Games
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Last night I watched Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I was going to save my thoughts on this for a Trash Culture piece with a bunch of other film reviews, but it made me cross about films in general and I wanted the chance to vent. Now.
Crystal Skull isn't a bad film by any stretch of the imagination, but nor is it up to the standards of its predecessors. No, not even Temple of Doom, and it's so far away from Last Crusade and Raiders that it's just not true. Part of the problem with it is the lengthy introductory sequence, including the oft-mocked "nuke the fridge" action, which takes nearly half of the two hour running time and is relatively dull. Once Indy gets out of the USA and stuck into some Archaeology, things improve a great deal. There are some great set pieces, including a car chase which is capable of rivalling sequences in the earlier films. At first I thought the inclusion of aliens in the plot was a stupid cop-out but then I realised that aliens are at the centre of a any number of crackpot theories about new-age archaeology and were actually quite a clever inclusion. But the pacing was always uneven and some of the CGI was awful.
What annoyed me was the motivation behind the film. It just so happened that the very same day I'd been mulling over the fact that I'd not seen either Alien or Aliens in a long time and what great films they were. It never occurred to me that I might want to re-watch Alien 3 or Resurrection or any of the execrable Alien v Predator films. And after watching Crystal Skull it actually made me pretty angry that studios nowadays just can't seem to leave a franchise alone until every last drop of profit has been squeezed out of it - which is usually long, long after every last drop of creativity or enjoyment has been squeezed out of it.
It's bad enough that this happens with modern franchises. But it's repellent when studios resurrect old characters and plots that had already reached the zenith of their powers just to pull out a few more dollars. Many of my absolute favourite teenage films have had this treatment 10, 20 years after they were originally released and it's appalling. It wouldn't be so bad if the films were actually any good, but they rarely are.
The worst offender in this regard has to be the Terminator films. The first two were superb pieces of dark sci-fi. The second film bought the series to a highly satisfying conclusion. But could it be left there? Could it fuck. No, while there was still some popularity - and thus some profit - to be made, we had to have a third instalment which was mildly entertaining but which completely screwed over the ambiguous-yet- pleasing ending of Terminator 2. And then a fourth which was awful and has - hopefully - killed the franchise stone dead.
I'm not very good at "winding back" when it comes to extending storylines past their original conclusion. I have for many years regretted reading the final book in Douglas Adams' Hitchikers series, written when he knew he was dying of cancer and which changes the happy ending of the previous book for one which is far more dark and bitter. Now that I've seen Terminator 3, and Crystal Skull, I can't just erase them from my head and pretend that I'm happy with the way those franchises had been wound up in the predecessor films.
Please, Hollywood, can't you just learn the right time to let a good thing die?
