A bunch of us from work went to see it yesterday. It has been quite a wait since Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and in that time, Harrison Ford has aged a good bit. (Haven't we all?) To their credit, Lucas and Spielberg had the good sense not to pretend otherwise, and the movie is set in the late 1950s. The bad guys are no longer Nazis--I think you can guess who.
On the plus side, it has many of the same endearing qualities of the previous movies. The action sequences are both exciting and funny. There is some clever dialog, a few surprising plot twists, and there is an odd mixture of the supernatural and the natural. You aren't supposed to take it seriously (unless you are a von Daniken follower, I suppose).
On the down side, the action sequences in the first three movies, while clearly impossible, were often just a bit beyond impossible--just enough for you to laugh and say, "Okay, we're making fun of the 1930s action adventure genre." A couple of the action sequences here--for example, involving some waterfalls and a refrigerator--just didn't work. They were so far beyond impossible as to fall a little flat.
In the first movie, Indiana Jones comes out of these horrendous action sequences pretty clearly injured and in serious pain--but Harrison Ford was much younger. It gave a little implication that while these action sequences were impossible, the screenwriter was acknowledging that Indiana Jones wasn't Superman. In this movie, he much, much older, and if anything, the consequences of Indiana Jones' heroics are less severe. Making a cartoonish adventure even less realistic definitely did not help the drama or the humor.
Great special effects have been part of all the Indiana Jones films, but great sight gags and dialog have been even more important. Who can forget the Nazi in the first film opening up what we assume is a torture device--but it turns out to be a foldable coat hanger? Or that great moment when the heroine asks Indiana about his plans as he gallops off to catch the Nazis: "I'm makin' this up as I go along."
By comparison, there are a few good gags (we see the Ark of the Covenant again) and some mildly witty dialog--but I was hoping for more. (And the mushroom cloud is all wrong--bad perspective, and a former co-worker who was 5000 feet from Ground Zero on one of these tests tells me that they are way colorful and pretty.) And the last ten minutes of special effects really took a pretty decent action adventure movie and gave a rather leaden ending. Unlike the first three movies, where there was an adequate explication of what was going on, I found the explanation disappointing. There were too many unanswered questions.
I would say that it was inferior to the first and third movies, but clearly superior to the second movie--which I, like many others, just hated.
No comments:
Post a Comment