Indiana Jones: Is Spielberg Too Rich and Famous to Be Good Anymore?
By Eileen Jones,
AlterNet. Posted May 26, 2008.
Spielberg's inventiveness fails a half-hour into the latest Indiana Jones, but the rest of the movie coasts on its zillion-dollar budget. The first couple of scenes in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull are good. I mean, really good. I was never more shocked than when I was sitting there in the theater having to revise all my expectations at a moment's notice: "Oh my gosh, Spielberg might've actually made a good film again! It's happening, right here, right now, after all these years!"
It was too wonderful to be true, of course, and the movie soon turned into just what you'd expect: a big-budget, corny, by-the-numbers sequel designed to please legions of nostalgic fans. But those first scenes, I'm telling you, presuming I wasn't having some sort of fantastic dream, were reminiscent of those long-ago Steven Spielberg genre films that made him famous in the first place.
This fourth Indiana Jones film, let's call it Indy IV, opens with a flat-out exhilarating drag-race scene in the harsh American desert between a carload of 1950s teenagers and the lead vehicle in a long, formidable U.S. Army caravan. So beautifully and unerringly shot, lit, cast and edited that it looks like a collective American fever dream of our insane post-World War II past, this bizarre race makes your heart thump with uncertainty. Is it going to end in comedy or tragedy, or split the difference? Will the soldiers and teenagers have one of those populist joyrides together and then amicably go their separate ways, or will the speeding teens wind up dead in a ditch, or will the soldiers open fire for sinister reasons yet to be revealed, or what? Spielberg plays so many complicated chords you can't be sure. David Lynch himself wouldn't be ashamed to claim a few of those chords.
But wait, there's more. Soon after that, there's a sequence I won't ruin for you that involves Area 51 and Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) surviving a nuclear blast, mushroom cloud and all. Hot damn, here we go, I thought. I've had the basic training in American film noir, and when the postwar hero survives a version of his own death, look out -- you're in for something. For one brief, shining moment I really believed that Spielberg had finally decided to damn all commercial certainties to hell and realize his vast talents in one risky late-career enterprise.
Wrong. .......(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.alternet.org/movies/86448/