Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Quick.  How old is Indiana Jones supposed to be?

Answer below.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is far better than I expected it to be, which isn't to say it's great, just that it was surprisingly enough not bad that I was able to enjoy it.  I really had little hope for it going in, but all in all, I'd rate Crystal Skull far above Temple of Doom and fourth best of the five movies in the series.

Hold on a minute there, Lance, you say.  There are only four movies in the series.  Raiders, Temple of Doom, Last Crusade, and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Nope, I reply.  There are five.  You are forgetting the second best of all the movies, the featured short at the beginning of Last Crusade, the one starring River Phoenix as a teenage Indiana Jones.

It doesn't have a title but if it did it could be Indiana Jones and the Origin of All His Iconic Props and Character Traits.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has the tightest script of all the movies, including Raiders.  Everything that happens in it, from the opening scene to the fading of the last special effect, happens to move the plot forward.  That's not necessarily a virtue and it doesn't make it better than Raiders or Last Crusade.  I'm not going to get into the ending of Raiders again because to many fans my opinion comes close to insisting there's no Santa Claus.  In the Last Crusade the Holy Grail is the McGuffin not the objective----it's an excuse for the action not a thing interesting for its own sake, like the ark is in Raiders---and there are long stretches when everybody involved, director Steven Spielberg, the screenwriters, the actors and the characters they're playing, and the audience, don't seem to care if they ever make their way to the ending of the movie.  Both movies are as much fun for the side trips they take from their main narrative as for the stories themselves.  Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, though, needs to focus more intently on its story to keep us focused intently on it, because if we ever sit back to just look at the scenery, we'd realize we've been here, done that, and bought the leather jacket and had a lot more fun along the way and the company on the previous rides was a lot less grumpy.

Spielberg, Harrison Ford, and producer George Lucas apparently decided that rather than ignore Indy's (Ford's) age or turn it into an ongoing joke they would treat it as an essential and realistic part of his character.  It's still not the years, it's the mileage, but Indy's worn down and close to worn out when the movie starts.  He's not past it, but time has passed him by.  He's not at all at home in the 1950s---in the age of the Organization Man Indy is the epitome of the dis-organizational man.  He's alone.  Marion's out of the picture.  His father's dead.  His old pal Marcus is dead.  Sallah is forgotten entirely.  His students all admire and respect him but there are no more pretty girls in his classroom batting their lashes at him with "I Love You" written in eyeliner on their eyelids.  He's lonely and a bit depressed.  He's still got a lot of the old moves (Indy isn't as old as Harrison Ford, by the way) but what he seems to lack is the old sense of adventure.  He's doing what he's always been doing because that's what he does and that's all he has.  This isn't Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Midlife Crisis.  But clearly he needs some rejuvenation and a renewed sense of purpose.  I don't think this was a bad tack for the film to take.  It was a good move, in fact, considering that Ford is now older than John Wayne was when the Duke first played Rooster Cogburn and there's just no getting around his age, even if he is in great shape.  But having a gloomy, grumpy old man as the leading character in an action-adventure movie is a problem.  Keeping us focused on the plot allows for us to take in what's happened to Indy since the Last Crusade while not becoming so involved and sympathetic that we start feeling grumpy and gloomy ourselves.

The trouble with this approach is that several things have to happen along the way to make it pay off in the end.

One is Indy has to be rejuvenated and given a renewed sense of purpose.

Two is there needs to be someone besides Indy to identify with, someone who is having the kind of fun we're used to seeing Indiana himself have.

Three is that the plot has to actually matter in the end.

One is taken care of as you know it will be because Karen Allen's name and picture are right there on the poster.  Marion's back!  You also know it will happen if you've guessed what Shia LaBeouf is doing in the picture.

Three...well...as I said everything happens in this movie to help move the plot along, which means if you're paying attention during the opening scenes in the desert warehouse you'll know exactly what sort of big special effects-heavy ending we're heading for and you'll have the whole movie to steel yourself against the inevitable disappointment.

Two is where the movie is at its weakest.

