“I don’t think he plans that far ahead.”
“It’s possible that in my old age, I have become cantankerous.” – Me, upon seeing the first trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
To be plain — and fair — the crystal skulls of space aliens, who helped architect the Mayan civilization in the distant past before burying their flying saucer under the South American jungle to wait five thousand years for a human to retrieve one of their goddamned heads, aren’t any more or less insane than the notion of a phantasmic creator force sufficiently pissed off with mankind to create a golden box laden with holy sand that has the power to blow Nazi heads off. I know what I’m in for when I step into an Indiana Jones movie, and it ain’t common sense. To paraphrase Dr. Jones, the danger is folklore: brilliant for its MacGuffiny, quest-inducing power, but thin on credibility.
Still, believable or not, the Ark had rules. (Indy even spelled them out, in a crisp, unapologetic scene, early in Raiders of the Lost Ark.) The creators of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull have apparently observed no rules whatsoever, even the kind of marketing horse-sense that would lead them to have contracted that title into something a little punchier. The skull certainly makes no sense: it’s often hyper-magnetic, but not when a ring of soldiers surround it with machine guns; it occasionally communes directly with the human mind, but not with the quasi-telepathic Soviet villainess (!) who wants to possess its secrets; it’s a piece of solid crystal the size of my right thigh, but it can be carried through the Amazon jungle in a single hand by a babbling whacko in a Pancho Villa poncho.
It’s always pointless to play Us vs. Them on movies like this, but there’s one thing the original Indy movies never were: they were never this sloppy.
Skull is sloppy. That’s a problem. Taken another way, the latest adventure of Indiana Jones could have been over-the-top, zany fun, but this is not that. It’s got a decent first act, where Indy is tossed raggedy-doll-like out of the trunk of a car in the middle of Area 51 by a bunch of Russians, who are standing in for the Nazis to such a painful degree that Cate Blanchett’s accent even leans Teutonic on notable occasions. Indy’s shadow assembles itself, fedora and all, and our man Harrison Ford turns to camera; a gorgeous, pulse-quickening reveal. It’s the best thing about this movie by a country mile — just seeing him, just seeing this old son of a bitch again, no matter what they’ve got him doing.
Poor Indy is forced to find an alien skeleton in the exact same warehouse where they hid the Ark, a pointless and cloying franchise toss-back which includes a shot of the great relic itself, going unnoticed by the goons who are now more interested in what happened in Roswell in ’47. The warehouse run-and-jump gives way to a weird fracas involving a rocket car, a Howdy Doody town, and a nuclear bomb, but at least here, we’re having a reasonably good time with the beaten, bedraggled, and sweat-soaked Dr. Jones, who is just as desperate to understand the world he’s been flung into as we are. This byplay concludes with the one truly indelible image of the film, as Indiana Jones climbs out of a lead-lined refrigerator, mounts a ridge, and watches a mushroom cloud destroy the daytime sky – the sole moment where our ’30s adventure hero has been vividly, graphically thrust into a horrible new world that is dispassionately uninterested in the beliefs and philosophies of one Henry Jones, Jr.
After this, though, the film just capsizes. The plot proper is brought on a motorbike by an annoying emo greaser named Mutt, and herein one of the film’s major problems gets rolling: too many unimpressive characters. Raiders had a supporting cast of about 8 and Temple perhaps half that; I remember every secondary character in both films because they were, if archetypal, at least well-performed enough by their actors to be distinct. Shia LaBeouf, along with glaringly overwrought Ray Winstone and distressingly miscast John Hurt and Cate Blanchett, never bother essaying the task of conveying who the fuck they’re supposed to be in the insane land-chase universe of an Indiana Jones movie. Think of the indelible lightning-strike of Paul Freeman strutting onto the screen in 1981, and compare it to the unsubstantiated performance muck of Mutt, Ox, and Mac. Who are these people?
The plot, too, is stultifying. There’s a 10- or 20-minute set piece in a Peruvian graveyard which Raiders‘ less distracted pacing would have cut through in 2 minutes flat. (Fought the bad guys? Got the skull? Good: get out.) There’s a lengthy and confusing back-and-forth at the Russian camp in the Amazon featuring a skull mental mind-walk, where Spielberg neatly plays the shadow of Indy’s head against a tent wall to make Dr. Jones’ consciousness seem to throb with alien energy. There are some betrayals and reveals about characters we don’t care about, and an awkward comedy break in the jungle soundstage involving a snake and a quicksand pit. (If Harrison Ford weren’t so gleefully great at playing Indiana Jones’ greatest phobia, the latter would take the crown for “stupidest gag in a stupid movie.”)
And then there’s the inevitable run-and-drive-and-splash chase sequence, which feels like it goes on for, I’m not exaggerating, half the movie — in which every single person involved seems to have forgotten what makes Indiana Jones the man he is. It’s actually pretty simple: throw the dude under a truck, and he feels it. Put him up against a bunch of bad guys and he comes away so beaten to shit, he can’t even make love to the girl. Not any more, though: Indy at 58 can drift off three consecutive waterfalls and come up like an Olympic diver. “It’s not the years, it’s the mileage,” Indy used to quip; in the new film, it might well be “It’s neither the years, nor the mileage, nor anything else.” Forget the age jokes peppered throughout; our hero wasn’t even on form like this in ’36. Like John McClane before him, Indiana Jones has become Superman. Where’s the fun in that?
