I do wonder though if this came out in the alien-crazed nineties if it wouldn’t have been an even more enormous hit, you know? Jones solves Roswell and all that.

This is the first I’ve heard that it’s racist to say South American pyramids being built by aliens is racist. This theory exists because nobody knew how pyramids were made and the pyramids show up around the world at roughly the same time despite the cultures not being able to communicate with one another, and some SF writer said, “maybe it’s aliens” and that was that.

Don’t trivialize the word racist. Not cool.

It was like watching a friend play a video game, without the tension of hoping my friend will eventually succeed.

What happened to the grave ghoulies after Indy did the blowback? Why visit in the middle of the night?

I couldn’t help but think of Uncle Scrooge when they entered the temple.

The prairie dogs serve as bookends for the opening sequence. Woulda been better to have a kid ALA Rick Jones stop and give him a ride in his jallopy. (Nice job on the atomic destruction.)

What if the replacement of the skull was a test? Just like the Monolith on the Moon, it would signal that the “locals” had progressed enough to trigger another visitation, perhaps.

79% at Rottentomatoes.com

It was worth the $6 I paid.

It’s George Lucas to the hilt. He Does Not Understand Humans.

My only real complaint is that the intelligence factor was reduced in order to increase the frequency of the action. And unfortunately I bought the idea of aliens and NOT the idea of Mutt swinging through the trees and landing on the villain.

One other point: It’s the desire for POWER that is always the undoing of Indiana Jones’ villains.

The problems for me were mainly the tone, and the complete lack of emotional stakes. When Indy’s father gets shot in the gut in The Last Crusade, you can see on his face that he’s deathly afraid of losing his dad, no matter how estranged they are. When Indy’s about to free the slave children in Temple of Doom, you can tell just how pissed off he is at having seen them abused. When Marion is seemingly killed in Raiders, his body language is of a man who just lost everything. When he stumbles upon her alive, you get a sense of just how overjoyed he is when he rips off her gag and kisses her.

When he meets up with Marion twenty years later in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and especially when he finds out Mutt is his son… it’s played for yuks, and that put me off.

And I’m sorry, John Hurt’s Oxley was one of the most useless and distracting characters of the entire series. I realize that the original intent was for that to be Indy’s dad before Sean Connery decided to stay retired, but he brought nothing– NOTHING– to the story. That character doesn’t work without an emotional connection to both Indy and Mutt, providing a bridge between them for the audience. And this while Marion had nothing to do other than be Mrs. Bickerson to Indy!

Imagine for a second if Marion were the one to have gone crazy in the jungle while staring at the crystal skull for too long. Imagine if Indy, after having gone twenty years without facing how much he loved her, now couldn’t even get through to her face to face. Imagine how much more the audience might empathize with Mutt when he has to see her this way. Imagine how much vital to the story she would have been if she were key to getting everyone to where the aliens were buried (like she was in finding the Well of Souls in Raiders).

It was really nice to see Ford as Indy, and I have to say the old man’s still got it. He slipped the character on like a comfortable, old hat (pun intended), and I loved the little hints we got about what he’s been up to for the last couple of decades. The opening (mushroom clouds and flying refrigerators notwithstanding), the campus chase, and the grave-robbing in Peru really felt right in line with what I love about these movies.

But jeez, what’s with the CG gophers? And the CG monkeys? And the friggin’ vine-swinging? And the three giant waterfalls that everybody survived? And what’s the deal with the whole “now that the adventure’s over, let’s get married, and look, I got my old job back and a promotion, and aren’t just a happy, just-add-water, instant family” thing? It just left me feeling like Spileberg’s been hanging out with Lucas WAY too much. When did he lose his taste and objectivity? Is no one honest with them anymore?

I think that when the two of them were in their primes, they were still childless, and still in touch with their childhoods. Raiders was made by two kindred, childlike spirits; that’s why we got things like melting faces. That’s something a kid would come up with. Now, they’re both older guys with grown children, and their perspective is that of parents. That’s poison to movies like this.

Anyway, I’d give it a C+, overall, mainly because it’s great to see old friends, even if you’re not as close anymore.

