Media Glutton, May 22 2008 - Indiana Jones

Media Glutton May 22nd, 2008

So I decided to wait until today to write up this week's gluttony because I wanted to write about the new Indiana Jones movie. I can say with some assurance that it was not, in any sense, worth the wait. The movie is aggressively mediocre in its execution, and from the first appearance of a digital ground hog in the opening shot, I started to have a bad feeling about the flick. Now let me say right now that this is not a terrible movie. It's even a mildly enjoyable movie. There are some fun action sequences, especially an early chase scene that takes place in a normally staid environment, and a later, protracted action sequence in the jungle that makes little sense (and suffers from one glaring continuity error) but is a lot of fun while you're watching it. But the dialog and acting are both pretty flat across the board, although it's really the plot that fails on the most levels. Strangely, the thing I was worried about most, Shia LaBeoufShia LaBeouf's character, is actually just fine. He strikes the right balance between rebellious and reasonable, adventuresome and supportive. His particular stereotype could easily have gone very wrong, but it never did.

I must say though, I'm not surprised it's mediocre. The other Indiana Jones films, with the important exception of the original, are also mediocre movies at best. I re-watched The Last Crusade this past week, and it's a deeply flawed film with some terrible supporting performances and more than its share of goofiness and illogic. I guess I would put this new film a little below that, but only a little.

OK, I'm not gonna give any real spoilers, but I'm going to talk in really general terms about the ending and so there might be something here people consider spoilerish (I would consider it so), so don't read the rest of this paragraph if you care. The last act of the film, when they finally get to The Place and deal with The Big Mystery, is a real let down. I mean, the sets are awesome and the effects are cool, and the resolution is pretty much what we've been expecting all along, but there's no reason for Indy and friends to be there. If they'd just given the bad guys the skull at the beginning of the movie along with some directions and then gone home, the ending would have been exactly the same. Nothing the heroes does - nothing at all - determines the final resolution of the film. Nothing. I mean, this is sort of true in the original Raiders of the Lost Ark as well, but there it worked much better. Here it would be bad on its own, but as a pale reflection of the original its even more trite and insignificant. Yeah, the effects are cool, but they're also so far out there that it takes you out of the more visceral realm where these movies work best. Actually I found that throughout the use of digital effects compared to the practical ones in the first film make this movie less compelling at almost every turn - especially the damned digital gophers or groundhogs or whatever they are.

Alright, that's it for the spoilers. I guess on balance I can't quite reccomend this movie (as if you hadn't guessed by now). I wasn't bored watching it, but all I did as soon as it was over was start complaining about unresolved plot points and stupid decisions. No, that's not true - I was complaining about some of those things during the movie as well. I've read rumors that Lucas or Spielberg (I think Lucas) expressed an interest in carrying on the series with LaBeouf as the lead adventurer and Harrison FordHarrison Ford in a mentor/cameo type of role. I might be OK with that actually, although really the problem here was not Ford's age but the bad script and lousy plot, both of which present much greater challenges if the same people make the next film. I'm actually surprised that Speilberg and Lucas spent all this time and effort to put together such a mediocre movie. Well, Lucas has been doing a lot of that lately, so that's not really a surprise, but I would have thought the least they could do would be to get a really top notch script and story and, most of all, a decent ending. Although come to think of it, Spielberg has used pretty much this exact ending before in other movies, so maybe he thinks it actually is really good. He's wrong.