coming back and screaming that this totally pushed all the right buttons. And everyone I speak to moans about the jungle scenes and how none of it looked real. Trouble is, in the old days they went there and shot this stuff...now most of it is on a nice, warm, clean greenscreen soundstage. Also, apart from apparently wanting all the stunts to be "real", good old CG wire removal was used throughout...something I don't remember Vic Armstrong and his original crew having to worry about!

Post by **James** » June 1st, 2008, 10:47 am

I watched the "making of..." the first two films on DVD the day before I saw the new film. And it really explains the problem. Spielberg and Lucas admit many times on the DVD that the first two films were written and conceived first and foremost as cool ideas and setpieces. They then went in and wrote a story around those ideas. This latest film is obviously just like that without the good story written around the scenes.

Post by **eddievalient** » June 2nd, 2008, 12:57 am

For those of you who missed it, here's what Lucas had to say in a recent interview:

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So why resurrect Indy after all these years?

GEORGE LUCAS: We're doing it to have fun. We're not doing it to say, Oh, we're gonna get an Academy Award, everybody's gonna love us.... We don't need the money. We're only going to get aggravation. The fans think it's gonna be the Second Coming. And it's not the Second Coming. They've already written the story [in their heads], and lemme tell ya, it's not that story. So they're going to be very disappointed. I went through this with Phantom Menace. Believe me, I've been there, I've done it, I know exactly the way they react. And they're very vocal about these things. We're not gonna have adoring fans sending us e-mails saying how much they loved the movie. We're gonna have a bunch of angry people saying, ''You're a bunch of a--holes, you should never have done this. You've ruined my life forever. I loved Indiana Jones so much and now it's ruined.'' And all that kind of stuff.

STEVEN SPIELBERG: Uh, he needs to speak for himself here. [Laughter all around] You need to put in parentheses ''George Lucas is totally speaking for himself.'' And I absolve myself of any connection with that last statement about fans not liking it.

LUCAS: All I'm saying is, I have been there, and I have walked through the valley of death on highly anticipated sequels.

So there ya go. Lucas is doing what he wants to do. Whether folks like it or hate it, at this point he's only out to please himself. I'll say again that I liked Crystal Skull quite a bit and I'm looking forward to seeing it again when the DVD comes out.

Post by **Vernadyn** » June 2nd, 2008, 3:17 pm

I just got The Complete Making of Indiana Jones book, and there are some pretty revealing comments that Lucas, Spielberg, and Ford make about Crystal Skull. Lucas says that he saw no point in making the film if it didn't have

He says, "My God, it can't miss."

When he asked Ford if he wanted to do another Indy movie, Ford agreed. Then Lucas mentioned the thing it had to have, and Ford "pitched it right back." Lucas replied, "But you haven't given me a chance. I know this is going to work." Ford replied that he would reconsider if Lucas talked it over with Spielberg. Spielberg didn't feel comfortable with the idea, as he felt he had made those kinds of films already. I think it's pretty well known that Frank Darabont wrote a script that Spielberg and Ford liked, but Lucas didn't. Before that, there were two screenwriters before Darabont, one of them being the late Jeff Boam, who wrote Last Crusade. The script he wrote pleased Lucas, but not Spielberg. In the end, Spielberg claims that it took David Koepp to make Lucas's idea pleasing to him.

Make of that what you will.

Post by **Ben** » June 3rd, 2008, 6:25 am

It's clear what Spielberg and Ford made of it, anyway. A lacklustre movie with no heart from its creators. Explains a lot.

Man, I wish Darabont had nailed it for Lucas. No good a director making a script if he's not 100% into it. And "aliens", or "inter-dimensional beings" as they are called, no doubt to easy Spielberg that they're not aliens (c'mon, they zoom off in a spaceship...they're aliens!) is not what Indy Jones is about!

Lucas' mind is fried.