Shia LaBeouf is fine as Indy's sidekick, Mutt Williams.  Transformers showed that LaBeouf can handle action-adventure with Ford's own old mixture of grace and humor and desperate befuddlement. LaBeouf looks as though he's making it up as he goes along too, doubting himself and surprising himself at every turn, but, unfortunately, in Crystal Skull, he's not allowed to rise above the rank of sidekick.  There's no battlefield promotion when he does what his character is apparently designed to do and takes over the heroics and the role of leading man.

Ford has always been at his best when he's had to play off of equals.  In Raiders he had Karen Allen, in Last Crusade he had Sean Connery.  LaBeouf is nowheres near being in Connery's league yet, but he can match the young Karen Allen.  The script never lets him.  Mutt's interchanges with Indy are mostly a matter of Mutt making an old man joke and then watching in amazement and admiration as the old man manages not to get himself killed pulling off some impossible stunt. That doesn't give Ford much to play off of or LaBeouf much to challenge Ford with.  And I can't recall any scenes in which Ford watches in amazement and admiration as the kid manages not to get himself killed. Their relationship in the movie is all about Mutt learning the ropes from Indiana, even though there's enough information dropped in the little expositional dialog between them that Mutt has already learned a lot of those ropes just the way we know Indiana learned them, on his own.

Basically, then, nothing happens between them to change Indy.

The screen lights up, and Ford lightens up, when Karen Allen enters. 

I don't know how Allen and Ford feel about each other in real life, but boy do they look thrilled to be back together in the movie.  At any rate, Indy and Marion are clearly thrilled.  The way their eyes light up as they realize how excited and happy they are at falling easily back into their old bickering ways is a joy to see.  All the years they've been apart don't melt away at once---their separate lives combine in an instant.  It's as if they've been together all along, just doing what they had to do temporarily out of each other's sight. Time doesn't stop or reverse.  It just doesn't matter as much as it had.  We aren't really told what life's been like for Marion since Indy disappeared from her life, but we can guess she has been almost as lonely, and almost all at once all that loneliness is taken away from both of them.  It's the rejuvenating moment we've been waiting for and then...nothing comes of it.

One of the better things about Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is that it takes longer to turn into an advertisement for its own video game than most action-adventure movies these days take.  One of the worst things about it is that it doesn't bring Marion back into Indy's life until about 10 minutes before it turns into a video game.

Once that happens Marion, Indiana, Mutt, and all the other characters, except for Cate Blanchett's evil Russian soldier-scientist, Irina Spalko, cease to matter as anything but targets.  Spalko, a day late and a dollar short, suddenly develops a back story that makes her a more interesting villainess than we knew, but unfortunately we don't have time to take that in before she suffers the usual fate of villains in the Indiana Jones movies and is swallowed up by a less than breathtaking special effect, although at least she doesn't melt.

Intriguingly, Crystal Skull establishes a time line for Indy's "lost" years between Last Crusade and this movie that has Indiana and Marion staying together after Raiders until 1940.  Last Crusade takes place in 1939.  That means that that Indy was cheating on her with that Nazi bitch Elsa Schneider!

Oh well.  We know they must have had a tempestuous time together, maybe that was during one of their periodic separations.

The point is, though, that Indiana and Marion had four years together before breaking up for the last time.  Since Marian wouldn't have expected Indiana to give up his life of adventure and she's not the type to have waited patiently at home while he was running around the world robbing tombs and melting Nazis, that means there are four years worth of Indiana and Marian adventure tales to be told.

I wish just one of them could have been told when Ford and Allen were still young.

By the way, Indiana Jones was born in 1899.

That makes him 37 in Raiders, 58 in Crystal Skull.

Like the man said.  It's not the years, it's the mileage.

Comments

[Tom W.]

Well age is relative in media narratives - Barack Obama is younger than Barack Obama, for instance.

[actor212]

I thought the movie was fine, as well...

...until the ridiculous ending.

Without getting into spoilers, someone really needs to sit down with Spielberg and ask why he feels the need. This is now the fourth movie of recent vintage I can think of where he's taken a perfectly good idea for a movie and skewed it into....well, to say more would be a spoiler, wouldn't it?

