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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.
This one guy rants about the movie, but there have been several other positive reviews. Just now media is picking up on this one aintitcool review and running with it. The original poster, ShogunMaster, just wanted a lot of attention and he got it.
It's an odd phenomenon we're seeing: One original poor review, then it gets written *about* in several other places, now all of a sudden people think there are lots of bad reviews. Huh?
--- witty signature
not to mention that the guy is a theater executive and has a vested financial interest in de-hyping this movie before it opens. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/movies/10indy.html?bl&ex=1210564800&en=3ce1b1dc8e8ec160&ei=5087%0A
just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand!
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No, a bad review is good news - for me. It seems that I absolutely HATE most movies that the reviewers love, and LOVE the ones reviewers hate.
I mean, how did the original Star Wars movie fare? Not well. How about Dirty Harry? Again, they hated it. The Terminator? Of course, if the movie turns out to make tons of money they somehow start giving it good reviews... funny, that.
If the reviewers gave this new movie kudos, I'd wait until a human being told me it was good before wasting my hard earned money on it. So hooray for the critics and their bad but predictable reviews! I'll probably be in line on opening day, thanks to the critics.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
The Phantom Menace is poor because Lucas valued the marketability and technical impressiveness of Jar Jar Binks more than the film itself. The ridiculous Anakan character didn't help. The fan-edited "The Phantom Edit" is actually not a bad film.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You seem to be submitting your opinion as fact so I'll do the same. I thought Temple of Doom was a horrible, horrible piece of crap. Like too many Spielberg projects from the '80s, it tried was too hard to be funny, with the girl playing a slapstick character that didn't work at all in the context of the movie.
Spielberg in recent interviews repeatedly refers to these movies as "comedies," which I think is the root of the problem. Raiders was not a comedy, although it had some comedic elements (but they were occasional).
Your main argument seems to be that these movies didn't suck, but only paled in comparison to the vastly superior first installments. To rebut this (and strengthen my own point), I point to Empire Strikes Back. It is often considered BETTER than Star Wars, and is almost completely lacking in the unfunny "humor" that killed Temple, Last Crusade, and most of the Amazing Stories installments.
Really, it is.
...rom a story co-written by executive producer George Lucas..... Screenwriters Jeb Stuart, Jeffrey Boam, M. Night Shyamalan, Frank Darabont and Jeff Nathanson wrote drafts, before David Koepp's script satisfied all three men.
The wikipedia reference spells it out.
-The film was in development hell since the 1989 release of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, because Spielberg and Ford initially disagreed over Lucas's choice of the skull as the plot device.
You've got an actor with creative input into the movie plot. Very rarely does that ever work. Yes, the actors have input, it is most successful when it's improv within the filming of the movie.
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Multiple treatments of the same premise, few of which actually materialize. This suggests the amount of vetting, oversized-personalities, and plain old stupidity was committee-style approval hell.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
This is why a lot of decent to good movies get bad reviews. Because the theater groups are trying to force the studios to lower their demand in price.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
It's worth noting that Star Wars: Episode I got great reviews from Aint It Cool News. So if they are panning Crystal Skull it may actually be a great movie!
Taken by itself, if Raiders or Star Wars had never been made, what do you think the worlds reaction to Temple of Doom would have been? or the Phantom Menace?
Um, without Star Wars, the reaction to Phantom Menace would have been a lambasting in the press, poor box office sales, and it quickly being forgotten among the huge pile of mediocre CGI drivel that has been produced at break neck speed in the last decade? It would have been to pop sci-fi what Eragon was for fantasy. Which is to say, not much.
Seriously, without the connection to Star Wars I wouldn't have given a rats ass about Phantom Menace at all. The only reason I could stand that annoying little prat Anakin was because I knew that someday he would grow up to be Darth Vader, and I was seeing how it happened. The only reason I could stand all the pointless and ham-fisted politics was knowing that it was all part of a plan to create The Empire. Hell would Obi-Wan have even been an interesting character if it didn't evoke memories of Sir Alec Guinness' performance in Star Wars?
No, PM isn't a victim of nostalgia. It leaned on nostalgia to make the audience care about the characters when otherwise they wouldn't have.
Temple of Doom without Raiders? B-grade comedy/action flick nobody remembers at best.
The enemies of Democracy are
I'm waiting for the second Buckaroo Banzai movie. Come on, people, get to it. It would probably be very helpful for Jeff Goldblum's career.
Although the anecdote may be apocryphal, I feel compelled to jump in here with a story from the time when filmmaker Luis Bunuel was working in the early days of Hollywood, circa 1940.
From what he describes in his autobiography, even way back then, things were so formulaic, he got disgusted. He then took this disgust to the next step, plotting out charts of characters, plot, era, etc., so that with this system and a few basic facts, the whole story could be told.
Then, a while later, he went to a premiere of a spy film where the heroine is shot at the end (I forget the title). Upon leaving the theater his companion was going on and on about how original the film was, so Bunuel simply states that he could tell what was going to happen from the opening shot. Naturally, the companion didn't believe him, so to prove his point, they went back to Bunuel's apartment to ask his roommate.
Upon describing some of the opening scenes, Bunuel's roommate just waved his hands, saying, "Don't bother - they shoot her in the end."
So, this past history when Hollywood had the ability to crank out thoughtful, meaningful, entertaining, and relevant films - when was that, exactly?