Saw this yesterday. I'd agree with Rogin's comments.

The opening sequence is really well done; the plot exposition is just tiresome (you're begging for an action sequence to move things along); Ray Winstone and John Hurt's characters are completely unnecessary; Shia LeBoeuf continues a suprisingly inoffensive career as teen hero (following on from the Transformers movie); and the ending really lacked oomph (and is so close to both Congo and The Mummy Returns that they should be ashamed).

I think it is time to retire Indy now; I'm not entirely sure about a new generation of films, although they've left themselves open to that possibility. And, sucker that I am, I did enjoy the poignant moment where Jim Broadbent mentions Indy's father and Marcus Brody.

My polish flatmates went to see it at the weekend and left before the end, and they've watched Alien vs Predator II, all the way to the end. It must be dreadful.

Nonsense. They missed out.

***spoiler****
The ending did indeed lack "oomph" but it made sense. The aliens skeletons are still "alive" in that they're all connected to their central consciousness. But they need all of their skulls in place in order to create their portal to their home dimension. One skull is missing, (because the Spaniards nicked it) the circuit.

When all of them are in place, the portal opens and Cate Blanchett gets sucked through it.

The legend says whoever puts all the skulls in place will give the person great "treasure." But their treasure isn't stuff, it's knowledge. Cate Blanchett got all the knowledge, but was sucked into oblivion in the process.

See? It's really quite simple.

Still doesn't adequately explain how, once the 13th skull is returned, the "interdimensional beings" manage to come back to life, destroy the entire city of El Dorado and piss off back to where they came from - why didn't they just crush the Conquistadors like ants in the first place instead of allowing them to nick one of their heads?

Having read Reed's spoilers... it sounds even more shit.

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Point of fact. I'm about 99% sure that at the end of Raiders, that warehouse is labeled "Somewhere in Washington, DC." So this is a different warehouse, but the ark is there now.

That bit's okay with me - WW2 had happened in the meantime, it's entirely plausible the US moved all its important stuff from Washington DC (which would have been a target for bombing raids had the war ever reached the eastern US seaboard) to somewhere in the middle of the Nevada desert.

The UK did exactly the same with its (paper) records of births, marriages and deaths, which were moved lock stock and barrel from Somerset House (on the Thames) to a depot in Southport in Lancashire.

Somerset House never got a scratch in the blitz, whereas one of the few buildings destroyed in Southport was ... you can guess the rest.

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Still doesn't adequately explain how, once the 13th skull is returned, the "interdimensional beings" manage to come back to life,

That's just how they're built. The skulls were always alive. Just sort of dormant. Waiting until they could all reconnect with each other.

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destroy the entire city of El Dorado and piss off back to where they came from

That was just collateral damage from creating their big vortex portal thingy.

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- why didn't they just crush the Conquistadors like ants in the first place instead of allowing them to nick one of their heads?

They weren't interested in crushing anyone. They're scientists. The details of how the Spaniards managed to decapitate one of them isn't explained, but it doesn't really need explanation. The aliens are powerful, but not invincible. After all, one of them crashed in New Mexico.

It's pretty terrible. Easily the worst movie Spielberg has directed since 1941.

There are some entertaining sequences, absolutely, but this is also the first time I can remember actually nodding off in a cinema. The crystal skull is both too purely a McGuffin (so there is no urgency or tension to the revelatory final sequence - contrast with the Grail which was needed to save Dr. Jones and the incorrect replicas of which killed spectacularly, or with the obvious power of the Ark of the Covenant), and too over-exposed to be any good as a McGuffin. It totally fucks the movie - and that destruction has George Lucas' grubby fingerprints all over it.

The only explanation for it that I can see is that Spielberg was too embarassed to tell George what a crock of shit he had dreamed up, so he just did the best he could.

It is definitely intermittently entertaining, but spectacle divorced from character and story just becomes boring very quickly.

Mark Felt wrote:

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Easily the worst movie Spielberg has directed since 1941.

Crikey, nearly seventy years...

