One week after the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and the consensus is… muddled. Something close to a plurality of viewers seem to regard it as mostly fun and pretty disposable, with only Roger Ebert’s breathtakingly hyperbolic review indicating that it’s any better than it had to be.
In print, in conversation, and online, I’ve found the following ideas about the film’s relative quality or lack thereof:
-It is the best film in the series since Raiders; it is barely better than Temple of Doom; it cannot hold a candle to any of them.
-Harrison Ford looks good for his age; Harrison Ford looks his age; Harrison Ford looks asleep.
-The action is amazing; the action is fake; the fakeness is part of what makes the action amazing.
-The nuclear explosion scene is goofy; the nuclear explosion scene is the lynchpin for understanding the entire movie; the nuclear explosion scene is the only part of the film that works at all.
-Cate Blanchett is wonderful; Cate Blanchett is wonderfully campy; Cate Blanchett is woefully campy; Cate Blanchett’s role should have been played by Angelina Jolie (a very hard idea to get out of your head, once somebody had put it there).
-The cinematography looks just like the last three; the cinematography, with its brighter colors and diffused lighting, is way better than the last three; the cinematography is atrocious, and Janusz Kaminski should apologise.
-The opening gag with the prairie dog hill sets the tone for the movie, broad and stupid; the opening gag sets the tone for the movie, knowing and sardonic.
-Steven Spielberg saved David Koepp’s terrible screenplay; Steven Spielberg couldn’t save David Koepp’s terrible screenplay; David Koepp’s screenplay was genius; Steven Spielberg is a hack who couldn’t save anybody’s screenplay, anyhow.
-The Denholm Elliot and Sean Connery “cameos” were sweet; the Elliot and Connery cameos were tasteless.
-The sci-fi element is a marvelous nod to the pop-culture environment of the ’50s; the sci-fi element is a distracting nod to the pop culture of the ’50s; haven’t Steven and George gotten sick of sci-fi yet?
-The crystal skulls are a lousy MacGuffin; and what, the Sankara Stones were such a good MacGuffin?; you do know that it doesn’t matter what a MacGuffin is, by it’s nature.
-Spielberg obviously had a ball directing this movie; Spielberg obviously couldn’t stand to direct this movie.
-It is a wonderful, elegiac movie; it is a tired, cash-in of a movie; it is a rollicking adventure movie.
(I’d throw up links to demonstrate all of these, but half of them were in blog comment threads, and most of them can be found in many places. If anybody seriously disputes that these all represent things that people are saying about the movie, I’ll repost over the weekend).
Basically, the only things that people agree on are that Shia LaBeouf was better than his naysayers expected, that the CGI monkeys are terrible, and that the climax of the film falls apart on its visual effects.
I bring this up because it points to a lesson we would all be well-served to learn: you can’t “solve” a movie six days after you see it, especially if you only see it once. Particularly in the case of a filmmaker like Spielberg, whose films both good and bad, even his most angry detractors must admit, have more going on than is obvious on the surface – we’re only just beginning to figure out A.I., and it seems like The Terminal is right on the cusp of a re-evaluation (rather leaving his two fine films from 2002, Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can, in the lurch, I’d say). And none of those films have a patch on the 27 years that people have been picking apart Raiders of the Lost Ark
In other words, I’m suggesting that maybe it’s a good idea to try to leave the big questions like “what is Kingdom‘s overarching purpose in Spielberg’s canon, Lucas’s, and the Indiana Jones series?” for later. Once the film is on DVD and we can watch it frame-by-frame twice in a row and things like that. This is a good thing to keep in mind for just about every movie that comes around: you don’t need to decide Right Now if you love or hate it. Let it percolate. And yes, I know that people like me are part of the problem. All I’m saying is, critical consensus or not, it takes time for a movie to reveal everything it has to offer. Let’s set Kingdom of the Crystal Skull aside for a few months, and think about it after it’s really sunk in a bit, and think about more important things.
Things like, ZOMG is The Dark Knight going to be the best film ever, or what?!