nixsight

Girl One and I finally got to see this this week. Here are five things that I thought about it:

Perhaps because we hadn’t built it up in our heads at all, and had had any expectations that we might have built up smashed down by dissapointed audiences, we both really enjoyed it. It’s difficult to know whether it will be relegated to the same “loved watching it, never feel like watching it again” status as “Last Crusade” was for me, but it felt like a better rounded and more individual film than any of the other Indy sequels.

It’s a beautifully made and wonderful looking film, and I can forgive CGI groundhogs and monkeys – there’s the tweeness in Raiders of the little monkey after all, and it doesn’t upset me there – but there are a couple of odd moments. Early on, Indy and one of his traditional “end boss” baddies fall through a skylight onto a hanging light array, and there’s a quite obvious glitch where the wires slow them down before they land on it.
And that snake? That it looks fake isn’t a problem, but I’m fairly sure a real snake’s head might pop off if you tried to use it that way.
Harrison Ford as Indy does a convincing enough job, though, that we didn’t find ourselves struggling with his age nearly as much as when he started dating Callista Flockhart.

There’s a completeness to the inclusion of nods to Sean Connery and Denholm Elliott, and the subtlety of those nods means that they avoid being trite. The return of Marion again is lovely, too. In a strange way, the mentions of Indy’s father felt less forced in this movie than the inclusion of Indy’s father did in the “Last Crusade” in the first place.

Support was ably provided by the awesome Cate Blanchett, the predictable Ray Winstone, an interesting turn by John Hurt, and an as always surprisingly capable performance by Shia LaBeouf – who always does a job that recalls a young Michael J Fox, despite giving the impression that he’ll be just another Hayden Christensen. If it wasn’t for LaBeouf’s performance, the “stunt plotting” inclusion of his character in this film would have stuck out like a sore thumb, whereas it actually seems to add to it.

In some ways this is the quintessential Spielberg film – certainly, if he wanted to put a cap on his family film-making, and wanted to spend all of his time on trying for Oscars, this wouldn’t be a bad place to do it. Many Spielberg themes are here – a maladjusted family unit, large-scale action, humour and energy, Sunday Matinee adventure and archetypal aliens writ-large.
It’s also perfectly in keeping with the other Indiana Jones movies, despite the bleating that’s gone on in fan arenas. Although there are probably valid criticisms to make of the film, for all the reasons that almost every other blockbuster ever released would have to take a hit for, the key thing that seems to bug people a lot are the sci-fi/alien elements.
But the quest aspect of this film isn’t science-fiction, any more than “Raiders Of The Lost Ark” and “The Last Crusade” were religious epics, or “Temple Of Doom” a thesis on Indian culture. In each movie – especially in the first and this one – both Indiana and the script are extremely pragmatic about the implications of the final artifact that he is searching for, to the point where the origins of it are almost irrelevant. In fact, the trail of puzzles that the hero faces here are more in keeping with the birth of the franchise than it’s sequels, and it gave me a thrill whenever I saw the alleged handiwork of ancient people as it fell, locked, rolled and slammed into place.
That the world of the film is shot through with a preoccupation with knowledge – and by extension, I suppose, science – rather than ancient traditional superstition, is a perfectly authentic product of the era that Indiana is living in in this movie. There’s more of a focus on the conflict between being a university professor and an adventuring archaelogist than we’ve seen before, and as the film’s excellent set-piece on the nuclear testing range reminds us, we’re in a post-Hiroshima/Nagasaki period, here. The wrath of god – whichever god – is no longer a vital enough weapon for the bad guys to chase, so instead they chase for a different kind of myth.
Certainly, if there is a science-fiction element here, it’s boiled down and delivered as mythology rather than technology, and works nicely in the series. And the climactic set-pieces are the first to give a really solid cinematic pay-off since the opening of the Ark way back when.

One more thing – I spent half of the movie trying to work out who LaBeouf reminded me of, before I realised that it was Jason Dohring, who played Logan Echolls in “Veronica Mars”, and based on that performance should get a lot more work. Certainly, aside from a passing resemblance, LaBeouf and Dohring share a lot of mannerisms.