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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.
Actually, I believe that scene was cut from the movie due to the collapse of said towers and the implications of that.
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.