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Spoiler-Free Review of Indiana Jones
Following last week's sour review of Indiana Jones, Seamus123 links us to
"A spoiler-free review of the brilliant new Indiana Jones film, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Much has been made of the revival of the series: is Harrison Ford too old, is Shia LeBeouf any good and can it live up to the three previous movies? All these questions — and some surprising answers — are found in Den of Geek's review." Personally I'll see it no matter what.
I can deal with LeBeouf in this Jones movie but I've already heard (and I hate to sound like Entertainment Tonight) that Spielberg has asked LeBeouf to carry on as the main character in a string of potential sequels.
Could this be good? Maybe. But I sure will lament the loss of Ford. In any event I hope to god that LeBeouf's character doesn't assume Indie's role or character or name directly in the coming movies. I haven't seen Crystal Skull yet so I can't say if they're setting us up for that the end (I hope not).
You know, I love the attitude of Indiana Jones and everything about the character but I'm going to get tired of it if you keep rehashing it. You know, it's ok to try out new things and introduce new personalities. In fact, it's almost required for the audience not to lose their interests. Hell, I wouldn't even mind if Lucas kept stealing high level plot lines from Akira Kurosawa films--so long as I don't get the same thing in 6+ movies of a diluted film franchise.
I joked with my roommates that we're not far from Lucas re-releasing a "Special Edition" of The Last Crusade where River Phoenix is superimposed with the image of Shia LeBeouf for continuity (a la Anakin Skywalker's apparition in Return of the Jedi). I know he's not the young version of Indiana Jones but I'm so sick and tired of that kind of stuff. Where's Drew Berrymore so she can step in and convince Lucas we should take this chance to replace all the scary whips in Indiana Jones with licorice sticks.
My work here is dung.
Harrison Ford is too old, Shia LeBeouf is too young to even remember the original Indiana Jones movies, and the Crystal Skull looked fake.
Next.
My blog
Meesa no wait for poodoo reviews! Meesa gonna give bigsa clink-clink to franchise rightawaysa! What could go wrongsa?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
It's a shame there won't be a Marcus Brody role in this one, as the actor died a few years after the Last Crusade. One of the funniest scenes in the trilogy was from this one:
Elsa: It's perfectly obvious where the pages are... he's given them to Marcus Brody.
Henry: Marcus?! You didn't drag poor Marcus along did you? He's not up to the challenge.
Donovan: He sticks out like a sore thumb. We'll find him.
Indy: The hell you will! He's got a two day head start on you, which is more than he needs. Brody's got friends in every town and village from here to the Sudan, he speaks a dozen languages, knows every local custom, he'll blend in, disappear, you'll never see him again. With any luck, he's got the grail already.
(next scene)
(Brody disembarks from the train along with the other passengers, a cross-section of Arabs and Turks.)
Brody: Is there anyone here who speaks English? Or maybe even ancient Greek?
Save bandwidth. Got it.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
> Personally I'll see it no matter what.
Then the terrorists have already won
When I do know the ending from hearing it from others, it has no affect on my enjoyment of the movie. Great film making is great film making. Everyone knew the ending of "Titanic" but it is the biggest blockbuster ever.
I want to know everything about the movie before I go a spend $10 on a ticket to see it. Nothing pisses me off more than going out with the wife and spending $20 on shit.
I can't stand the guy and the only way I'll consider the movie a success is if he's playing the role of Short Round. Mister Jones! Mister Jones!
Whale
"A conscious decision in production was made to steer clear of CGI effects when possible and perform stunts the old-fashioned way"
Thank god. CGI made Star Wars 3 one of the worst movies I've ever seen. "This chair doesn't look quite right, can you paint it orange?" "I'll just make a quick 3d model of it instead. You know -- to ensure the movie doesn't look too real."
Whale
Indiana Jones wins and the villain loses.
If it weren't for the creative young directors coming out of independent cinema and the new paths of distribution now available for the few original films out there, I would have given up on film a long time ago." I haven't seen a quality blockbuster in years, but at least there are still a lot of brilliant smaller films out there (you know, the ones that AREN'T prequels, sequels, and remakes).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I have no doubt this movie will be a huge cash cow.
However, I have absolutely no understanding why.
Please can someone explain to me, why that when the 1st Star Wars Prequel was widely regarded as a crime against celluloid, and the 2nd Prequel proved, if anything, to be even worse that the 1st, that anyone at all went to see the 3rd Prequel.
George Lucas is a filmmaker that has made an extremely large amount of money based on a very small number of good films made more than 20 years ago, while the majority of his work is very poor indeed. One might also say that for Spielberg too.
If you have high expectations for this movie, then might I suggest that you are possibly suffering from amnesia, or are 5.
