In my book, the film was a success. Good, not great, it successfully caps the orignal trilogy. There are some rather good action set pieces, although I’m not sure any quite rise to the legendary level achieved my many in the first three. I don’t think there’s any real point in seeing this if you haven’t seen the earlier movies, but that’s a pretty small potential demographic anyhow.
Being a bit intentionally vague, I think the core of the movie is really the triangle of Indy, his love interest, and the teen Mutt. Shia Lebouf, who played Mutt, actually rather surprised me. His character was probably a bit too much of a ’50s stereotype, but even so he worked well with the others and I ultimately liked him a lot. I actually wasn’t a big fan of him in Transformers but it appears I underestimated him. Female love interest was everything I hoped. The other two supports were alright, particularly Indy’s interaction with Mac, but certainly are no Brody or Sallah. Denholm Elliot, the actor who played Brody, actually died back in 1992, he’s definitely missed and the film does a fairly good brief tribute to him.
The Crystal Skull itself works okay, and I’m definitely grateful that Spielburg and Ford fought with Lucas to tone that stuff down. The initial warehouse sequence and the jungle battle are probably the best action in the movie, although I was rather fond of an early tomb raid that actually felt about as realistic as this series gets. Bleh on the ending, much of it just fairly directly repeated prior themes and the rest I don’t think the series needed. One of the critiques I’ve seen is that the film could have actually addressed the increasing sovereignty of countries over their archeology heritage, and I think that’s true but more of a missed opportunity than a critical flaw.
And on to spoilers.
My friend Lampbane has an excellent rundown so I’ll link to her and comment off that. The teaching bits she mentioned are definitely great, particularly when he breaks into teaching mode at inappropriate moment. On the other hand, I had no problem with Karen Allen’s jowls.
Anyhow, Oxley could probably have been dropped or greatly limited which might have made the movie tighter. The actor was fine, but ultimately a mostly delirious character can only do so much for you. Also his backstory was convoloted.
I did like Cate Blanchett, although her character’s death was way too Raiders. Mac similarly got the Last Crusade reaching for the grail death. The gold-pseudo-magnetism was the appropriate way to take him out, but the implementation wasn’t great for me. Also, the star ship take off does take the series a bit too much into sci fi, as Lampbane notes. I’m not sure how I would have ended it, but I think you could probably find a more satisfying nuclear weapons analogy.
One other comment, the one area where the lack of modern thought on archeology kind of does rise to a critical flaw is in the tomb raid where they initially find the skull. I rather liked that sequence, but while the takedown of blowdart guy was awesome, it also represented the killing of the legitimate guardian of the tomb. They had a freaking sign warning that trespassers would be shot. The sequence was redeemed a bit when Indy didn’t take anything else, thanks to an accusing look from Mutt, but this is one occasion where a diplomatic/non-lethal takedown would have been much better. Or maybe just some regret. In the prior movies, I don’t recall Indy actually tends to avoid killing natives, with some reasonable exceptions in Temple of Doom, and I think that’s for the best.
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