Crack That Whip! Give The Past A Slip!

In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, everyone’s favourite whip-wielding archaeologist battles Communists, dodges thousands of poison darts and machine-gun bullets, and even withstands an atomic bomb blast as he goes in search of a fabled city made of gold. But with this new adventure, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Harrison Ford are hoping to capture something even more elusive: the magic of a beloved series that has been inactive for nearly two decades.

Many of the hallmarks of the Indiana Jones are here: a thick red line still traces Indy’s travels around the globe via ancient Pan Am routes; every ancient building Indy visits is still filled with gigantic stone pillars that slide in and out of their hiding places amidst much Dolby-ized rumbling and scraping; and Indy has lost none of his propensity for hopping into moving vehicles and punching out whoever’s behind the steering wheel. But not everything has remained unchanged: the Communists, not the Nazis, are the bad guys now (they’re led by Cate Blanchett’s androgynous villainess Irina Spalko); McCarthyite goons are questioning Indy’s patriotism; and Indy must put up with a young, motorcycle-riding tagalong named Mutt (Shia LeBeouf), who may or may not be his son.

Do all the elements snap right into place, like the headpiece on the Staff of Ra? Or are Spielberg & Co. too old for this game, no longer able to outrun the gigantic boulder of audience expectations? I caught an advance screening of the film with my friend, TV columnist Nicola Simpson Khullar (who's also the daughter of an archaeologist, no less!), and sat down afterward with her to compare reactions. Here’s our mildly spoiler-filled conversation.

Paul Matwychuk: Let me start by asking what you were hoping for from this movie. What did you want it to deliver?

Nicola Simpson Khullar: I guess I was hoping for the magic. It’s a franchise that’s supposedly based on action and one-liners, but with this one, I found that what magic there was comes from the music. The only times I felt really connected to it emotionally were when John Williams did his thing and those familiar themes would come up.

PM: Myself, I have to admit, I wasn’t all that interested in this movie when it was announced. The whole idea of returning to the well again after all these years just bored me. Harrison Ford just seemed way too old, he hasn’t given a really dynamic, engaged movie performance in ages—

NSK: You don’t count Hollywood Homicide?

PM: Afraid not, and I was about as interested in seeing him banter with Shia LeBeouf as I was in seeing him paired up with Josh Hartnett. But then a funny thing happened: I remembered seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark when I was 12, the perfect age for it, and I realized how long it’s been since I’ve had that kind of magical, enthralling experience at the movies. And I started to think that maybe Spielberg could pull it off! And suddenly, the idea of sitting in a movie theatre as the lights went down and that Indy theme music started up sounded really exciting. So I completely changed my attitude—I was really looking forward to getting sucked into another rousing adventure.

NSK: So were you sucked in?

PM: Well, I think the movie starts out well and has a lot of fun with the ’50s setting, but once it heads into the jungle, it really starts to fall apart. None of the characters’ motivations are very compelling, the Ray Winstone character isn’t very interesting—the first time Ray Winstone has ever played the least interesting person in a movie!—and the action stuff just seems a lot more rote.

NSK: And there was definitely too much action at the expense of the characterizations. Once they get into the jungle, there are plot holes and anachronisms big enough to drive any of those trucks through. I mean, at one point, they’re driving through the jungle with this massive clearcutter creating a path through the trees, but then the clearcutter is taken out of commission and when the big chase scene starts, they’ve somehow got miles and miles of perfectly clear path in front of them. It’s like the end of Speed, where you just go, “Oh my God, will you just end this chase already!”

PM: Well, I will say that I appreciated the fact that Spielberg is one of the few remaining directors who still takes the time to put together a coherent action sequence. You actually know where everybody is in relation to each other, the editing is crisp and clean, and the shots give you all the narrative information you need with a minimum of fuss. Michael Kahn, Spielberg’s editor, is just a genius at this stuff.

NSK: But the action is so choreographed—it’s all too perfect. I was also distracted by some of the conspicuous greenscreening, especially in the scenes where Karen Allen is driving through the jungle. And that sequence in the cemetery looks really stagebound. I just don’t expect Spielberg to be lazy in that way. Maybe they were trying to duplicate the cheesy look that effects had in the ’50s? Or am I trying too hard to excuse it?

PM: Were you surprised that they didn’t make Indy’s age more of an issue? There are a couple of winking lines of dialogue at the start of the movie about how he’s not as young as he used to be, but it never becomes part of the stakes in the action scenes that he doesn’t have the physical stamina or agility that he used to have. It seems like there could have been a lot more tension in the movie if Indy had to rely on Mutt—this kid whom he doesn’t entirely respect—to do some of the physical stuff.

NSK: One of the best scenes in the original Raiders is when Marion nurses his wounds. He’s really taken a licking by that scene—he can barely move! In this movie, Indy takes way more punches, but he doesn’t wince or limp at all. And he’s 20 years older! You’d think at one point a hit to the chin would break his dentures. Indy’s lost a lot of the ordinary-guy appeal that he had in Raiders. He seems almost indestructible at this point. He’s almost more of an alien than the ones in the movie—which, by the way, really bugged me. It just seemed really X-Files to me. And I don’t want to spoil the whole plot, so maybe I’ll just say that the logic of that backstory seemed really hazy to me.

PM: The ending is a real letdown. And I don’t mean just the final little epilogue, which I think a lot of people are going to find very anticlimactic, but the big action climax feels like nothing more than a retread of the ending of Raiders, where the villain with the foreign accent is destroyed by the powerful object they’ve spent the whole movie trying to acquire. In the world of the Indiana Jones movies, too much power apparently makes your head melt.

NSK: What did you think of Cate Blanchett?

PM: I hate to say it, but I thought she was a big disappointment.

NSK: I gotta agree. And her dialogue coach should have been fired.

PM: Just from the way she’s dressed and styled, you keep waiting for that character to be more deliciously sadistic and kinky...

NSK: Exactly! You expect there to be some kind of sexual tension or flirtation to be there with Indy. The movie isn’t terrible by any means—this isn’t like the Star Wars prequels, where you really feel ripped off at the end of them—but all the missed opportunities do start to pile up. Maybe that’s because they had such a hard time getting a script together—supposedly M. Night Shyamalan wrote a script, Frank Darabont wrote a script. I don’t know how David Koepp wound up with the job. Now, I like David Koepp! I think he did a great job with Jurassic Park. But on this one, I’m sure Spielberg and Lucas must have been looking over his shoulder the whole time. I get the feeling this wasn’t the best script they could come up with; it’s more like the best script they could all agree on.

PM: How do you think people will react to it? Do you think they’ll feel we’re just a couple of cranky critics who are being way too hard on it?

NSK: Well, I think people will find it somewhat predictable. I’d be very surprised if people like the ending.

PM: Shia LeBeouf’s Tarzan routine, swinging through the jungle vines, is not going to go over well. And those gags with the groundhogs were a terrible idea.

NSK: Oh God, the groundhogs! They should have just gotten rid of all the CGI animals, period.

PM: If we’re judging it harshly, I think it’s only in comparison to the high hopes we had for it. Taken on its own merits, it’s a well-made adventure, and there were all sorts of touches in it that made me smile. I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from seeing it. But I miss the irreverence of the original Raiders. Remember the way the first movie ended, with the all-powerful Ark of the Covenant being filed away inside this giant government warehouse? Such a nice, deflating touch. So what does the series have reverence for now? Well... it has reverence mainly for itself. It’s enshrining itself and its place in the history of blockbusters.

NSK: It wants to put itself in a box and hope the next generation will rediscover it 20 years later.