Personally I'll see it no matter what.
Why? Just because of the first two words in the title? That, frankly, is a piss-poor reason to see a movie.
Yours is the exact attitude that causes movie studios to continue producing terrible sequels and re-makes instead of movies that are worth watching. Why innovate when you can imitate for cheaper and people will eat it up anyway, right?
the coolest club on
I forgot to add...
It stars an elderly man, whom despite enjoying roguish Sean-Connery-esque charm has never actually had the ability to act more than "let's pretend". That being the method of acting he employs (and I quote).
It also stars a young man who displays all the ability and hype of a young Ikea-nu Reeves. Popular with tweenage girls and middle-aged gay men, but devoid of any, you know, actual acting talent.
It will however make squillions of dollars. And likely send indie filmmakers further into depression and despair at how low-brow the cinema audience really is.
Dah-nuh-da-da!
*whipcrack*
*wisecrack*
*swiiiiiiing*
*punchpunchpunch*
INDY!!!
Dah-nuh-da-da!
Is it just me, or is everything WAY too positive in this 'review'? This is less a critique of the film and more of a plug for it.
Things like -
He's really old, but that's a GOOD thing!
- just wear thin on me.
that's a vomit-inducing puff piece. I only managed to read the first three paragraphs before my gag reflex kicked in and I had to look away for a while.
I can only take so much sugar in my reading material.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
'nough said
Ebert has me sold.
"I can say that if you liked the other Indiana Jones movies, you will like this one, and that if you did not, there is no talking to you."
The butler did it!!!
/me ducks
var sig = function() { sig(); }
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
[spoiler:]
There's a damned giant flying saucer, that has nothing to do here and completely ruins the franchise.
WTF? Did Spielberg run out of ancient culture to use as a historical background to Indy's adventure, so he was desperate to put some E.T. in there ?
Or is "Putting flying saucers that have nothing to do with the movie" Spielberg's latest "signature" ?
Thankfully, the movie it self doesn't depend on some "final twist". Instead if you neglect the "E.T. finally phones home" moment, it's actually an enjoyable movie.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"It's a hell of a lot better than Sex..."
Could have fooled me. The commercial looked chocked full of it, from the chase scene in the jungle, to Indy swinging around in the warehouse, to the jeep going over the edge of a cliff. Maybe I have a lower tolerance to things looking plastic.
At the end Trinity dies ....
I will fuck you dead -God
"...Crystal Skull is an absolute triumph, and a picture-perfect tribute to one of cinema's great action franchies..."
OMG by bullshit detector just exploded.
What kind of geek den is that? Sex and the City has a much higher Macbook count than IJ4...
I have about a 2 second closeup in this movie in the classroom scene! Just look for the blonde kid in the front of the class who looks like he belongs on slashdot...
Sometimes you can get away with a few sequels. Star Wars had two sequels before it turned to crap. Matrix and the first Pirates were both fun but disappeared up their own assholes with the first sequel. Bond had been moribund for years until the reboot. Sometimes you can get away with a reboot like Batman. Sometimes you can keep the same general universe and setting while bringing in new characters (anime does that a lot, see the Gundam shows. Trek did that at first with TNG and DS9 but fell apart with Voyager and Enterprise.)
:) Firefly basically said "Ok, we want to tell a Han Solo early days story but it'll be without all the Star Wars baggage. By the time we get the show in the can, the Han Solo relation will only be tangential." And it was successful. The Iron Man movie was a breath of fresh air. Instead of screwing up a comic book by the numbers like the Fantastic Snore, they did it right. Remains to be seen if the Iron Man sequels will scarf the cock or remain quality.
But there comes a certain point where you just have to say fuck it, let's trash the old shit and come up with new. Everyone loved Han Solo and would have loved to see his early days. The Han Solo trilogy was great, at least I remember it to be so when I read it at age 12.
The problem is that there just aren't many good ideas in Hollywood and those that are have trouble attracting funding. Fresh and original is risky.
Personally, I love the Indy movies. I would love to see another series come along with that same kind of wit, energy, and adventure. But I don't want to see Harrison Ford on his walker, I want to see Shia La Poof garroted for having been in Transformers, and most of all I don't want to see a movie that maeks me think "Gee, this is really a depressing end to what had been a great and complete series."
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
.... pretty much everyone involved with that abomination would be blacklisted, 1950's style, and never allowed to work in Hollywood again. It really was THAT terrible, IMO. Peter Cullen and Hugo Weaving may be forgiven, considering all they contributed was voiceover work. But otherwise, that should have been a career-ender. (Then again, I said the same thing of Michael Bay after Pearl Harbor... *sigh*)
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
All the Indiana Jones movies are overblown remakes of the serials made for adolescents in the 1940s, like Flash Gordon. They were never meant to be taken seriously. They have flimsy plots, wooden underdeveloped characters, contrived settings, and an endless series of film grammar clichés passing as a movie.
