Slashdot Mirror
Early Review Calls New Indiana Jones Film Dreadful
bowman9991 writes "Hope this one isn't true! An early negative review calls the upcoming "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" movie predictable, lacking in tension, and a fan's worst nightmare. SFFMedia believes this new Indiana Jones movie could create a similar reaction a lot of people experienced after watching the first of the last three Star Wars movies, 'The Phantom Menace': you wait for years and years, the anticipation building, and then it's so awful it taints your view of the original movies. Of course George Lucas was involved with Star Wars too." The SFFMedia piece refers to this review on Ain't it Cool News. The trailer I saw (before Iron Man) actually looked great to me, so I'm taking this with a grain of salt.
Yes, that's the brilliant recut "Shining" trailer. If you haven't see it yet, go click now.
Here's an interview with the guy behind it.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
media hype:
OMFG there's a negative review of indy 4!
reality:
negative
neutral
neutral
positive
the nyt has the real story: studios are required by law to show movies to exhibitors before they buy films (which is how the party pooper reviewer shogunmaster got to see it), which in today's internet age means that studios (especially control-freak spielberg on this specific issue) are losing the ability to control pre-release media buzz
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Actually, I believe that scene was cut from the movie due to the collapse of said towers and the implications of that.
There just isn't any excuse for Jar-Jar.
Temple of Doom is the reason PG-13 was created. There was no PG-13 rating at the time but the heart-ripping-out sequence was just a bit too gory for the PG rating so somebody yelled THINK OF THE CHILDREN and thus PG-13 was created. Which means Temple of Doom itself is, in fact, PG.
Last Crusade is PG-13.
Douchebag.
To the mods: That whole bit is by Patton Oswalt, not the anonymous coward.
It means theaters owners haggle with the distribution companies. If an movie expected to do incredibly well is downplayed, they might be able to get the copies of the films for the projectors for a slight discount.
heh. CAPTCHA was "procure"
... I found it funny that they mentioned the Lost City of Gold as it accidentally referenced the old Allen Quartermaine days (a crappy knockoff of Indy Movies incase you missed them)At any rate, take AICN stuff as you would with any critic. For those that have never visited the site, read only the first paragraph or two and then skip to the last paragraph or two of Harry's reviews. In between, he's going to expound about a recent mundane task he did which has no bearing on the review, such as his numerous trips to take his grandma to the vet or whatever. STFU, Harry, and get on the with the review. Sheesh.
-fragbait
I read this on AICN earlier this week. If you read the reviews coming in (there are now at least 3) the first seemed to slam the movie. It was supposed to be an executive who saw the movie, and just wasn't impressed. Personally, I felt he was just trying to review it to sway the tide. The next two reviews that came in were both fairly positive. The second said that it was basically "just like the first two, just add 20 years to the characters." The third said "seems hollow, but still true to the Indiana Jones universe."
Basically, I feel that the first review was some guy either pissed off at the studios, pissed at GL or SS, OR, knew that a crapload of people who have been hanging on the edge of their seats for any word of this movie would hear HIS first, and for whatever reason he decided to hate on it.
Personally, I'm going to see it. I am too young to remember the others in the theater, though I have seen every one multiple times, and it just seems like the theater experience is the REASON to see a blockbuster like this.
---my 10 cents
Spielberg was the reason PG-13 was created. Both Gremlins (which he produced) and Temple of Doom ultimately led to the new rating. But I think the seeds were sown back in '75 with Jaws. He barely won a PG rating for it by placating the MPAA with the words "May be too intense for younger children" written beneath the rating. Even then, there was considerable grumbling from parents who had unwittingly ruined the summer beach vacation for their preteens by letting Spielberg traumatize their kids with a PG film that was, for its time, as gory and frightening as any R-rated horror movie. Note that it has since been re-rated PG-13.
I mean, how did the original Star Wars movie fare? Not well. How about Dirty Harry? Again, they hated it.
Who hated these movies? Neither film was recognized as the classic that they'd eventually become - most future classics aren't at the time they're released - but I don't recall many scathingly bad reviews and I can't find many at the moment either. Star Wars was considered an exciting popcorn movie - ineffectual, but fun. Dirty Harry was criticized a bit for its politics but was still called an effective thriller.
Here are Rottentomatoes' "top critics" pages on both of these films, you can read some of the original reviews there (ignore the dates, most of these were written on the movies' release):
Dirty Harry
Star Wars
I mean, I dunno what your standards are, but an 88% positive rating from the top critics in the land seems pretty good to me for a film that was never intended to be anything but a light-hearted space romp.
I think you need to re-evaluate what you think of movie critics. Your stance is similar to one that I think a lot of people take, and it's based on this false premise that critics like bad movies and hate good ones. I would bet that 90% of the time, critics like the same movies you do. Where I think this idea that critics are somehow out of touch with the public comes from is the fact that they do not buy into hype. If a summer blockbuster has a $100 million marketing budget, a lot of people are going to be excited about that. Some of those people will even try to convince themselves that they liked the final product, so as not to feel they've wasted all this time and energy on anticipation. (This is the same phenomenon that's been observed in studies whereby the longer someone stands in line, the longer they're willing to keep standing in line, so as not to have wasted their time standing in line.)
Critics are trained specifically to ignore hype and judge a film purely on its merits. That means *good* blockbuster films, like the original Star Wars, do get good reviews. It also means *bad* blockbuster films, like, say, Wild Wild West, get bad reviews - even if they make hundreds of millions of dollars in box office and garner their share of fans at the time of their release. We all know that film's crap now, but the critics were ahead of the public in figuring it out. That's their job.
I'd also argue that not all classic films are really great films by any objective or even most subjective measures - go watch Dirty Harry again and tell me what's good about it. I'll tell you what's good about it: Clint Eastwood and the character that he creates. That's why the film endures today. Without him and without that character, the film would be just another cookie-cutter thriller. But critics don't review characters; they review films.
Anyway, enough of my rant. You should listen to critics if they don't like the latest Indiana Jones film, because they're looking past how cool it is to have Indiana Jones back on screen and instead reviewing the film. And they've generally got pretty much the same tastes as everybody else.
If I remember correctly, that screaming women is Mrs. Spielberg.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
I was actually IN NYC during that time.
The release of Spider Man was delayed (it was supposed to come out very shortly after sept. 11th) specifically so they could re-write the ending involving the towers. It was quite a conversation topic for New Yorkers at the time. Myself and quite a lot of people were pissed at the idea of changing the ending as we saw it as a sort of memorial for the towers.
Instead we got the mediocre ending that exists for the movie now. That explains the trailer though.
I would have loved to see the original ending. And of course, I'd love to live in a country where big corporate entities don't pander to every little politically correct agenda and maintain some sort of integrity.
In this interview director Sam Raimi indicates that the footage was shot specifically for the teaser. He wanted to use the image but in a different context for a key part of the final reel. Hence they manufactured the bank heist story for the teaser, but the clip showing the web would have been used at a more pivotal point in the movie as opposed to a bank heist unrelated to the rest of the plot.
Spielburg has had his share of excellent movies as well as his substandard movies. Many of 'meh'-quality movies had a screenplay penned by David Koepp, who also wrote this newest Indiana Jones movie.
I'll defend Spielberg on a point here. From DVD interviews, of the three, Temple was Spielberg's least favorite and Lucas's most favorite. That says it all. It's amusing watching Spielberg in those interviews as he keeps tiptoes around calling Lucas's opinion and style a pile of crap (which he clearly wants to say).