‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’ has finally arrived and it proves three things:
1) Practical effects are infinitely better than CGI unless your movie takes place in space. And even then, practical effects are infinitely better than CGI.
2) Lucas and Spielberg no longer have the magic touch.
And most important
3) I am 33-years-old.
Given, point two was already proven halfway a while ago. But was it blind optimism to believe that Spielberg would slap some sense into Lucas, to take things back to square one? To make this movie the way they’d made the others? To try to recapture the magic? I don’t think so. And Spielberg was almost on our side.
Check it:
“He [Spielberg] thought maybe we should just go back to the way we did things before, like matte paintings on glass and things like that,” said visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman.
He did? That’s a great idea! But wait…
“We entertained that idea for a little bit, but we realized we could serve the story better by using our digital tools.”
Boy, were they wrong on that one.
And that brings me back to point one – practical effects are infinitely better than CGI.
There’s no magic in CGI. You notice they don’t do ‘Movie Magic’-type shows on TV anymore? It’s because they’d all look like commercials for DeVry – just dudes in front of computers. You no longer gasp at amazing visuals in movies now, because if it’s TOO amazing, you simply assume it’s computer generated. No, they didn’t blow up an interstate bridge for ‘War of the Worlds’. There were no huge armies of ogres or whatever in Lord of the Rings. Spider-Man? Pure cartoon. Sure, animated robots fighting are pretty cool, but there’s nothing that makes you think “Wow, how’d they do that?” because the answer is easy – computers. Anything breathtaking came to you from a hard-drive and the blood, sweat and tears (for real, no sarcasm now) of a team of digital artists.
And it’s the “how’d they do that?” part that is key to making you feel like a kid again, which is the key to these movies. I’ve read my share of apologetic reviews of Indy 4 that defend the movie by saying you have to check your brain at the door and that these movies were never anything to really dwell on. Really? Because I saw ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ in 1981 and I’ve been dwelling pretty hard on it ever since. I’ve thought about it for so long that when ‘The Mummy’ came out – ten YEARS after the last Indy movie – my first thought was “Indiana Jones rip-off.” Then, in 2004 when ‘National Treasure’ came out, I didn’t think twice about ‘The Mummy’, which made tons of money in its time. My first thought was still “Indiana Jones rip-off.” I don’t feel this way about ‘Starman’ or ‘Flight of the Navigator’ or even ‘The Goonies’, all of which have aged horribly. I think you’re deluding yourself if you think the Indiana Jones movies were disposable.
Which brings me to point three – I am 33 years old.
When I saw the first trailer for Indy 4, there was this selective memory thing going on, where I was mentally fast-forwarding past the parts that I thought were crappy (Indy’s swing and miss in the warehouse, then his limp “I thought I was closer” line while the bad guys sit next to him and wait for him to start punching them) and sticking to the stuff that felt like Indy (His great “Not as easy as it used to be.” line). I was consciously and sub-consciously preparing for Indy 4, protecting myself from the heartbreak of a grand 27-year-old illusion being totally destroyed.
When I was a kid, I would’ve just swallowed all of this stuff whole. There would’ve been no “That line is a few degrees off from what it should’ve been” or “This car chase doesn’t seem to be moving very fast” or “Monkeys? I hate my eyes.”. None of that. But not so, now. It takes a great deal more work to get under my skin. False notes ring loud and clear now. Human behavior isn’t quite the mystery it was in my grade school days. I’ve grown up and movies have grown up and innocence isn’t as innocent as it used to be.
None of this should matter, though. Movies are like a dream state. And every adult has a part of them that never grew up. The trick is knowing exactly how to plug into that. Lucas and Spielberg used to own the map to that place.
Which brings us back to point two and a perfect place to end this rant.
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Well said. And I was hating my eyes when I saw those monkeys, too. My damn monkey-seeing eyes.
Anyway, great post. I think you hit the nail on the head when you say there was nothing disposable about the Indy movies — “Raiders” is a classic nine ways from Sunday. I’m not saying Spielberg and Lucas have made a classic every time out of the gate with this franchise (though “Last Crusade” came close) and that anything short of undying perfection would have satisfied me with “Crystal Skull”, but at the very least, they needed to respect their own franchise half as much as the most devoted fan. (Aside: Isn’t it kind of sad that Indy’s own creators can’t be counted on to be Indy’s biggest fans?)
But I was thinking about something else today. The last time Spielberg made an Indiana Jones movie, he hadn’t yet made “Schindler’s List.” After he made that movie, he said he’d never depict Nazis as cartoon figures again. With that comment, he was, in a small way, apologizing for “Raiders” and “Last Crusade,” and their depiction of mass murderers as over-the-top movie-villains. But in a larger way, Spielberg was distancing himself from those earlier Indy movies, and the person he was before he went through the deeply changing experience of making “Schindler.” But if you look at the movies he’s made since 93′s “Schindler,” with the exception of “Lost World,” he has truly changed. He abandoned the filmmaker he once was. “Crystal Skull” wasn’t just his first try at Indiana Jones in 19 years, it was his first try at making a no-holds-barred fun-as-hell summer popcorn movie since “Schindler” sobered him up. “Crystal Skull” may prove a fourth thing: the Spielberg who made “E.T.” and “Jaws” and “Raiders” and “Close Encounters” and “Jurassic Park” is gone. Even if he tries to get back to that old place again, I just don’t think his heart’s in it anymore.