Film Review: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

In 1977 George Lucas and Steven Spielberg ran into each other while vacationing in Hawaii. Lucas was escaping the pressures bought on by the success of Star Wars, Spielberg had just made Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Jaws. One afternoon at the beach Spielberg told Lucas that he wanted to direct a James Bond film; Lucas insisted he had a much better character for an action adventure movie: an archaeologist called ‘Indiana Smith’.

Thus far we’ve been spared the spectacle of James Bond agonizing over his relationship with his Father (as Spielberg’s heroes are inclined to do); he liked the concept of Indiana but didn’t like the last name so they changed it to ‘Jones’ in honor of Lucas’s dog and spent the afternoon drawing figures in the sand mapping out set pieces and story boards: the lines in the sand became Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Lucas wanted to recreate the serial adventure films from the 30’s using the modern special-effects and his archetype technique of story-telling that made Star Wars such a success. The two directors spent a week with script-writer Lawrence Kasdan brainstorming ideas; Kasdan spent six months turning them into a script. Tom Selleck was cast to play the lead but withdrew due to scheduling conflicts so Harrison Ford, who had worked with Lucas on Star Wars and American Graffiti signed on at the last minute.

Raiders of the Lost Ark was released in June of 1981. It’s one of the most successful films of all time, the hero quickly became a household name; many of the iconic scenes from the film – the escape from the boulder in particular – are cultural touchstones. The theme is instantly recognizable and voters on the Internet Movie Database rate it the seventeenth best film ever made.

Lucas and Spielberg still had plenty of ideas from their week-long brainstorm that never made it into Raiders: a shootout in a club in Shanghai, an escape from a plane in an inflatable raft and a chase through a mineshaft were all stitched together into Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, a prequel released in 1984. Darker in tone, the film has even better action sequences than its predecessor but Spielberg’s decision to cast his wife Kate Capshaw as Indy’s love interest turned out to be one of the worst decisions of his career: huge chunks of the film are unwatchable due to his wife’s dreadful performance and constant screaming. The film was a success but not hugely so. Capshaw’s career never recovered.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade – an unwise title in retrospect – also did well at the box office without recapturing the success of Raiders. Unlike the Star Wars trilogy in which each movie had its own individual character the Indiana Jones franchise consists of repeated attempts to recreate the magic of the original film.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull does not succeed in that respect; or really in any respect except in that it will make an awful of lot money for Lucas and Spielberg who are both already multi-billionaires. I saw it in a crowded theatre in central Wellington filled with the families who are the movies core-demographic and I was struck by the lack of engagement the audience had with the film. The jokes got few laughs, the stunts and special effects almost no gasps. When it comes to constructing ingenious action sequences Spielberg is easily the most gifted film-maker of all time; he has an incredible technical ability and limitless resources to call upon yet the fights atop boats, tanks, cars, trucks and motorbikes are simply the same old set pieces we’ve seen done hundreds of times before.

This is easily the worst of the Indiana Jones films – while there’s no performance as dire as Capshaw’s in Temple of Doom the script is a catastrophe: gone are the spectacular opening sequences, replaced with a pointless drag race across the desert. Ray Winston plays a character that seems entirely superfluous – no doubt he served a vital role in some earlier draft of the script or perhaps a key scene that got left behind in the editing room. One of the running gags about the character of Jones was that he’s that most unlikely of action heroes: a university professor – only now he’s also a former secret agent and war hero. And the sense of the numinous that pervaded the previous films – the notion that the Lost Ark, Holy Grail and Stones of Sankara are unearthly artifacts not of this world – has also been left behind, replaced by a plastic looking aliens skull.

The plot, such as it is, involves returning the plastic – I mean, crystal – skull to a lost city in South America and trying to prevent the evil Soviets from same. Whoever gets there first will . . . well, the movie isn’t too sure about what will happen then. The finale is a deus-ex-machina in which the heroes are saved and the Soviets destroyed for no apparent reason other than that’s how movies like this are supposed to end.

At this point I should walk back a bit and reassure viewers that this is no Revenge of the Sith. The movie is not bad, merely mediocre with some impressive but unoriginal action sequences. The special effects are formidible; the writing dismal and any scene that doesn’t involve stunts or effects is very poorly directed: there are plenty of shots that look as if Ford, William Hurt and the rest of the actors are simply sitting on a blue-screened sound stage; there is no sense of direction or any chemistry between the performers – it seems like they read their scripts, showed up to work that morning and the DOP shot their scenes while Lucas and Spielberg were off meeting with someone about the Burger King marketing tie-in.

One of the running gags in the film is Indiana’s age – and its hard to get around the absurdity of Ford running around with a whip and pistol fighting Soviet soldiers in his sixties. But worse, I think is the age of the directors – the movie is filled with 50’s pop culture gags and cultural references that Lucas and Spielberg are clearly aiming at the parents in the audience. The problem here is that almost all those parents were born in the sixties and seventies and have no idea what the film-makers are on about. Like the Plastic Skull, the Ark of the Covenant and Indiana Jones himself, Lucas and Spielberg have become relics of a bygone age.