So I’m now on my 3rd summer movie from my list of 15, and thus far the only one I’ve really enjoyed is Iron Man. Speed Racer was total crap, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – the film I had such high hopes for – was only marginally better. The following is my attempt to itemize the various creative and conceptual issues I had with this fourth installment, and to build the case that this was overall the worst of the series. (If you haven’t seen Indy IV yet, you will probably want to skip the rest of this article, although to be very honest, I think I’d be doing you a favor if I spoiled it.)
- The Whole Ancient Aliens Premise. Here’s the thing guys. We’re living in a post-X-Files world. We’ve seen Stargate and its various TV offspring. If you’re going to decide that you want to tell us a story about prehistoric alien settlers, you’re gonna have to get a writer who’s a lot less burned-out than George Lucas, and ideally, does a little bit more research on what other people have already said and done in this crowded sub-genre. For crying out loud, they used that ancient-aliens plot in AVP!
- Shia, King of the Apes. Remember that sequence in Spider-man 3, where Tobey Maguire dons emo threads and struts like an epileptic? Well, Shia’s jungle-vine swinging sequence felt a lot like that. It was so jarringly unbelievable that, had this been a perfectly decent movie, it would have singlehandedly ruined the whole thing. (Of course, it turns out that Indy IV was positively riddled with issues, so it’s hardly unique in that regard.)
- Warriors popping out of the temple walls. Wait … we saw this trick in The Mummy Returns 6 years ago, didn’t we? Lucas should know. His company created the visual effects for it.
- Underground city of gold fills up with water. And I’m pretty sure we saw this exact same sequence in National Treasure 2 less than a year ago as well.
- Our treasure is … knowledge! And believe it or not, we’ve seen this humdinger as well, 14 years ago in a made-for-TV movie called MacGyver: Lost Treasure of Atlantis. I’ve been hunting around for the precise quote, but it doesn’t appear to be anywhere online. A number of other reviewers have made the MacGyver-Indy connection here and here though.
Now, I’ve been a fan of Indiana Jones for as long as I can remember. I’ve often argued that these newer high-adventure movies – National Treasure, The Mummy, Sahara, Fool’s Gold, etc. – are just feeble attempts at recreating the magic of the original Indy trilogy. Nicholas Cage, Brendan Fraser and Matthew McConaughey’s characters in those movies are just facets of Harrison Ford’s, who still plays the reckless, intelligent, wry adventurer better than all of these other hacks put together.
The biggest disappointment to me is that this fourth installment saw what was once the pinnacle of the genre, cribbing notes from its lesser brethren. It’s interesting to note that the parts that made me smile or laugh or sigh were the bits that directly referenced the first three films, e.g., Shia chuckling at the end of a motorcycle chase, and Indy shaking his head disapprovingly – an allusion to a similar scene in The Last Crusade with Indy and his father. If you watch at Star Wars Episodes I through III, you’ll notice a very similar style of pseudo-parodical humor throughout that set of films as well. Lucas, it seems, has lost his ability to come up with anything new, and has fallen back on cheap, self-referential jokes to pander to the fans.
I wonder if he realizes that he is slowly ruining every movie I loved as a child? If Lucas announces a Willow 2, I am going to kill myself.