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Easily the worst movie Spielberg has directed since 1941.

Hardly. AI, War of the Worlds, The Terminal and The Lost World: Jurassic Park were all worse than this.


I agree that the plot is too muddled with extra characters and the skull was too over-exposed. I agree that Lucas (who merely cowrote this) isn't a great writer.

What, exactly, is George Lucas good for? The recent Star Wars films, especially in contrast to the early ones that he didn't direct, show he's not a very good director.

The recent Star Wars films, as well as the latest Indiana Jones film, suggest he's not really a great writer.

He's good at distilling some good ideas from old movie serials and pulp novels and he's good at hiring some very good CGI people, artists, character designers and so forth. And he's good at merchandising. So basically he's a brilliant producer and studio exec who thinks he's a writer-director.

Yeah, I get the impression that Lucas came up with a brilliant "concept" for the original Star Wars film, and Hollywood being Hollywood they've indulged him ever since, with generally disastrous results.

It would be like J.K. Rowling demanding to direct the Harry Potter movies.

I saw this over the weekend and more or less enjoyed myself, though the enjoyment was based almost entirely on the earned goodwill I have for Indy as the movie itself was pretty terrible for many of the reasons listed above, but also because:

* The Tarzan-like scene was embarrassing and, may have even been so in the animated Disney film in which it belonged.

* To amplify Mark Felt's good points about the crystal skull as MacGuffin, the other problem was that it made no sense as part of Indy's character arc. The Ark, the stones and the grail all tied together with what Indy was going through/learning about himself in the movies, and so MacGuffins were themselves resonant. Here they served no purpose but to look like a larger-than-scale version of something you'd get out of a coin-machine in a biker bar.

* Leaving aside the portions of the plot that seemed to be introduced for no real reason and then dropped, the main plot felt like something out of the post-Franklin W. Dixon-era Hardy Boys. . . very much a poorly thought out, badly written thin reed to hang a movie on. Plus, they somehow managed to put together a Indy-has-a-son story completely without emotional resonance. I would have thought that would be hard to do.

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The only explanation for it that I can see is that Spielberg was too embarassed to tell George what a crock of shit he had dreamed up, so he just did the best he could.

The whole aliens/crystal skull thing reminded me very much of a story Kevin Smith (Clerks, Dogma, etc.) tells about writing a Superman script in the late '90s. The producer, Joel Silver, kept telling him that the script was good, but what it needed to be great was a big, mechanical spider. Eventually, this became one of the reasons Superman didn't get remade until two years ago, and it's also why the Will Smith movie Wild, Wild West had a huge mechanical spider in it. Apparently, Lucas had a stick up his ass about there being aliens in the Indy movies since the beginning, and Spielberg had managed to back him down until, unfortunately now.

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and Hollywood being Hollywood they've indulged him ever since, with generally disastrous results.

I don't know if anyone is indulging him, at least not willingly. He made so much fucking money off of Star Wars and all the related tat that he was able to create and maintain Lucasfilm, ILM and Skywalker Sound. He's essentially the biggest budget independent filmmaker in history.

20th Century Fox distributes his stuff because it's going to make money no matter how bad it is, but they don't have much influence on how it gets made.

Marvel seems to be following this model. They've set up their own studio. Universal or whomever distributes it but they have more or less total control over their superhero films. I think that will usually result in better films, but not always. Marvel has a lot of confidence in its "properities," in the case of Spider-man and Iron Man that's good, because the film benefits by sticking to the source material instead of letting Hollywood ruin it with their committee-think. On the other hand, some of Marvel's properties don't deserve to see the light of day.

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Marvel seems to be following this model.

I believe this was also the Pixar model, before Disney acquired it last year. To tie this together with the thread, Pixar became a stand-alone production house after Steve Jobs bought it from George Lucas.

As for the film, one thing I did find to be amusing/clever, was that Indy's son called himself the dog-themed name "Mutt" rather than his given name, Henry (just like Indy called himself Indiana, after his dog, rather than Henry).

My 7 year old loved it!