OMG! Indy and the Crystal Skulls! OMG! WOW! ***SPOILERS***

Aarontu wrote:

I liked it. I thought the chase scenes were great and the nuclear bomb test part was entertaining. The CG prairie dog things were horrible, though, as were the monkeys. I thought there would be more traps, too. I thought it was pretty good, though, overall. (way better than the star wars prequels)

I felt like the overall message the movie was conveying is:
"Monkeys and aliens hate communists" or something like that.

Oh yeah, the prairie dogs. Fine the first time, but really? more?

Pre-amazon hijinx (most of the movie) I actually felt the movie was very promising.

SPOILERS!!!



Surviving the Nuclear Blast was something new brought to the table, the motorcycle chase wasn't bad. Other than that I'll have to agree that it's not as good as the Original Trilogy. The CG was crap. I was more on the edge of my seat with a foam boulder rolling down in Raiders than the giant stone gears chopping up the ruins in this one. The fire ants were pretty cheese ball as well.

Just got home from seeing it and all I have to say is...
Thanks a fucking lot for destroying my childhood Lucas and Speilberg!What a festering shit pile of a movie.CGI monkeys and crystal aliens can bite my ass!!Fucking aliens dont belong in a indy movie.Who the fuck were those guys with the skull mask and the blow guns anyways??Why didnt "Mutt" just shoot Cate Blanchett with the 30 cal. he was proping himself up with when she was right in front of him??
Hopefully this will be the last Indy film because I dont think they can go any lower.Can they?

Druen Kree wrote:

Just got home from seeing it and all I have to say is...
Thanks a fucking lot for destroying my childhood Lucas and Speilberg!What a festering shit pile of a movie.CGI monkeys and crystal aliens can bite my ass!!Fucking aliens dont belong in a indy movie.Who the fuck were those guys with the skull mask and the blow guns anyways??Why didnt "Mutt" just shoot Cate Blanchett with the 30 cal. he was proping himself up with when she was right in front of him??

MEGA SPOILER POST FOLLOWS

That was exactly what I was going to say. They had to have him (Sheeah LaBooff) talk about fencing just so he could sword-fight on top of a jeep, then he's swinging around holding on to a loaded machinegun and not using it. Not once. Lucas was crushed that he couldn't include Ewoks, so he had to use monkeys and prairie dogs instead. The refrigerator was fooking stupid, I thought that the first half of the movie was twice as long as it should have been, his treacherous british side-kick was stupid(had he stayed a double-agent, rather than turning into a cheep knock-off of Benny from The Mummy, he would have been more interesting), and ALIENS are not Indiana Jones. Blegh. And the swinging through the trees thing was just terrible.

AND, it is understandable that Indy would take the mask-wearing d-bags in stride, but why didn't Mutt McStupid say something like "WTF, who are these guys, yo?" and then Indy could mention what my brother told me, which is that some stupid south-american gangs wear skulls and do brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and that's probably what they were supposed to be.

Furthermore, Indy going off on a ramble about the merits of quicksand was totally out of character, as was the idea of him joining the OSS. And I can't believe how pissed off I was when they revealed that Shia Lebouff, an actor I personally despise, was Indy's son.

I was bouncing up and down in my seat like a little kid when I saw the Lucas Films logo at the beginning, and by the time I left the theater I was excitedly discussing the previews we had seen. That's not a good thing.

And the ants were dumb as hell! Critters in Indiana Jones are supposed to be gross, not deadly. And the part where Cate Blanchetski is hangning from a tree and the ants build a ladder to reach her and then she squishes them... Ugh.

I would absolutely have preferred a movie that was "Formulaic" to something that strays from tradition to the point of bringing Prequels to mind... The whole thing was supposed to be about nostalgia, but they decided to play that card by references to the original series, when they should have played it by remaining fastidiously true to the traditions of the original series.

OK, I finally got around to seeing it and here's some thoughts.

- The movie isn't nearly as bad as some have made it out to be. It's definitely not great, but it's not awful either. It errs just slightly, for me at least, on the side of "OK". Which is really more disappointing than if it totally sucked. I had a fun time watching it, I groaned a couple of times and frowned at the screen a few, but by and large I still enjoyed more than most Hollywood action movies I've seen over the past few years. I expected it to be awful based on what I've heard and came out surprised that it wasn't as bad as everybody has said.

