**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Karen Allen, Shia LaBeouf
screenplay by David Koepp
directed by Steven Spielberg
by Walter Chaw There's a moment in the first thirty minutes of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (hereafter Indy 4) that is so iconic, so breathtaking in its construction and implication within and without the text, that I was frankly glad to be alive at this point in our cinematic history. Well into its second century, the movies have become the wellspring of our past–enough that more than a few people, I'd wager, will debate whether or not mammoths had something to do with the construction of the pyramids and, more insidiously, whether, as U-571 asserts, the Americans had anything to do with the recovery of a working German Enigma machine. As early as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and before, films began to comment on how they'd become the opaque overlay to actual history–and perhaps, you know, history was the better for it: prettier, fancier, taller, with a better screenwriter and Edith Head at the threads. The question with currency, then, becomes what happens to our concept of history when the digital age renders any phantasm a compelling one. The image of which I speak (it's a minor, minor spoiler, so avert thy gaze if you're easily offended), of Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) silhouetted against a mushroom cloud, is something that people like Baudrillard would/should worry over for entire volumes of critical theory. As Indy is permanently, pregnantly implanted on the collective psyche of the blockbuster generation, I do wonder if I'll ever see a depiction of a nuclear blast again without looking at it through the prism of this avatar's eyes. It's like picturing Marty McFly jumping into the Holocaust, or Forrest Gump at Dealey Plaza–I won't be able to help myself.
For an hour at least, Indy 4 is genius. Exhilarating, imaginative, a comfortable marriage of George Lucas's stunted puerility and Spielberg's gifted puerility as the Paramount logo morphs into–spoiler–a groundhog hill run over by a 1957 roadster we follow as it cuts through a military procession that…well, that would be telling. The worst-kept secret was that the picture is somehow about "Saucer Men from Mars," and sure enough, the evil Reds, led by a Natasha-warbling Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), coerce our archaeologist into helping them locate certain artifacts unearthed at Roswell, NM. The implicit promise is that the film will deal with McCarthyism and the Red Scare in the United States, with Indy losing his job to the finger-pointers and forced to deal with Hoover's goons impugning his patriotism. Here's a chance to understand that which drove Cold War paranoia–to find Indy in the United States for his last adventure, adrift in the nuclear, post-war age and demonstrating that Raiders of the Lost Ark wasn't the fluke in the series for its smart, razor-sharp script and remarkable pop-insight into what it meant to be a Nazi appeaser in the form of Paul Freeman's French baddie Belloq. Raiders of the Lost Ark is a seminal picture for a lot of reasons–many of them having to do with its absolute understanding of how the West viewed this moment in history and how we view it still in all its glorious simplicity today. But what's astonishing about the first part of this third sequel, up to and including the introduction of young sidekick Mutt (Shia LaBeouf, who makes his entrance as the spitting image of Marlon Brando in The Wild One) and a motorcycle chase featuring a disappointingly obvious stunt double for Ford, is abandoned completely in its second half.
With the possibility that Indy 4 will address the big issues that it raises, it proves itself a sentimental old fool in retreating back into the utterly, dishearteningly familiar. I'm not asking for a master's course discourse in the prevailing sociology of the late 1950s, I'm asking for the pop treatment of a truly shameful era in American history in exactly the same way as Raiders tackled the wartime interzone (it's Casablanca but better, no?), or, hell, like Indy 4 itself does in that one mind-blowing tableau of Indy against the Apocalypse. But the second hour is yet another jungle adventure full of the same old waterfalls and riddles as Indy, reunited with Marion (Karen Allen, terrible), traipses around, dodges Commies, and opens heavy stone doors with the clever manipulation of levers and cracker-jack deciphering of hieroglyphs. Its resolution is near-identical to the first film's climax when it would have been more apt to emulate Raiders' epilogue. (Major spoiler, now.) Why not, for instance, have Spalko's fate be her carving the secrets to cold fusion and light-speed travel into the walls of the cell of her Peruvian madhouse oubliette as a sad-faced nun shuts her forever from the world? Wouldn't such be the better price paid for her Mephistophelean act of knowledge-brokering than a broken-banks' worth of special effects? The whole second half of the film feels simultaneously smug and timid: it rehashes most of the major sequences from the first three films, while the lone exception–a field of piranha-like ants–is resolved in a way that doesn't make a lick of sense.
