Matt May 27th, 2008

Saturday I went to see the new Indiana Jones movie. I was young enough to have only seen the original three on Beta (remember those?) and VHS, so seeing the latest installment at the theater was a bit of a treat - like finishing a drumstick and finding that there’s still a few peanuts left in the package. And while at the time I thought the film was both better and worse than I expected, my overall feeling is that Lucas & Spielberg ultimately threw us, the fans, a few peanuts after they had their fill on the drumstick. Mindless fun, but ultimately disappointing if you stop and think about it.

There be spoilers below (mostly spoilers, so be warned).

Let’s start with the opening scene. Yay, desert! This looks like the opening of the last film. But wait. Cars, the 50s, a strip race… aw, man. A fucking homage to American Graffiti. Fuck it. Fuck fuck fuck. Deep breath, but I survived. I can deal with it but all bets are off if I even catch a whiff of Richard Dreyfuss.

The movie picks up from there for a bit. We see Indy and a friend hauled out from the trunk of a car (picking up his fedora (peanut #1) along the way) and interrogated by Natasha Fatale. Ultimately he’s coerced into helping the Russians find something in the warehouse we see at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Here Indy gets a bit of action, we hear his knees and whip crack (#2 and we wonder if he’s been taking his calcium), there’s a car chase, we get a glimpse of the ark (#3), the Russians get the loot and Indy makes his escape with an improbably placed rocket train thinger.

From here things only get weirder. Indy (and some of the Russians) arrive at an atomic test site for fuck knows why and the bomb starts to countdown. How does our sexagenarian hero escape certain doom? Why, by locking himself in a fridge. A fridge we’re supposed to believe would outlast an atomic blast while the house it was standing in, nearby cars, essentially everything else was blasted to smithereens, while all the fridge endures is a bit of a drop and the necessity of a new paint job. This scene is an obvious nod to early serials, where we’d see our hero die and come back the very next week having only just narrowly escaped his fate. Here, I’ll let Annie Wilkes explain why this sort of thing does not stand, man:

Annie Wilkes: When I was growing up in Bakersfield, my favorite thing in the whole world was to go to the movies on Saturday afternoons for the Chapter Plays.

Paul Sheldon: [nodding] Cliffhangers.

Annie Wilkes: [shouting] I know that, Mr. Man! They also called them serials. I’m not stupid ya know… Anyway, my favorite was Rocketman, and once it was a no breaks chapter. The bad guy stuck him in a car on a mountain road and knocked him out and welded the door shut and tore out the brakes and started him to his death, and he woke up and tried to steer and tried to get out but the car went off a cliff before he could escape! And it crashed and burned and I was so upset and excited, and the next week, you better believe I was first in line. And they always start with the end of the last week. And there was Rocketman, trying to get out, and here comes the cliff, and just before the car went off the cliff, he jumped free! And all the kids cheered! But I didn’t cheer. I stood right up and started shouting. This isn’t what happened last week! Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us! This isn’t fair! HE DID’NT GET OUT OF THE COCK-A-DOODIE CAR!

And it does feel like cheating. And not only that, but it feels lazy. I imagine it was supposed to provide a jolt of adrenaline, or maybe it’s in Spielberg’s contract that he has to have an explosion in every movie - I honestly don’t know. But would it have been so bad just to have Indy be spotted by a helicopter, or a passing jeep - maybe even a roving pack of Boy Scout troops on their way to explore some nearby caves? Apparently so.

And so we’re moved on to the next part of the movie, the red scare, Indy loses his job, lame nods to Marcus Brody and Indiana Jones Sr. (extremely lame).

From there- aw, hell. I can’t go on. I’ll just sum it up in a few words: mutt, greasers, motorcycle chase, pan america, grave digging, the city of gold, aliens, mind control, capoeira, indians, Karen Allen, jungle chase, vine swinging, fencing, giant ants, waterfalls, thank god the credits are rolling.

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