Every so often, a motion picture comes along that is a touchstone for a certain segment of the population.
If you consider the late 1960s as the time when American films grew up, then "Bonnie and Clyde" or "2001: A Space Odyssey" would surely be hallmarks for a generation. In the 1970s, it has to be "Jaws" and "Star Wars." Regarding the 1980s, I know people for whom "Goonies" and "Ghostbusters" speak to them like no other movie before or after.
But I rarely encounter someone who says that about "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Frankly, I consider the movie and the entire Indiana Jones series to be a wildly over-hyped bit of manufactured mythology. People like the pictures, but it really hasn't achieved the level of being a life-changing experience.
On June 12, 1981, the day it opened, I saw the initial Indiana Jones effort, "Raiders of the Lost Ark," at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. A friend insisted we go to the first afternoon showing. Barely minutes into the feature, the sold-out audience was hooting and hollering, screaming and carrying on, as rapturous with joy as anything I've ever encountered. There aren't religious tent revival meetings that could have achieved that energy level.
As I sat in the theater during those opening seconds of the film, I wondered what these people were getting all worked up about, behaving as they were, as if there would never be another movie. They couldn't possibly know the film's characters or the essence of its story line.
Then I realized what was going on. They weren't reacting to the picture, they were reacting to all the advance publicity. It was that moment when, with some exceptions, movies stopped being a form of creative expression and became a cog in the wheel of commerce.
Some people believe that the world of motion pictures was forever changed with the success of "Jaws" starting on June 20, 1975 -- an event that some say ushered in the concept of the "summer movie blockbuster."
I don't accept that. The popularity of "Jaws" was because it was a terrific film and audiences loved it. Yes, it made a lot of money, but that had nothing to do with "a business plan" and more with Steven Spielberg's talent.
Spielberg always bristles when asked if he's to blame for the "summer movie" machine, and the possible ruination of moviemaking, or at least an alteration of it. I don't blame Spielberg at all.
But I do blame his pal George Lucas, a guy with a couple of lucky cinematic ideas that he's been tediously remaking over and over and over. Lucas brought publicity overkill to the release of his "Star Wars" on May 25, 1977, and he fine-tuned it in 1981 with "Raiders of the Lost Ark."
Now, 27 years later, and after two sequels, the Indiana Jones character is back in "The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." There's a moment in this two-hour-and-four-minute feature when Harrison Ford, returning as an older Indiana Jones, mutters, "Same old, same old." Rarely have truer words ever been spoken on screen.
Jones' iconic fedora is a little more iconic -- it even has a film-ending bit. He still has his leather jacket and bullwhip, although the whip isn't used very much. He still hates snakes, although when forced to grab one to save his life, he doesn't yell out, "I hate snakes." And he is once-again compelled to engage in feisty banter (a la Tracy and Hepburn, but not quite) with his former love interest Marion Ravenwood, played by the returning Karen Allen, who has a surprise in store for Indy.
But if that isn't enough nostalgia for you, the movie offers pretty much the same adventure we've seen in the three previous Indiana Jones pictures. There are car chases, deep dark caverns housing all manner of treasures, friends who are turncoats, and a gadget or gizmo or talisman around which the antics revolve.
This time it's a crystal skull in the shape of the head of the space aliens from Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." This skull has magical powers of mind control, and it's all supposedly rooted in some kind of Mayan mumbo-jumbo relating to those wacky crop circles in fields in South America.
The point is to get caught up in the adventure and overlook the lazy repetitive plotting, the stilted cornball dialogue and the cheesy-looking caves that resemble nothing more than plaster of Paris prototypes for an amusement park theme ride.
The film's villainy comes in the form of Soviet agents also seeking the Mayan mystery. Thus we're in 1957, stuck on a trail with KGB caricatures, meandering from the desert to a Connecticut college to the nether regions of South America.
Additionally -- since this is a George Lucas enterprise, after all -- we're also mired in some sense memory vault from his fondly remembered and apparently much-lamented past. Seriously, man, get some therapy.
We are treated to riffs from movies from long ago, and some from not so long ago.
Cate Blanchett's Irina Spalko. a Soviet mind-control expert, is right out of Lotte Lenya's rigid characterization of evil from James Bond's "From Russia With Love." Ravenwood's son Mutt Williams (Shia LaBoeuf) arrives on the scene exactly the way Marlon Brando's biker was first seen in "The Wild One" -- same shot set-up, but different brand of motorcycle. John Hurt's Professor Oxley is occasionally a raving loon who is nothing more than Walter Huston's grizzled gold seeker from "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre." The angry ants that attack might just be the same hungry gang from "The Naked Jungle," that 1954 Charlton Heston South American plantation tale about rampaging ants. The warehouse in Area 51 in which all manner of boxes are stored (we're given a brief peek at the Ark of the Covenant) is right out of the warehouse in "Citizen Kane" where the sled Rosebud was kept. In fact, Lucas and Spielberg missed a tip-of-their-nostalgic hats here by not lifting a bit of melody from Bernard Herrmann's musical score from "Kane."
But one of the worst bits of copying is from Mickey Rooney's "The Atomic Kid" (1954), which is about a uranium prospector who gets caught in the radiation fall-out from an atom bomb test in the desert. In "The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," it's Indy himself blasted by the nuke. He's really too close for comfort and would never have survived, and that takes you out of the movie. But Lucas (who produced and co-wrote the story upon which David Koepp's screenplay is based) and Spielberg (who directed) don't seem to care about that bit of silliness. Oh, and Sean Connery as Indy's dad does show up, but only in a photograph.
Yes, it's sort of fun seeing the laconic Ford do his laconic Indiana Jones again, but I wasn't impressed with the numerous fight scenes that all looked over-choreographed and markedly fake. John Williams' music is nothing more than movie-theater Muzak. As for the chattering monkeys and briefly seen jungle natives, they are mere filler for this ultimately empty bit of nostalgic fodder. And then there are the comic prairie dogs. Enough said? I think so.
There really had to be a reason to make this fourth Indiana Jones adventure, but I didn't see one on screen. Watching the film, I got the sense that Spielberg wasn't that into it. I guess he was helping out Lucas, an old friend, who simply refuses to acknowledge that he's getting older, and doesn't seem to realize that this material is just getting old.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | May 27 2008 |