It's hard to know for sure, but from the look of this preview, the forthcoming India Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull seems like a worthy edition to the franchise rather than something like Sylvester Stallone's cringe-inducing efforts to revisit his classic characters.
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Crystal Skull
15 Feb 2008 01:13 pm
Comments (35)
As a native of Indiana, I resent that typo.
Not to re-direct this thread, but I thought Rocky Balboa was the second-best Rocky movie, so that attack at Stallone seems slightly off. I think his major sin was staying on those characters for too long in the first place, not re-visiting them again after some time away.
Rocky Balboa was a decent movie. Way better than Rocky V, by all accounts.
You can't trust the trailer. The movie will still suck.
Production design by Damien Hirst?
Doesn't tell us much. The trailers for the Star Wars prequels were always far superior to the actual films.
Gabriel, that's true for the 1st and 3rd movies, but I'd argue even the previews for the 2nd movie sucked. "Attack of the Clones" would come up and everyone would snicker and make a Attack of the Killer Tomatoes joke.
Blah and Gabriel are right.
That Vanity Fair article from two months ago scares the hell out of me. Lucas decided on a script, Spielberg said it sucked, Lucas said he wouldn't work on Indy IV if that script wasn't used, so Spielberg caved. Let's just say, I'm worred.
I don't know if the movie will be awful or not. I'm certainly hoping for the best, given how much I love the franchise. But man, that was a great trailer. I second the "made me feel 9 years old again" sentiment. Seeing those memorable scenes meshed with that iconic, exciting music -- quite a rush. Then when it segued into Indy in present day, it really felt great. Back on an adventure again with one of the coolest heroes in American film. The jokes about his age were well integrated within the trailer and funny, and the settings they showed, the action, it all felt positively Indiana Jones. I'm thrilled.
"the forthcoming India Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull..."
are we outsourcing our action heroes now?
Can't be as bad as Transformers.
My read on the Vanity Fair article was as follows:
1) Ten years ago, Lucas comes up with a premise for a new Indy movie.
2) Spielberg and Ford both think it sucks
3) Lucas commissions script after script on this premise.
4) Spielberg and Ford both think they all song, and refuse to do it.
5) Lucas refuses to come up with a new premise.
6) A script is finally commissioned which Ford and Spielberg both find acceptable.
Neither Spielberg nor Ford has any particular reason to want to make an entirely shitty piece of shit movie - they both have plenty of cash. So I'll say that, most likely, the script is mediocre, rather than absolutely horrendous.
I imagine the premise is going to be awful, though.
MY writes: "Sylvester Stallone's cringe-inducing efforts to revisit his classic characters."
You should have some respect. After all, every time you put up one of those Table vids I marvel at how you and Douthat remind me of Tango & Cash.
re the premise (spoiler speculation):
A photo of the titular MacGuffin has been released, and it looks like like a Sleestak. "Roswell" is mentioned in the trailer. If the MacGuffin is lame, that's too bad, but the rest of the movie won't necessarily suck.
If Matt listened to Mastodon and not Feist he would know that the Crystal Skull is to be found on Blood Mountain.
Let's see how many times Shia Lebouf says "No, no, no, no, no, no, no"
"India Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull"
Must be the Bollywood version.
Well, the new Rambo was cringe-inducing, but not because he was revisiting the character as a geezer; it's for the same reason all the other Rambo movies are cringe-inducing. Okay, the part where the baby was bayoneted made me cringe. Oh, and the pig-feeding scene. And the mass-killing-for-personal-growth moral message.
What I'm trying to say is that it was awesome and that Matt should apologize.
1. I loooved "Raiders Of The Lost Ark," but despite my honest good-faith attempts to see the trailer through the eyes of my former twelve-year-old self, it's still 2008 and the concept of the 1980s "wisecracking action hero" feels incredibly dated.
2. The "skatepunk sidekick" looks to have about the same depth and charisma as whoever-it-was who played the young Anakin in "The Phantom Menace."
Transformers wasn't that bad, given that the source material sucked. My little brother made me sit through WAY too much anime for me not to know how much worse a movie about giant robots could have been...
Since Ford is older than his co-star Jim Broadbent, I can't see how the movie can help but suck. Ford's in great shape for a geezer, but he's a real geezer. Older than Keith Richard by a year. From the looks of the trailer, the character ran over about a million miles of bad road since the last time we've seen him.
Very hard to judge. The best scenes from "Temple of Doom" could be made to look awesome, too, it's just that the rest of the scenes sucked.
Ford does look remarkably fit for a man his age, however.
The first Rambo movie ("First Blood"?) wasn't one of the five worst films ever made. The second one definitely was, and I never saw the others.
It seems pretty easy to understand how the movie could potentially suck.
However, the main weakness of Temple of Doom -- lack of Nazis -- seems to have been avoided.
Lucas can produce acceptable work when there are people around him willing to tell him "no," which seems to have been the case here, so it may not be a complete disaster.
I'll play the curmudgeon and say I thought the trailer looked like crap because of all the CGI. The first three movies managed to be cool adventure tales without the assistance of CGI. CGI generally tends to be a good excuse to make outlandishly improbably action sequences. And with George Lucas pulling the strings, that trend is only more likely to be played out. So I'd bet good money it will suck (if such a thing could be conclusively determined).
"Lucas can produce acceptable work when there are people around him willing to tell him 'no...'"
Exactly.
