"Have your knife ready, kiddo. If that groundhog pops up again, I want you to gut him. Groundhogs is good eatin'."The moment I knew we were in trouble was when a CG groundhog popped out of the Nevada desert not once, not twice but thrice in the first twenty minutes of the long-awaited fourth installment in the Indiana Jones franchise.
While this could be considered a minor quibble and an insignificant blight on an otherwise generally pleasant bit of escapist cinema, the groundhog is actually representative of a major fault in Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It's a useless bit of tomfoolery, a contrivance that does nothing to propel the adventure of the man in the fedora, but it's also more than that.
George Lucas and his Northern California Skywalker Ranch empire have changed the face of movies. It was Lucas' pioneering spirit that led to the advent and refinement of computer generated imagery (CGI) and the ability to put things on film that had never been possible before. In Lucas' and other's hands, that technology has now been horribly mutated into a tool for the vain and a surrogate for narrative deficiencies. It's a means to its own gee whiz end that has all but squandered the good will Lucas earned from his early career's low-tech success.
While Lucas was giving us Jar Jar Binks, his partner, Steven Spielberg was making better use of the advances in special effects. From the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park to the tripods in War of the Worlds, Spielberg's judicious use of special effects as a plot development and mood enhancing tool have almost always been pitch perfect. Unfortunately, Lucas' fingerprints are all over The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and the overstuffed computer effects that would be more at home in a story about hobbits and iron men than one about a globe-trotting, rough-and-tumble archaeologist give the movie an anachronistic high gloss resulting in an Indiana Jones adventure that looks and feels like the Tomb Raiders and National Treasures that it inspired.
As a movie, IJATKOTCS (I now refuse to write it all out) is not without its nostalgic kicks. Seeing Ford don the fedora and crack the whip again is a delight, and Karen Allen appears to be having a blast reprising her Marian Ravenwood role (She can't stop grinning.). Also, the red route lines that traverse sepia toned maps while our hero travels and John Williams' classic soundtrack fire neural pathways that serve to remind us that this is Indiana Jones, dammit, but in the the end, those feelings of nostalgia are outweighed by a muddled and foolish plot (Indy is actually trying to return something rather than find it. Wait, someone already found it and returned it so Indy needs to find it again and take it somewhere else?). I can forgive a muddled plot. This is Indiana Jones after all. As for the suspension of disbelief required for the story's more ridiculous bird walks, if you can't handle that, stay home and watch the History Channel. For Indy, I can forgive a lot, but the movie's greatest offense can best be summed up by an episode that occurred in my home a few days after seeing the movie.
My wife and I were watching a PBS special on the history of Las Vegas. There was a segment of the documentary that dealt with the nuclear testing that was taking place in the Nevada desert in the 1950's and how visitors to Vegas would watch mushroom clouds ascend over the horizon in between hands of blackjack. Jamye interjected that this was her favorite part of the new Indiana Jones movie. I was puzzled. I had no idea what she was talking about. After a few moments I remembered one of the movie's big action set pieces involving Indy, a nuclear testing sight and an old refrigerator, but the sad point had been made. An Indiana Jones adventure was guilty of the biggest sin imaginable. Like most movies of the past ten years, it was destined to be forgettable.
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