- It's a better movie- and closer in tone to the originals- than any of the STAR WARS prequels. I think it's _much_ better than the prequels, actually. I think it was better than IRON MAN, and I think it was still way better and more genuine than those god damned silly ass MUMMY movies. There were spots where I thought the tone was exactly right and of course a few where I just said "This is not Indiana Jones". But as a whole, I don't feel that it in any way constitutes childhood rape or whatever.

- I really didn't expect the movie to be so old-fashioned. It felt dated. Which frankly, I kind of liked because it wasn't all modernized and jumped-up for today's audience. The CGI was egregious, of course, but not as much as it could have been.

- I actually thought the plot- although very, very sloppy and underwritten- was fine. Aliens/all that Von Daniken stuff fit in just fine with Indiana Jones as far as I'm concerned. The concept of combining archaeology with "mysteries of the unexplained" is right in line with the series. The problem was that the resonance the crystal skull thing _could_ have had wasn't written into the film. The crystal skulls are supposed to contain knowledge to save humanity from its darkest hour- something that could easily have been tied into the (very strange) nuclear testing scene and the Cold War. But wasn't.

- While watching it, the whole film felt weirdly rushed- but in retrospect, I think it may actually be that it was overworked and over-labored. There were some really, really sloppy editorial decisions/transitions and the effects had a second-rate feel.

- There's no doubt about it- the monkey thing is the Jar Jar Binks of the Indy series. I can't believe _somebody_ didn't say "no" to that or the prairie dog stuff. Which puts those things squarely into the "George Lucas made us do it" category. Seeing those kinds of things makes me really feel that people like Lucas and Spielberg are really, really out of touch with their audience. The scenes like those and the waterfall were just so far out of the bounds logic, reality, and reason that they were just stupid- not cool or comic-book at all. The boat scene in TEMPLE OF DOOM was more reasonable, and that's saying a lot.

- Harrison Ford is really, really rusty. But I still liked seeing him on screen as a favorite character. He was mostly fine, but I think they overwrote his "I'm a grizzled, kind of bitter jerk" side. Shia Leboof was actually not that bad. I didn't like that Marion Ravenwood took on the Marcus Brody bumbling idiot role at all. I think Cate Blanchett is both a great actress and amazingly beautiful and it was cool to see her playing a heavy.

- The main thing the movie was missing to me was sense of awe and wonder. We didn't need to see the aliens/entities/whatever because it would have been much more powerful and interesting if we left the movie never really knowing anything about them.

- It seemed strangely small and contained, not really very epic or sweeping at all. It was kind of weird to see a modern movie that was so set-bound.

- I _do not_ like Janusz Kaminski, the DP Spielberg almost always works with these days. That harsh, way-too-hot fill light look works fine for something like MINORITY REPORT but it looks awful in a period film

- To compare this movie- or any other Indiana Jone film- to RAIDERS is completely foolish. RAIDERS is one of the greatest films ever made, a once-in-a-lifetime convergence of all that is right and good about movies and moviemaking. To expect any movie to ever approach that is to set yourself up for grave disappointment.

So in all, I'd say 5-ish, 6-ish out of 10. I definitely didn't hate it.

I wonder if the problem with movies like this is expectations though...I mean, one of the things that makes a movie like RAIDERS, STAR WARS, THE MATRIX, or even FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING so successful is that initially audiences went into those not really expecting anything- or expecting the worst. When those movies turn out to be amazing, then it sets up a situation where we expect that sense of discovery and revelation to be a part of the continued experience- which it just can't be. I wonder how audiences would appraise CRYSTAL SKULL if it were a totally new character without any need to demonstrate fealty to a canon of previous films or audience expectations.

EMPIRE STRIKES BACK is probably the one example where expectations were actually blown out of the water by a vastly superior movie.

Oh, and what the hell did Sallah do to piss Indy off so that he would never be mentioned again? I mean, I understand him not having Willie's picture and Short Round likely cheated him out of money or something...but Sallah seemed like such a nice man.

Saw it this weekend. What a fucking bore. It's not bad, it's just boring. At the end I commented to my wife that I felt like I had just watched THE MUMMY. It was as calculated and soulless as those efforts.