Meanwhile, Shia LaBeouf is capering with monkeys, Spielberg is playing with groundhogs, and Indy is just doing his goddamndest to keep up with his own travelling squad. By film’s end, our lone run-and-jump hero is surrounded by a cadre of minders that would make the Entourage guys blush, to say nothing of the various critters, both terrestrial and not, that keep nosing their way into his story. Crystal aliens, giant snakes, duck cars, a man named Ox and a boy named Mutt…. the flick’s a goddamned terrarium. At least with the man-eating ants, the requisite Phobia Scene arrives and momentarily saves us from the dreck. Sure, if they’d been the giant man-eating ants from Them!, they might have fit the 50s sci-fi pastiche of Skull a bit better, but anyone who saw the hive-minded legions of La Citadelle Asiégée overwhelm all creatures in their path are going to be pulling their feet up onto their seats, nonetheless.
Right, that 50s pastiche. I can see what they’re doing here, see the hoary clichés of a hundred atomic-era science fiction movies worming their way around the plot structure, but when blended with the more robust aerodynamics of the 30s serializing which must, as if by law, never be fully extracted from an Indiana Jones movie, the chemicals never mix into a solution. David Koepp’s dialogue is terrible and his plotting is worse; he throws away the story’s requisite parental angst scenes with warmed-over material from his own Lost World and War of the Worlds scripts, as if our memory of the superior Last Crusade subplot will carry us through any “absent father” subtext in Crystal Skull in lieu of his characters having to do anything about it now.
It goes back to what I said at the beginning — MacGuffin-wise, the space aliens aren’t a bad idea. Conceptually, they are the first plot driver since the Ark with the potential to make our hero realize there are worlds above and beyond this one, that the “blank spaces on the map” (as Jackson’s King Kong called them) are not yet entirely filled in. That means something to Indiana Jones, I imagine; a rejuvenation of the spirit for the aging adventurer who finds himself older and creakier, living in a scarier world and confronted with a son by the only woman who was ever worth spit. It means something to me, too, but not to the filmmakers, who are too busy basking in the warm glow of gifting the world with the return of Indiana Jones to have thought that we might, after 19 years, want this return to have, y’know, a point or something.
Ultimately, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is neither content to mine the aging of its hero nor the aging of its milieu; mortality and morality do not apply here. The result is a movie lacking in any kind of arc, which some would argue is beside the point anyway, but which makes it a surprising non-starter in the canon, even given the flimsy philosophical musings of its predecessors. A nod at the pilot episode of Young Indiana Jones and some war-buddy recollections with Mac are the closest that Skull comes to considering the breadth of experience that would come of Indiana Jones’ long and varied life, and the melancholic 5-odd minutes following the nuclear detonation are as much as the film has to say about a world that has passed that life by. It’s a serious, nearly unforgivable, lack. This guy’s 58 years old, he’s lived through both World Wars, and America is disintegrating into McCarthyism around him — and after noodling about the price of mortality with Jim Broadbent over a Yorick-ish photo of Dad, the best Indy IV can do, goalwise, is yet another temple in yet another South American jungle?
You know the one: it’s the one where angry natives live in the walls with their blow-guns, millennia-old cave paintings answer niggling plot questions, and gigantic clockworks conceal the world’s oldest archaeology collection. The siren call of the MacGuffin is answered in a plagiaristic exhalation of John Williams’ score (note that the Skull theme is a precise inversion of the Ark theme); the villain makes the same mistake that all previous Indy villains have made and gets her head blown cleanly off; and the nuclear (get it?) family unit is laboriously cemented with a wink skyward to the laughing ghost of Sean Connery. By this point, it’s hard not to feel like you’ve just had your ass kicked.
Steven Spielberg finally got back to making Steven Spielberg movies, but it turns out he sucks at it now. His choreography is muddled throughout the inter-vehicle trades and fights of Skull’s climactic chase (War of the Worlds‘ single-take car scene beats the pants off this whole mess), and the Great Green Screen simply overwhelms any kind of physical reality to the whole final third of the film. The director, nominally no slouch with visual effects, appears to have turned the reigns fully over to Lucas – the last act of Skull is as plasticky, digital, and disengaging as the water planet in Attack of the Clones.
Unintentionally, Indy IV seems best fit to be propaganda for escapism itself: when there’s trouble at home at both the national and familial level, the answer seems to be “forget about that, come play with the aliens.” None of the potential emotional journeys that the early parts of the film suggest — even the dopey, paint-by-numbers consequences of Mutt’s parentage — are actually resolved in an engaging way by the final reel. Indy has no personal connection to the skull he is seeking beyond wanting to help out an old college buddy, and getting to the end of the puzzle won’t solve his relationship with his son, his lost love, or his shambled life. Surprisingly, this augurs an unsettling discontinuity of both parental and social responsibility which pairs Indy IV much more closely with the abandon-your-family thematic joyride of Close Encounters than the subsequently apologetic Spielberg might have considered.
These flicks are pop art, but they used to be pop art with soul. In failing to draw the external adventure even slightly towards the internal one, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull makes its fatal mistake. At least Last Crusade wasn’t dumb enough to believe that the adventure was really about the Grail.
Afterword, summer 2009: I’m glad to see the phrase “nuked the fridge” has made its way into the popular consciousness, the film equivalent of television’s “jumped the shark.” Me, I liked that scene. But it was definitely the end of the road.