Apart from that, Indy becomes a McCarthyite, Shia Leboeuf pretends to be a sophisticated Marlon Brando, and Irina Spalko was a waste of Cate Blanchett (save for that one scene you highlight, but too little, too late). Any frikkin' Strasberg student could have done a competent job on that cardboard cutout.

Yes, there were some amazing scenes involving all of the above, as well as Karen Allen, and they were close enough in proximity that I didn't feel that I could take a quick bathroom break, and yes, I would and probably will see it again.

But it was somewhere in between Temple of Doom and Last Crusade on the scale. And light years from Raiders.

You know what it reminded me of? Sean Connery's remake of "Thunderball"...what the hell was that again? The one with Basinger.

[Apostate]

I actually think, to your point 2, Lance, that they got in at least two "Not bad, kid" moments in there between Indy and the young'un.

One was the bike getaway - Mutt's reckless ride through and into the college.

The second was when Mutt fought hard and bravely to get the skull back while everyone was parallel-driving on that wonderful wide track through the jungle.

I think they showed the kid had mettle.

I liked the movie, down to all the ridiculous details and ending. I even liked the Ukrainian villainess. Her end was appropriate to her -- at least she didn't get eaten by ants. That would have been so wrong - she was high-minded in her way.

Anyway, enough spoilers. Sorry.

[Exiled in New Jersey]

Since my home equity line is tapped out, I couldn't afford the tickets to Indy, so to scratch my Karen Allen itch I popped Starman into the DVD player last night. What chemistry she had with Bridges; she had that magnetic field that seemed to draw her leading men to her. And it is funny but after the love making in the box car, Bridges had that same wonderful, almost smug, expression he flashed in "Picture Show" when he finally succeeded with Jacy. But then the camera pans to Allen, and there is no snide Jacy-ism coming from her mouth, only love in her eyes.

I am glad she is back; I remember the shock of seeing her on Law & Order....not as great as hearing Kathleen Turner's sexy voice turn into a smoker's husk, but almost.

[David]

Well, this is disappointing. Here I was all prepared to read that you hated the movie, and instead, I find that we mostly have the same opinions of it. The only difference, perhaps, is that it was better than you thought it would be, which is not bad but not great, whereas it turned out pretty much what I expected it to be, which is not bad but not great. Raiders was an amazing movie; none of its sequels have lived up to it, so I didn't expect this one to either. I put it roughly on par with the other two - better in some areas, worse in others - but then again, I'm apparently only one of five people who will admit to liking Temple of Doom. I suppose I never fully stopped being a 12-year old.

Anyway, I also wish there had been a little more emphasis on character and a little less on plot, particularly when it comes to Marion, but also for Mutt and even Indy himself. And yeah, I thought the ending was loud and dopey and it seemed like they did it just so they could have a big, cgi-laden finish. It felt like they wanted to do something that was on par with the big finish of Raiders, but they forgot that there was more to the Raiders ending than just special effects. Then again, I personally think the ending of Raiders was one of the top ten best movie endings ever, but like I said, I'm apparently still 12 years old.

[Kit Stolz]

For once I agree with you about a movie. First, I second your character judgments. (As you say, wouldn't it have been interesting to see what happened if a girl tried to flirt with Indy in class? That possibility wasn't broached).

But I would go further and add that in this movie Spielberg and his collaborators found their way out of the corner they painted themselves into years ago with the guilt-ridden "Last Crusade," and, in a light, B-movie sort of way, also dug up interesting answers to moral questions about "grave-robbing" and universal questions about the origin of civilizations. Plus, although perhaps under-utilized, Cate Blanchett made a wonderfully Soviet villain.

A much better movie than I expected.

[Ellz]

Shia LaBeouf is a really good actor and is really fit! I remember when i used to watch the Even Stevens he played Lewis Stevens he maded me laugh!
Anyway I think that he was amazing in Indian Jones! Well as a 15 year old I think it shouldn't only be adults to voice there opinion! :) x (:

X Ellz! X