We were watching a bit of INDY IV making of stuff tonight an they were talking about how in TEMPLE OF DOOM they used real bugs and the bugs ran off every day — by the time they finished filming only 25% of the bugs were left. in RAIDERS they had BINS of real, live snakes they dumped onto the set.

What a different world it was.

This is funnier than anything in the movie.

Irina wasn’t bad as a villain, despite looking quite a bit like Miss Dwyer from The Invisibles.

Shia Tarzan was a very, very bad idea.

And if you show a gopher in the first scene of a film it better have relevance to the rest of the film.

And why the hell was this film so bright. Did everyone in the church at the end of the film need to have a spot of sunshine on their shoulder?

And I know Ford hasn’t had a great run of late, and we all knew Lucas has been sucking ash as a writer since he created one JarJar Binks, but how in holy silly christdom did Spielberg actually allow this to be the final product. The director of Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, and Munich, and this is what he made. It boggles the mind.

a. It supports the racist notion that, while ancient Caucasians could surely have built Rome or Athens, Native Americans (same applies to Egyptians, Easter Islanders, etc.) could never have built their civilization without help from ALIENS from outer-space!

b. Strong, sexy, cultured Irina Spalko just HAD to be vaporized by a friky Alien, because -of all things-, she happened to be seeking KNOWLEDGE!

The movie actually wasn’t horrible. The NY Post gushed and created extra stars to award it, but The NY Times might have been looking to take away stars undeservedly. I guess the movie was going to sink or swim, not on Harrison Ford, but on the success of Shia LeBeouf. If his character didn’t work, the whole movie was going to be a total waste of time, and he was perfectly fine I thought in the role. I never saw him before and don’t even know why he is famous other than he makes the occasional appearance on Page Six. I guess the way they went from strangers to Dad and Son faster than Mike and Marcia Brady bonded was a little silly, but that’s about it other than I found the entire first 1/3 of the movie pretty lackluster. Maybe that is because of Blanchett again. She didn’t really work for me.

I don’t know why people are knocking the name “Mutt”. As it happens my father’s nickname was “Mutt” and he was a child of the 50s, hanging in pool halls, wearing leather jackets and having the DA haircut. I guess because of that it sounds pretty normal to me.

Rich!

Great, fun flick!

Oh, wait…

I still can’t figure out why the first 3-minute scene with the rejects from American Graffiti wasn’t left on the cutting-room floor. What was the point of it? It was the equivalent of starting a James Bond movie with a couple of guys fly fishing before the opening credits.

Cliches took the place of mythology and legends this time around. It looked like a bunch of old guys got together to make a movie like they used to back when they had fresh ideas, which they no longer have. The action sequences were okay, but clearly designed for the inevitable theme-park ride.

“Hmmm… that means… this skull… uhh… Ox…. hmmm…return…. uhhh….”

Then once the jungle chase starts, it’s non-stop running for an hour, then the movie is over.

A classic? Nope, but at least this movie didn’t leave a bad taste in my mouth like Superman Returns did. That was my biggest fear going in.

When I sit back and think about the big things about KOTCS that bug me, it all comes back to Temple of Doom. They’ve done insanse things in TOD, and that movie was filled with lots of scenes that don’t serve the story. They might be exciting to see, but cut them out and it won’t affect the plot at all. That said, I can still enoy TOD for what it is. It’s got some great music, and as corny as it may be, the whole “must save the children” bit gave Indy something to fight for.

KOTCS doesn’t have that clear motivation. Sure, it’s there. Must stop Soviets. Must return skull (’cause it told me to). Must try to save old friend’s sanity. But they’re presented as very vague goals. And, sadly, there is very little new music in it. Most of it is recylced from the previous films.

Still, I did have fun seeing it. I can now categorize the movies like Star Trek filsm (though with Star Trek, the even ones are the good ones, and with Indy it’s the odd ones.)

I feel a special attachment to her character, as one might guess.

If you think about the kinds of mysteries and artifacts Dr. Jones was studying pre- and during WW2, the natural progression for the 50s would be aliens. It’s hard to be annoyed by them, because aliens are really just an extrapolation of the mythos.

In re: Shia & The Monkeys…

A subtle hint that he’ll be playing Yorick when they make the inevitable movie of Y: The Last Man?