Now we have the latest $200 million remake of the same boring movie. Yawn!
The saddest thing about the Indiana Jones movies is that they are taken so seriously. This is because the art of making real important films has been essentially lost. The movies that are made now as 'serious' or 'art' are all stupid, boring, incomprehensible, and insufferable. So the comic book movies look good in comparison. That doesn't make them good. It just makes them overblown eye-candy fests.
The art of making movies that are good, engrossing, serious, relevant, important, and that are watchable decades into the future reached its peak in the 1940s. Even though the titles seem dated today, the year of 1939 is shaping up to be the peak of movie-making throughout the world. The advent of television in the 1950s and the development of bet-the-studio-on-one-film mentality of the 1950s and 1960s seriously hurt the movie art and industry. There was an era of great films to come from Europe in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but it died off in the 1980s as state subsidies paid to pseudo-intellectual directors resulted in a flood of drek that led to the destruction of European film industry.
The ability to watch any individual film title at the convenience of the viewer that resulted from the VCR and the DVD didn't help the moviemaking art. Great for the movie product business, but not so great for the advancement of the art. It led to a homogenization of product and an oversupply of mediocrity.
So, yeah, I not impressed by the latest Indiana Jones or anything that George Lucas makes. He has made a profitable career applying CGI and film effects to recycled schlock for the past thirty-five years. I felt the same way about Star Wars when it came out in 1977. It's fun, sure, and watchable. But it's nothing that hasn't been seen before and done better in the past.
Most people were shocked by crying game, because they watched it in the two years preceeding the release of stargate.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Regardless of the reviews I have seen, I am going to wait till I hear feedback from some friends on it. Honestly, from the trailer alone the movie doesn't look that good. Sure, trailers only mean so much. But then again, looking at the trailer for Speed Racer, I knew it was going to be a train wreak.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
An UFO is as much appropriate in a franchise which up to now focused on ancient civilisation and magic, as it would be in, say, a Fantasy movie such as Conan, LOTR, Harry Potter, etc...
What's next ?
A microbiology based explanation in a franchise which was based on mystic / spiritual pow...
no, wait !
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
DO NOT READ AS THIS MAY SPOIL YOUR MOVIE EXPERIENCE, IF FOR SOME REASON YOU THOUGHT IT WOULD BE A POSITIVE THING
The new Indiana Jones was, frankly, the biggest POS I have ever had the displeasure of watching, and I was a huge fan of the original three.
Once I saw the green LucasFilm logo and Exec. Prod. credit for Lucas I had the same weird feeling that I had at the beginning of Phantom Menace, which I also get when eating Taco Bell, with pretty much the same end result.
Luckily I obtained a free advance screening, so I didn't have to spend a dime on this crap, but even that doesn't change the awfulness of this film.
I had heard some rumors of an "area 51" or "alien" type of theme rather than the usual religious one, but I figured it would be passing references, or perhaps some nifty little ending like they did with the warehouse scene at the end of Raiders or something.
But then I remembered George was involved, AND I remembered what idiocy Steven did to E.T. with radios and such. Luckily, there won't be remakes of this like E.T., because they got it all out of the way in this one.
Rather than ruin the plot, whatever it was, here's a random list of stuff that sucked. Don't read it if you like the fantasy of Indiana Jones.
1. Shia the Beef as a 50s Biker; I assume a gay 50s biker, who bitches like a gay Biker for no apparent reason.
2. All the soldiers on the army base having been deployed to Iraq, or missing for no apparent reason. "Closed for weapons testing" means that all the soldiers and contractors go home.
3. Colonel Henry Jones, master spy for the CIA.
4. Col. Jones being interrogated by the FBI for being a Soviet agent, but is let off because some random character "vouches" for him.
5. Col. Jones being fired from his job for being a Soviet agent.
6. Col. Jones being promoted to a better job for being a Soviet agent.
7. Col. Jones, in Berlin, being a double agent.
8. Director Steven, shamelessly plugging his kid in the diner scene.
9. Crazy Primitive Alien Monkees in a graveyard running away from a gun and disappearing with no explanation.
10. A crystal skull designed by H.R. Geiger, which wouldn't have sucked in another movie, but chooses to in this one.
11. Gold is not magnetic, neither is lead.
12. An awful premonition that you will be subjected to Jar Jar.
13. An Army of the Dead, which apparently left the set to star in Diary of the Dead, as they seemed absent from the film. Luckily, the Crazy Primitive Alien Monkees were able to stand in for them.
