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Thoughts on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
May. 19th, 2008 | 09:57 am
The opening scene of this latest Indiana Jones installment is terrific. To the strains of Elvis’ “Hound Dog,” you’re plunked squarely into 1957 America, an era of the cold-war, the red scare, and hot-rodders. A jalopy full of exuberant teenagers is tearing down a New Mexico highway alongside a long green convoy of army trucks and jeeps. The soldiers’ reactions range from grim shakes of the head to one young jeep driver, barely older than the teenagers, who’s delighted and plainly longs to hit the gas and race with them. It’s a fun, adrenaline pumping sequence that effectively lays the groundwork for the action scene that follows. (The teenagers in the jalopy, by the way, seem to be lifted from a classic Life Magazine shot of a group of 1950's kids playing “chicken.”)
So long as the film is set in 1950s America, it works. Lucas does a great job of neatly and vividly distilling that era. Leather clad, switchblade wielding bikers with DA haircuts duke it out in diners with the “squares,” and KGB agents and the FBI/MIB bedevil a noticeably older and more cranky Indiana Jones. The blacklisting of academia, the sterile rise of middle class suburbia, nuclear testing, Roswell, and Soviet psychic research are invoked and in a neat bow to the 21st century, Swift-boating is briefly touched on. The feel of that section of the film is similar to the best of that sadly short lived and intelligent Young Indiana Jones television series.
Unfortunately, once the action moves to South America, that kind of detail vanishes, and Lucas relies more and more on special effects, puzzle solving, and non-stop chase scenes. It turns, essentially, into a huge non-interactive video game. It’s not a bad film by any means, but I found myself thinking wistfully of the first movie, when Speilberg had to rely less on CGI and more on making the interplay between his villains and his heroes and their environment interesting. Kate Blanchett is fun in a Boris-and-Natasha sort of way as a spooky, sabre-wielding Soviet agent, but she can’t compare with Belloq (who could?) or even with the Nazi blonde from The Last Crusade. As glad as I am to see Karen Allen again, the father/son interaction between Harrison Ford and Sean Connery in that same film was more complex and engaging.
Watching this movie in the wake of seeing some of the trailers and commentary about the new computer game Grand Theft Auto IV raised an interesting point. It seems to me that the rise of computer generated images is causing a shift in story-telling genres. Filmmakers are relying so heavily on CGI that even action movies are getting dumbed down while at the same time, computer games seem to be getting more intelligent. I was impressed by what I saw of Grand Theft Auto IV. With its embittered greenhorn protagonist and gritty landscape of urban posers and dreamers, it's a computer game with characterization that goes beyond bad guy/good guy. It’s too bad that so many action films are abandoning that level of nuance.
Perhaps because it's a new medium, computer game creators seem to be in the process of figuring out that spectacular CGI functions best as a backdrop, even as filmmakers struggle to cope with a changing industry by relying on it more and more. Until filmmakers stop looking for easy and quick answers to the shift in audience viewing habits, CGI will continue to be more of a detriment than an asset in Hollywood.
In the meantime, an entirely new and exciting form of fiction may be evolving on home computers, a hybrid of gameplay and genuinely complex storytelling.
So long as the film is set in 1950s America, it works. Lucas does a great job of neatly and vividly distilling that era. Leather clad, switchblade wielding bikers with DA haircuts duke it out in diners with the “squares,” and KGB agents and the FBI/MIB bedevil a noticeably older and more cranky Indiana Jones. The blacklisting of academia, the sterile rise of middle class suburbia, nuclear testing, Roswell, and Soviet psychic research are invoked and in a neat bow to the 21st century, Swift-boating is briefly touched on. The feel of that section of the film is similar to the best of that sadly short lived and intelligent Young Indiana Jones television series.
Unfortunately, once the action moves to South America, that kind of detail vanishes, and Lucas relies more and more on special effects, puzzle solving, and non-stop chase scenes. It turns, essentially, into a huge non-interactive video game. It’s not a bad film by any means, but I found myself thinking wistfully of the first movie, when Speilberg had to rely less on CGI and more on making the interplay between his villains and his heroes and their environment interesting. Kate Blanchett is fun in a Boris-and-Natasha sort of way as a spooky, sabre-wielding Soviet agent, but she can’t compare with Belloq (who could?) or even with the Nazi blonde from The Last Crusade. As glad as I am to see Karen Allen again, the father/son interaction between Harrison Ford and Sean Connery in that same film was more complex and engaging.
Watching this movie in the wake of seeing some of the trailers and commentary about the new computer game Grand Theft Auto IV raised an interesting point. It seems to me that the rise of computer generated images is causing a shift in story-telling genres. Filmmakers are relying so heavily on CGI that even action movies are getting dumbed down while at the same time, computer games seem to be getting more intelligent. I was impressed by what I saw of Grand Theft Auto IV. With its embittered greenhorn protagonist and gritty landscape of urban posers and dreamers, it's a computer game with characterization that goes beyond bad guy/good guy. It’s too bad that so many action films are abandoning that level of nuance.
Perhaps because it's a new medium, computer game creators seem to be in the process of figuring out that spectacular CGI functions best as a backdrop, even as filmmakers struggle to cope with a changing industry by relying on it more and more. Until filmmakers stop looking for easy and quick answers to the shift in audience viewing habits, CGI will continue to be more of a detriment than an asset in Hollywood.
In the meantime, an entirely new and exciting form of fiction may be evolving on home computers, a hybrid of gameplay and genuinely complex storytelling.