Jeremiah Tolbert

We saw the lat­est, and prob­a­bly last, of the Indiana Jones fran­chise last night.  This is gonna be chock full of spoil­ers as I dis­cuss many aspects of the film. Come back after you’ve seen the movie and let’s discuss!

As we left the the­atre, gen­er­ally sat­is­fied, the first thing that my wife and I talked about was the change in tone over the series. The first film, while hav­ing comedic ele­ments, was fairly seri­ous. The sec­ond one had more comedic relief, then the third was prac­ti­cally a com­edy until the final act. Now this film takes that com­edy even fur­ther, with sev­eral comedic char­ac­ters fac­tor­ing in through most of the series. The last act barely takes a turn for the seri­ous. In gen­eral, this is a much more light­hearted film than any of the pre­vi­ous Indy pictures.

Everyone involved in this (minus Shia) are a hell of a lot older than when the started, and I think their age and matu­rity shows in a kind of round­ing off of the sharp cor­ners. The meat is here, the core of Indiana Jones. I laughed with joy at sev­eral moments–especially when the punch sound effects matched the ear­lier films so well. Nobody takes a punch like Indiana Jones, even this con­sid­er­ably older and slower Jones.

The loss of the Nazis was felt by me pretty strongly. I think the screen­writer did a fairly good job of try­ing to make the Russians men­ac­ing, but they just don’t have that malev­o­lence that the Nazis had. The Soviets could barely hold together their own coun­try, let alone take over the world. The Nazis actu­ally got pretty far along in their plans before they were stopped. So, Nazis scared me more, but then, I was a kid.

The vil­lain­ness seemed more eccen­tric than evil. Kate does an admirable job with very lit­tle, com­pared to some pre­vi­ous vil­lains in the series. The sword-​​fighting aspect did not seem inte­grated into her char­ac­ter as a psy­chic sci­en­tist very well. If I were more cyn­i­cal, I would say the sword fight­ing was added to the two char­ac­ters sim­ply so we could have the action scene later on.

The most sat­is­fy­ing aspect of the film for me is how much Indy has changed, and yet how much he has remained the same. You don’t get the feel­ing that he went into cryo­genic sus­pen­sion between the third and fourth films. The rev­e­la­tion that Indy is a war hero and a for­mer OSS spy is fit­ting. His hatred for Nazis ear­lier could very eas­ily have led to his enlistment.

It’s that gap of time between the third and fourth films that makes me sad. We will never see a movie ver­sion of those years, at least not with the prin­ci­pals we know. Maybe when I’m 75 and Spielberg’s chil­dren sell the rights and some young Turk revives the fran­chise, but it won’t star Harrison Ford, and then I’ll be one of those old fogeys say­ing “Who’s this dorky kid play­ing Indiana Jones? He can’t hold a can­dle to old Harrison!” And then teens in the rows around me in the moviesphere will glare at me over their smart glasses, won­der­ing who Harrison is until their smart glasses help­fully present the infor­ma­tion from Wikipedia. Also, what a “can­dle” is.

Anyway. As much as I enjoyed it, there were moments of ridicu­lous­ness. The CG actu­ally both­ered me less than I expected except for those stu­pid god damned prairie dogs. The scene with the snake, while funny, was com­pletely imprac­ti­cal, and when they actu­ally use the “snake” to pull Indiana out, it looks ridicu­lous. That would kill a snake, pulling on it like that. Also, siafu are African army ants. South America has its own big ants (no where near as big as those), and I can chalk up Indiana call­ing them siafu because of his worldly trav­els, but the bio­log­i­cal pedant in me was annoyed by it. Several action scenes felt a lit­tle half-hearted–in par­tic­u­lar, the run down the slowly dis­ap­pear­ing stair­case at the end.

I was not both­ered by the addi­tion of aliens to the fran­chise. I was a bit wor­ried about this, but it works int he pulp set­ting of Indiana.  There are only so many bib­li­cal arti­facts you can wrap a movie around.  I’m just glad we didn’t get “Indiana Jones and the Shroud of Turin Hoax.”

Another thing– I was left con­fused by the aliens burn­ing up Spalko. Of course, it’s true to form for the series that the vil­lain gets incin­er­ated or melted, but I didn’t under­stand, from the per­spec­tive of the aliens them­selves, what her sin was to deserve it. They come 7000 years ago and teach human­ity a whole range of tech­nolo­gies. And she asks to “know every­thing.” Wouldn’t they be happy to oblige her? Was the idea that they looked into her mind and saw the evil schemes? I guess I can buy that. But it felt a bit anti­cli­mac­tic.  She should have been dri­ven mad and left a bro­ken husk like Ox was, only worse.  That would have been more sat­is­fy­ing, I think.  She got what she wanted, and couldn’t han­dle it.  But then, that would have denied us our melty face, and we can’t have that, it’s a Indiana Jones tradition!

I’m sure there were major prob­lems in the film. But it’s freak­ing Indiana Jones. I was raised on this stuff. It was about 100x bet­ter than the Star Wars pre­quels, and per­haps my relief over that will cloud my judge­ment on the rest of it.

It made me laugh with humor and excite­ment. It made me feel like a lit­tle kid again most of the run­ning time. I’m happy with it, and I look for­ward to see­ing it again. That’s all I can really ask for. Best movie ever? No.  A good way to spend a Thursday night?  You bet.

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Tags: Film, indiana jones, Recommended Media