Wile E. Coyote and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

This is probably going to make me sound like a huge fogey, but the hell with it: this movie would have better if it had been made 20 years ago. It still wouldn’t be as good as Last Crusade, much less the original Raiders (kind of a tall order, since that was the movie that made me fall in love with movies as a kid), but it would have been better. A bit better, anyway.

Why? Because it would have pre-dated the CGI technology in which Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull overindulges. CGI, in and of itself, is no different than any other tool at the disposal of a filmmaker: it can be used skillfully, to thrilling cinematic effect (as in The Matrix, or the Lord of the Rings trilogy), but it can also be overemphasized, to the detriment of essentials like plot and character development (the lamentable Star Wars prequel trilogy). Crystal Skull is nowhere near as bad as the latter, but it falls well short of the former.

The movie uses CGI and green-screen flashiness in places where Raiders and Last Crusade didn’t need them, and as a result many of the action sequences feel less realistic. That’s a bummer, because the big thrills-and-spills set pieces are what we all go to an Indiana Jones movie to see. Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and screenwriter David Koepp certainly know this.

Perhaps they knew it too well – if so, it might explain the more glaring respect in which Crystal Skull suffers by comparison: unlike before, at several points in the new film the audience is asked to grant our heroes temporary exemptions from the laws of physics. It’s like the movie is suddenly, briefly infiltrated by a Road Runner cartoon. The effect is jarring.

To draw a comparison: Indy’s horseback assault on the Nazi truck convoy in Raiders of the Lost Ark, which includes his being thrown through the windshield, clinging to the front grille of the speeding truck, sliding himself between the wheels along the undercarriage, catching the rear bumper with his bullwhip, being dragged along the road at high speed and finally pulling himself back into the rear of the vehicle was certainly the kind of thing that is only possible in the movies. Still, audience members watch it and cling to their armrests thinking, “Wow, that is SO COOL!” By contrast, watching any of the several impossibly massive falls and/or impacts in Crystal Skull elicits a reaction along the lines of “Aw, bull-SHIT! Please. Come on.”

Despite these substantial faults, I managed to enjoy the movie. It’s possible that I’m cutting it extra slack out of left-over affection for the original Raiders, but if so I figure at least I’m copping to it. Bias or no, credit is due to the principal cast, whose charisma is sufficient to pilot the film past intermittent patches of lame-ass dialogue.

Much has been made of Harrison Ford now being 65 years old, but I appreciated that the screenplay didn’t skirt the issue. Some is the fisticuffs load is shifted off the graying Dr. Jones through the introduction of a youthful cohort named Mutt. Although the character as written is a standard-issue 1950’s greaser with a leather jacket and a switchblade, Shia LaBeouf manages to make him a bit more than the sum of his motorcycle parts (Spielberg doesn’t make it easy on him by setting up his first entrance as an homage to Marlon Brando in The Wild One).

To a very large degree the success of this type of genre film can be measured by the degree of menace provided by its villain. Indeed, Crystal Skull’s ace in the hole is the redoubtable Cate Blanchett as Dr. Irina Spalko, jackbooted ice queen and favorite of Stalin. Wielding a rapier as sharp as the edges of her jet-black bob, she is one seizure of Indy’s bullwhip away from dominatrix territory.

Lest it become a much different type of movie, Dr. Spalko instead remains hellbent on perfecting her freaky Rasputin-like mind control techniques and weaponizing them for a Soviet takeover of the world. The missing piece of this mass-mindfuck puzzle is the titular crystal skull, which a certain American archaeologist is determined to find first. That’s the jist of it, anyway. And… globe-trotting adventure ensues.

Consider this a grudging Spoiler Alert. I don’t consider it much of a spoiler, since the detail in question is revealed within the movie’s first ten minutes, but at least one person I’ve talked to complained of spoilage over this, so whatever.

“Globe-trotting,” come to think of it, is a slightly inadequate way of characterizing the adventure. The film’s action does take place within the terrestrial sphere, but as we quickly learn, the plot hinges upon the sometime presence on earth of aliens. As story ideas go, it wouldn’t have been my first choice to see the Indiana Jones movies cross thematic paths with E.T. and/or Close Encounters. I’m not sure why the scary wraiths swirling out of the ark in Raiders or the invisible bridge and thousand-year-old knight guarding the Holy Grail in Last Crusade seemed less farfetched to me. But they did. Go figure.

OK, you’re safe from spoilers now, you big chickens.

In the 19 years (holy crap, I’m old) since the last Indy movie, the standard refrain from Spielberg, Lucas, Ford et al. was that they would like to make a fourth film, but weren’t going to unless/until they had a script they felt was worthy of the franchise. In retrospect, I’m honestly not sure they did. Maybe they reasoned that they had a script that was close enough, and recognized that the sure-footed skills of their cast and director (CGI overuse notwithstanding) combined with the latent affection of Indy fanboys like me would earn the movie a marginal approval. After all, the movie business is all about that margin.