14. Apparently ILM still hasn't figured out gravity. In the real world, lighter pebble sized objects may stay aloft because of high winds, however rocks the size of office buildings tend to fall. In the ILM world, dust settles, then giant rocks hang aloft in a way I haven't seen since a Coyote held up a sign after running off a cliff 20 seconds earlier.
15. A room containing every artifact of every culture ever, for no apparently explained reason.
16. Yay, it's Jar Jar! No wait, a dozen Jar Jars!
17. Jar Jar promising you a gift for freeing him after thousands of years, but when you ask for something benign that ancient carvings have shown he gave everyone else on the planet, he kills you for no reason.
18. Triple agents?
19. In the past, the bad guys were eaten by crocodiles, had high speed aging to dust, or exploded and melted for pissing God off. Now if you are male, Jar Jar kills you with an advanced vacuum cleaner, if you are female he kills you with Wikipedia then an advanced vacuum cleaner.
20. Assistant Dean Super CIA Col. Henry "Indiana" Higgins Jones get's hitched?
21. A teleporting hat?
22. An atomic blast, which destroys buildings, has to make a second pass because it forgot the mannequins hanging out in front of the buildings.
23. Col. Jones, Master Spy, is rescued by Shia the Beef with what appears to be a large g
I'm a satanic clam.
What I feel was IJ's original brilliance was that it was a mashup of genres from a particular era of cinema: it took a pulp detective movie, an swashbuckling adventure, a Casablanca-ish winds of war story and a biblical epic and put all the elements and styles together into a single story.
Rather than try to recreate the same story every time, the franchise should be aiming to create a movie each decade that mashes together all the genres that were most popular in the time period 50 years earlier.
Newflash - Harrison Ford has aged. Would the movie be better for pretending that was not the case? Very likely not. It's good to hear a report that that is handled well and with some depth, instead of being glossed over.
I just thought it was a review from someone who really liked the movie, and wanted to give a few reasons why he thought it was done well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This may sound lame ("my brother's sister's boyfriend's doctor says"), but I got the bad news from a nationally syndicated critic who happens to be a total fanboy. Obsessed with DC Comics and Star Wars figurines, etc. etc. He's been doing this for a while, he's generally forgiving with nerd-intended flicks like the recent rush of comic book flicks, and even gave the second F4 flick the benefit of the doubt. But not the new Indy.
And he's convinced the flush of positive reviews in the past few days is coming from LucasFilms flooding the Internet with mixed messages in order to keep the fanboys to attend at least the first week's screenings. Don't be fooled. This movie's poised to be a serious mega-dud.
It's Shia LeBoeuf not Shia LeBeouf you insensitive clod!
Even with online ticket purchasing and five screens per complex, people still occasionally line up for hot movies. I recall the last Harry Potter opening midnight shows being the most recent.
In which case the "saucer" has a much more literal meaning.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Ideally, there should be a Pat Roach fight in order to make it a true Indiana Jones movie. In any case, you can't do it right without some hapless bad guy getting chopped up by an airplane propeller or mashed in a rock crusher... Very important, you see.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
I saw this in a sig on Usenet like 17 years ago ... I had to dig through a bunch of CDs to find it.
***** If Indiana Jones were a Computer Science professor... *****
"He speaks twelve programming languages. He knows _all_ the local operating systems. He'll blend in. With any luck, he's probably FTP'ed the Grail already..."
I know whether or not the reviews are favorable that I'm going to see the movie. It's a pop corn summer filled with action and explosions movie. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
Ha, ha, ha.
Th movie industry has managed to convince people that of you don't participate in the bombastic blockbuster fest every summer, somehow you are socially deficient.
You may think you want to see it, but marketing, astroturfing and many other ways of advertisement put *social pressure* on people to watch the blockbusters.
This works wonders with fanbois and children, we adults refer to proper film critics to form an opinion regarding the quality of a movie.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There is a good reason one should refer to film experts before going to watch a movie: they will tell us if it is something innovative or just more of the same bullshit.
/. is very peculiar, we want the world to trust our opinions as experts when it comes to IT and technology, but are quick to ignore expert opinions of proper film critics (hint: they don't care about what actresses dress on premiers) if they destroy blow by blow lame attempts to revive past cinematic glories.
I have watched on of the Indiana Jones movies on TV and frankly leaves me unimpressed.
I had a similar attitude to James Bond films (having watched one or two it was obvious that most were crap) until the last one, which clearly was a departure from the franchise and had proper actors and plots in place.
There is no such a thing in the new IJ movie: no innovation, plot confusion, temporal idocity (make up will just take you so far). The experts have spotted this and have warned us.
But of course
IANAL but write like a drunk one.