Comparing "Raiders" to its sequels isn't really fair. It was one of the greatest films ever made. "Crystal Skull" might not be great, but it can't be as bad as "Temple of Doom", which, to be honest, was awful. A blatant, poorly-done rip-off of the far superior "Gunga Din". The new film will probably be on a par with "Last Crusade", which had an average script dressed up with top-notch production values. Decent, but not even in the same ballpark as the original.
Hmmm...
21st century George Lucas suckitude vs. the consistent mediocrity that is Steven Spielberg?
Sign me up!
The first Indiana Jones movie is the only one that's truly great. This won't be as good as that one, but it certainly could match the other two.
Anyway, the most important thing is I now have a brand new Cate Blanchette fantasy. Woof!
Your snarky dismissal of Stallone (yeah, he's a hard target to resist, I admit) was at least 50% off the mark. Rocky Balboa was--very surprisingly--a pretty decent movie. Manipulative, sure, but no more than the original and far better than the sequels. I can't comment on Rambo, since I have refused to see any of these movies. FWIW, the trailer did look pretty ludicrous.
It has been said to some extent above, but the Rocky movies after the first all sucked. Rocky Balboa was probably the second best one. All the Rambos after the first one sucked, reportedly (I didn't see them all).
Does Indiana Jones have to wear the exact same outfit when he's 60 that he wore when he was 30? Did those clothes ever wear out? Or did the Nazis put him in an aging machine, so that he could be really old and still fight them in the 40s? It does feature action sequences with those old army trucks, which is one of the highlights of the first one.
I think someone criticized something that seemed "improbable" in the trailer. At least it's not as improbable as centuries-old Inca booby traps that still work, perfectly smooth dirt roads that allow a hero to drag himself under a moving truck without harm, and a 3000-year old sealed tomb that's freshly stocked knee-high with asps. One could in a movie normally buy into the Ark of the Covenant melting Nazi face and the Holy Grail having some special Jesus-power, but the Indiana Jones series requires a whole 'nother level of suspension of disbelief. The series single-handedly invented the genre of the magic treasure hunting historian, to the extent that a film like National Treasure is still today not received as a comedy.
It is definitely important to remember that the 2nd 2 Indiana Jones movies really really sucked. I haven't seen the first lately, but I wonder if that one might not have aged particularly well.
I recently watched Empire Strikes Back on cable and was amazed at just how godawful it was. I'd always thought this was the most fun of the three movies, but it was of much poorer quality than your average made-for-SciFi channel extravaganza, and not just in terms of special effects. The camera work was just terrible. And I had the clear impression that I was watching actors stomp around on movie sets through the entire thing.
What makes anyone think that any project involving George Lucas at this point won't just be pathetic? How long is he going to be able to milk nostalgia for a couple of cheezy popcorn movies he mad 30 years ago?
Just adding my vote in defense of the new Rocky. Certainly not great, but a pretty decent movie.
Plus it’s one hell of an ad for HGH.
I assume from the Nazi references, the Crystal Skull reference, and the Roswell reference that what the plot of this movie is about is Cate Blanchett (the villain) is some sort of Nazi resurrectionist who wants to use the legendary "Crystal Skull" and a bunch of Nazi UFOs to start up a "Fourth Reich".
I think that's been done before in several fiction novels I can remember reading. But most people probably don't know anything about the topics, any more than they knew about the Holy Grail and the like. The Indiana Jones movies are usually based on "real" myths and legends just as the Lara Croft movies were.
The trailer wasn't that good, so I think we need to wait for a better trailer before we pronounce judgment.
One thing that seems likely, though, is that Harrison Ford will be playing more "Grumpy Old Men" than "Indiana Jones" in this one. That's why they brought along the kid. Although you'll recall they had a Chinese kid in the "Temple of Doom" movie.
I thought that movie was excellent. Some people criticized it because of the more mature violence in it, but the whole "falling out of the airplane, then falling over a cliff" bit was just awesome as action movies go. Made no sense, but then the James Bond movies make no sense either.
Consider "Goldeneye". Does anybody think any human being would deliberately ride a motorcycle over a cliff, sky dive down into a falling plane, enter it and fly it away? You might try that if you had already fallen over a cliff - I mean, you're dead anyway, right? But deliberately doing that? Even I couldn't buy that one. You'd have to have a suicide fetish.
Another scene I never bought was in "Cradle 2 the Grave" where Jet Li gains access to a bad guy's apartment by hanging from the car park on the roof, then letting go, and falling down and catching the next apartment balcony down, then repeating the maneuver until he lands on the target balcony. No rope, no nothing. Just acrobatic ability. You'd have to be either utterly confident of your ability to do that - or utterly nuts.
Or take "Triple X": Vinn Diesel parachutes onto a mountain with a snowboard, snowboards down the mountain, then starts an avalanche and outraces it so it will overwhelm the bad guys in front of him. Again, you'd have to be utterly confident - or nuts. (Or as he put it in the movie, "I live for this shit!")
So, yeah, all these stunts and special effects are basically stupid but absolutely standard in action movies. If you can't accept them, don't go to the movie. I mean, it's not "Sense and Sensibility", right? If you want Gwyneth Paltrow with a bad British accent, you're in the wrong theater.
Nothing is more boring than reading or hearing people proclaim with great superiority how they're far too sophisticated to like action movies.
1) Since when was India "The Cradle of Civilization"?
2) A set-piece fight inside the warehouse where they keep The Artifacts could be fantastic, but it's also very self-referential and could backfire in a way that sours the enjoyability of the previous film.
Of course, I'm sure George Lucas is too smart for that.
Comments closed February 29, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
for a couple of minutes there, i was 10 years old again.
Posted by rob! | February 15, 2008 1:26 PM