Indiana solves every puzzle instantaneously. Indiana punches guys and gets punched for an hour at a time. The car chases are interminable.

THE CGI. MY GOD THE CGI. Someone please take the computers away from George Lucas--he's totally fucking obsessed. Scenes outside a fucking warehouse were CGI--WHAT THE FUCK FOR? And the muppets. Be they Ewoks, Jabba's band, prairie dogs, or monkeys--keep your fucking muppets out of my movies, George.

Highlight: Indy swinging with the bullwhip in the warehouse and coming up short. The motorcycle chase. Grabbing the "rope."

Lowlights: Aliens? Jesus. Try harder. Bad history too--Indy says he'll go teach in Leipzig--that's in what-was-East Germany you retard. Not exactly a diehard anti-Communist if he's going over there for a gig. Cripes.

I don't know about the Star Wars prequels - they're intended for kids, as were the first three movies (alas 4-6). You probably don't like them, because you're grown up now and only like the older ones due to nostalgia.

But I love a

good

kid's movie...

Highlight: Indy swinging with the bullwhip in the warehouse and coming up short. The motorcycle chase. Grabbing the "rope."

Agreed, those were all nearly classic Indiana Jones except for the "rope"...that just didn't make sense! He doesn't come back with a stick, a vine, or anything else...he comes back with a HUGE FUCKING SNAKE and he just happens to know that it's not dangerous, etc. It was a forced way to remind us that Indy doesn't like snakes. Sloppy writing.

I just don't have a problem with the aliens...I believe in aliens more than I believe in the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail. Is a box full of ghosts or Christ's pimp cup more believable or ingenious?

It was kind of strange how long some of those fisticuff scenes went on...and there was an odd slow place to a lot of it, but I wonder how much of that is because we've gotten used to a different style of filmmaking.

I still can't help but think how we would have recieved TEMPLE OF DOOM or LAST CRUSADE if they were released now...I remember both being soundly trashed by critics and audiences and now they're much more widely appreciated.

Some of the "hey guys, remember this?" referencing got old...I didn't need to see the Ark to know it was in that warehouse somewhere. Although I did like the nod to YOUNG INDIANA JONES, when he mentioned riding with Pancho Villa.

I liked the rope bit because Harrison Ford's "omigod" face is awesome. He goes from running through the shadowy graves blowing darts back into bad guys' mouths to "Aiee! Snake! Snaaaaaake!" I love that.

I'm trying to put a word to what was missing from this one--I feel like it's "charm." This was just a movie. What was really nice about RAIDERS was the juxtaposition of Indy as icon--the silhouette, the bullwhip, etc., and the "reality" of his goofiness and just-barely-scraping-by escapades. This movie was lacking in this department--he really was an unstoppable badass. What's the fun in that?

John Hurt: TOTALLY WASTED. Criminal.
Cate Blanchett: She's no Toht.

OT-rich Catholicism is the best fantasy setting EVAR.

You know what I thought was pretty cool? They actually kept the tradition of the Indy films having these strangely gruesome deaths...big, mainstream movies just don't have that any more, you know?

John Hurt: TOTALLY WASTED. Criminal.

Yes, he probably was. At least he was sober enough to read his 2-3 lines.

That was one plot point I really liked- and it was something actually very Lovecraftian. The whole thing with him going crazy, locked up in a South American asylum and scribbling crazy talk on the walls...

Michael Barnes wrote:

You know what I thought was pretty cool? They actually kept the tradition of the Indy films having these strangely gruesome deaths...big, mainstream movies just don't have that any more, you know?

I'm with you there. They had some really cool deaths--the rocket engine incineration, the eye burning, the first ant implosion. Pretty sweet for PG-13.

Some Lovecraftian stuff would have been great--instead we get a steaming pile of alien autopsy BS. What if he had to get the skull back so Cthulu wouldn't rise? Maybe atomic blasts stirred his slumber and the Guardians At The Gate needed the last of number?

Fuckin' A, George, I'm in the phonebook.

Barnes mentioning the out of touch thing with Lucas and Spielberg hit on something I had been thinking about the movie in retrospect. I think that Lucas and Spielberg are old. I think they are too old to make this kind of film now.

Barnes is currently in semi appologist mode. I'll give him 4 months before he becomes a full on hater.

Better than the mummy? Fuck off.