The most disappointing misstep, though, isn't the script's second-half pandering, the desperation of Allen's overwrought perkiness, the not-mild suggestion that Mutt is to be Jones's heir-apparent in Lucas's inevitable spin-off sequels, nor the anticlimactic final third that doesn't know how to end itself, much less the quadrilogy. No, the most disappointing misstep is that it doesn't properly use John Williams's score to rousing effect. Though I'm not much a fan of Williams's later work, his stuff from the Raiders period is as much a part of my generation's core identity as any single character; when Indy 4 fails to even once introduce the obligatory trumpets where they would actually frenzy the desperate-to-be-frenzied, that's the cruellest blow of all. Consider that I wanted so much to be enthralled by this picture despite a gnawing realization that there was only ever one good film out of the first three (the second is uselessly ugly, the third sentimental bullshit) that I fought against its first half's light's long-gutter and eventual wink-out. Say it ain't so, Joe. Still, I'd go back to watch the hour set in the United States again in a heartbeat, maybe just to imagine a rest of the film after the midway that had the balls to be something great instead of a little love note to itself and the diehards. Originally published: May 22, 2008.
by Bill Chambers Irksome that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull reached Blu-ray before Raiders, et al (and breathtaking HiDef clips from the original trilogy sprinkled throughout this BD release only rub salt in the wound), but the disappointment ends there, really. Preceded by an insanely cool, foundation-rattling new THX logo mastered in full 1080 and Dolby TrueHD, the film docks on the format in a 2.40:1, 1080p transfer that looks like it was peeled off a movie screen and affixed to your monitor, passing with flying colours my unscientific 'down' test whereby I carefully observed the close-ups of Cate Blanchett to see whether the light-attracting blonde hairs on her cheeks retained their supple, tactile quality. (Affirmative.) Indeed, it's kind of ridiculous how undiminished the image seems even at, what, a fifth of the size? (I mean that as a compliment to the telecine artists, not as an insult to the filmmakers.) Ditto Ben Burtt's sound design, preserved in 5.1 Dolby TrueHD: although I could only audit the 640 kbps core of it, again it replicates my memory of the theatrical experience, right down to the noise-cancelling electronic hum as the spaceship surfaces in the climax. So the A/V presentation is unimpeachable–how are the extras? Well, that's another matter entirely.
While the supplements take hours to get through, they're typical of content producer/FILM FREAK CENTRAL whipping boy Laurent Bouzereau in that they're simultaneously fatty and lean, a lot of superficial sound and fury. Based on the fact that he's the only guy in his field your average film critic can name (my heart sank when an influential colleague called him " the unsung hero of 'Making Of' documentaries"), Bouzereau's ubiquity has earned him a lot of undue veneration. You know what else is ubiquitous? Cancer. Spielberg loves him because Spielberg is an intensely private individual who knows that Bouzereau will never go peeking under the hood; the true unsung heroes of this weird sub-genre are folks like David Prior, Mark Rance, Julie Ng, David Gregory, Michael Pellerin–they're the people fighting against the ephemeral nature of the form, and if you haven't heard of them it's in large part because they lack the shamelessness of Bouzereau, who once awarded himself a writing credit for Michael Crichton's obviously self-penned introduction to the Looker DVD. I can see kids liking Bouzereau's stuff and imagine that it would make an effective gateway drug for a budding cinephile, but let's not pretend he hasn't helped lower the bar for this cottage industry's standard of operations.
