My friend and I went out to Indiana Jones last night at midnight (the first showing) and really had a ball. Here is my review of:
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
The opening scenes start out with Indiana Jones in typical situations and, of course, Indy dressed in his usual garb, but the dialog is forced and the feel of the movie is off. It looks like an Indiana Jones movie, but doesn’t quite have the feel. As the movie progresses, the feel comes and goes, but there is an odd atmosphere about the scenes and situations in the movie. Indiana Jones movies all have a level of the Paranormal about them, but this one takes the cake. I am not sure what the inspiration for this was, but I think it was a little too far fetched for Indiana Jones.
Harrison Ford is excellent in this movie. Indiana Jones is back and has really aged well. The movie is set in 1957 (about 13 years after “Crusade”) and Indiana Jones has accumulated many experiences skills, but they don’t go into too much depth about those. I’d like to see the adventures between “Crusade” and this one!
One of the first rules about Storytelling is “If it doesn’t pertain to the story, don’t put it in.” The movie had several things that were cool to know, but had no baring on the story. For instance. Mutt (Shia LeBeouf) gets stung by a scorpion and freaks out (don’t worry, this isn’t a spoiler). Indiana asks how big the scorpion was and Mutt replies “Huge”. Indy then replies, “When it comes to scorpions, the bigger, the better… if you get stung by a small one, don’t keep it to your self.” That’s it. No more talk about scorpions for the rest of the movie, and the bite doesn’t play into the story line anywhere either. If it is related to a deleted scene, this scene should have been deleted too. This is one example of several cases.
An alternate name for the movie could have been Indiana Jones and the Advent of Computer Animation.” There are scenes where the CGI was too much. Other scenes, the blatant use of green-screens is totally evident. The clean up crew was either rushed to release it by a certain date or they really didn’t care. Bad Form Indy!
After the movie, my friend and I thought about the movie. All the elements of Indiana Jones were there and the story was okay, but it wasn’t great! We kinda felt robbed. I guess we expected too much. Harrison Ford was awesome. Shia LaBeouf was awesome! The acting was good. The story was where it missed the mark. (That and the dumb, unbelievable Tarzan scene). I would still recommend this movie, but would warn people that it’s a little out there.