Disc 1 contains the film itself as well as the highlight of the bonus material, a Java-enabled interactive timeline split into three categories: Story; Production; and Historical. Despite the curious disclaimer "Historical aspects of this feature are for entertainment purposes only," there's a lot more truth to the History Channel-esque factoids than you'll find in the movie proper (with its fictitious "Akator"), though the Story timeline–a pictorial recap of the film's plot–is pitiful and the Production timeline is sketchy at best. The latter, like the accompanying "The Return of a Legend" (18 mins.), skips over the fabled "Frank Darabont draft" completely in recounting the screenplay's hellish evolution. It must be said that Bouzereau is such a whore for Spielberg, however, that he's barely cognizant of the verbal nooses ol' Steve fashions for partner-in-crime George Lucas. Repeatedly Spielberg talks of "humouring George" during the development process, while Lucas, the King of Bad Ideas, speaks bitterly of his rejected concepts, such as his preferred title for this fourth outing, "Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men."* Rounding out the first platter: "Pre-Production" (12 mins.), in which we're treated to pre-viz animatics detailed enough that I'm half-surprised Lucas didn't decide to just animate the film à la Clone Wars; and two 5.1 trailers for Crystal Skull labelled #2 and #3, with #1 either mislabelled or altogether absent. For what it's worth, every last item up for grabs here is in HD.
Anyway, it's all downhill from there. Disc 2's six-part, feature-length Production Diary: Making Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (81 mins.) is agonizingly lightweight, the world's most distended EPK. If Pellerin's mammoth Lord of the Rings documentaries owe a debt to Bouzereau's groundbreaking Jaws retrospective, they also threw down a gauntlet Boozy hasn't the wherewithal to take up. Overreliant on plot synopsis, the piece is equally edifying with the sound off, as a careful parsing of the B-roll will tell you as much as if not more than the talking heads. I was humbled by the revelation that some effects I was convinced were CGI were actually practical, like the disappearing spiral staircase leading to the alien temple and the intricate, Rube Goldbergian door marking the open-sesame entrance to same. Meanwhile, a fleeting glimpse of Lucas oozing out the sides of a director's chair is provocative for how much he has begun to resemble Jabba the Hutt, bringing to mind the old saw that artists can only draw self-portraits.
I presume the reason for the six additional featurettes–"Warrior Makeup" (6 mins.), "The Crystal Skulls" (10 mins.), "Iconic Props" (10 mins.), "The Effects of Indy" (23 mins.), "Adventures in Post-Production" (13 mins.), and "Closing Team Indy" (4 mins.)–is that their content couldn't be shoehorned into the long-doc. Whatever the case, they're marginally more informative, especially the penultimate segment's interview with Burtt, whose spilling of trade secrets is geek nirvana as usual. I do wonder, though, how all this talk of reunions and "like we never left"s makes Vic Armstrong, stunt coordinator of the first three Indy films, feel, since he was unceremoniously replaced on Crystal Skull by Gary Powell (who, as it happens, poached the Bond franchise from Armstrong, too). This is precisely the sort of thing Prior would annotate for fear of looking evasive. "Pre-visualization Sequences" for the "Area 51 Escape," "Jungle Chase," and "Ants Attack" join a batch of "Galleries" (The Art Department, Stan Winston Studio, Production Photos, Portraits, and Behind-the Scenes Photographs) in capping the BD.
122 minutes; PG-13; 2.40:1 (1080p/MPEG-4); English 5.1 Dolby TrueHD, French DD 5.1, Spanish DD 5.1; English, English SDH, French, Spanish, Portuguese subtitles; BD-50 + BD-25; Region-free; Paramount
*Furthermore, I can't imagine that the boasts of shooting on film and Spielberg's insistence that he's just "the custodian" of something that "belongs" to the world (i.e., the Indy franchise) are anything other than digs at Lucas's rampant revisionism. return
