jon_a_ross (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} jon_a_ross) wrote,@ 2008-05-24 07:08:00 |
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A little more detail on my feelings towards the latest Indiana Jones movie
The movie starts with a bunch of joyriding 1957 teen punks almost running over a CGI mole who came out of a CGI molehill.
That begins the long slide into ... well ... the violation of another of my childhood memories really. Jones, after all that happens in the movies before, stops picking on the Nazi's and switched over to the Russians (as refered to in a number of statements in the first ten minutes of the movie) introduce an MI6 character from this history that I HAVE JUST HAD THE HORRIBLE THOUGHT THEY MIGHT TRY TO MAKE .... Tears! Anyway a character with whom Jones has some history.
Lucas must have then picked up Chariots of the Gods and gone 'this is even better then scientology, I can make a movie of it' and then proceeded to hit the booze until some CGI filled vomit landed on the page.
Ok. I have to say that a lot of my vile hatred for the movie comes from Lucas not being able to leave Aliens out of it. (only they aren't aliens. Once enough people have seen it I'll rant about how I feel about what they were but .... it is stupid.) And that Lucas screams into this movie 'I think this is great. I think this is Great. I know this is my childhood bring brought to life so I can live it again in the great movie that I'm making. La la La. I'm Great.' Editors should have the ability to say to these people, No... That isn't a good idea. Stop acting like a child. Actually I have lots of vile for this movie from lots of things, I'm going to try to walk through some of it here without giving any spoilers away.
So Jones has to recover this plastic Alien Skull that is wrapped up in the myths of Meso America while learning that he as a son and so on...
Acting: None at all. There is lots of re-acting, but you do not leave the movie with any iconic scenes in your head that you will be able to quote to your friends and get them to remember. (The opening scene to Raiders of the Lost Ark, good and useful, show what I mean)
The extras are cardboard cut outs, from the FBI 'looking for hidden Red agents in the USA' to the 'I'm a russian agent slash super thug, come with me or I'll kill some kittens.' Ford I can understand some of his character being limited to reactions and action scenes not really being a tour-de-force, but the other characters are just as lifeless.
Believability: All of the Jones movies step away from the 'real world' it is part of the spirit of the shows. Usually they do this in small steps, from the traps at the beginning being defendable as real (even if you are left asking 'who reloads the darts?'). This movie went 'Magic and Technology are Super Cool' and throws us into a sea of magic from the get go. Jones is able to find one of these Alien Skulls in the first five minutes of the movie by throwing gun powder into the air and following it as it swoshes along a warehouse. Doing some rough sums in my head, if the magnetic field generated by the skull has enough power to move a half gram particle from one hundred meters away it should be strong enough to pull 20 kg objects to it from half a meter... Anyway... The magnetic power of the skulls seems to flux wildly. (Usually when someone remembers that it should effect X or that it really shouldn't have effected Y but did...)
So, magic gets introduced too soon and is too big a part of the movie for me to support it. As for the action scenes? The first twenty ~ Twenty-five minutes of the movie was just like a Forest Gump piece. Harrison Ford goes past a number of Ironic 50's events, from the first rocket car to break the sound barrier to an atomic bomb. (Yeah. They go there.) As I told Trent going into this movie, Jones is really a superhero with a healing factor out the yin-yang. They prove it by just how much he can survive.
The cheeseball level of the fights is ok. Again, Jones wasn't really grounded in reality so each time ramping the action level is fair enough. You do wonder, given the nature of some of the later hiding spots of the enemies how long it takes them to set that all back up after it gets foiled...
CGI: ugh. I love animation, especially when I can see how they did it but still be able to see past how it looks on the screen to accept it as real. In this movie all the animals with the possible exception of one monkey (and I'm personally thinking the monkey was CGI too, just not moving wrong like all the others) were digital. No animals were hurt in the making, but man do they hurt your eyes with all that motion blur to hide the details.
I also spent much of the start of the second act looking at the use of focus on the movie. I couldn't decide while watching it if they were using a soft focus on the background to hide that it was digital, to punch the details on the main actors in the foreground, or to use a digital effect to paint the background with '50's era hues'. It really distracted me at points, which was fine as most of that first part is info dumping on what is going on.
The backgrounds and machines later also are digital, I suspect that when we see the special features on this movie they will be proud of how they only did 10 days shooting on location and the rest was in the studios of X in front of a blue screen...
Plot: Sucks goats. Hard.
Ok, to be fair, all of the others didn't have any depth at all. But in this one the McGuffin doesn't even trade back and forth that much. A > B > C > D > E > F > G > H > I Yeah... 9 scenes say, first scene being one that starts in the middle as per standard Jones, then a call to action, First step on the journey, Find the Map, Descent into the underworld, Find the wise man to guide you, Battle against impossible odds, Use the Map...
And you can guess the last ones if you know where they stole the structure from. (In this rant the use of Scene refers all of the action taking place with both a single location and theme)
The good bits: Rare bits of movie that poke through, hinting at a much better movie that could've come to the light if a better editor had come in and curb stomped the lot of them into cleaning it up. It does have some good moments, but I can't say they are worth seeing the movie for. If it's on TV and you have something else to do while it's playing every now and then it will reward your inattention with something good.
In the end, I knew I was going to see this movie. Seeing it with my friends (my wife is included in that) making it a shared moment when another in the long line of memories from the 80's being raked over the coals of remake this into crap is perhaps going to give it a longer lasting impression in my mind then it should get. But as I sit here I can't think of a good exchange of dialogue that would be worth the energy to type out here and get someone to like it enough to think the movie is worth seeing.
I honestly don't see anything. Which, in a way, means that when they do the Epic Adventure! parody movie or whatever they will be forced to parody the cheeseball and hope for the best. Ugh.
Why can I see so much of the vile trash in my head but I can't envision a glorious movie?
The movie starts with a bunch of joyriding 1957 teen punks almost running over a CGI mole who came out of a CGI molehill.
That begins the long slide into ... well ... the violation of another of my childhood memories really. Jones, after all that happens in the movies before, stops picking on the Nazi's and switched over to the Russians (as refered to in a number of statements in the first ten minutes of the movie) introduce an MI6 character from this history that I HAVE JUST HAD THE HORRIBLE THOUGHT THEY MIGHT TRY TO MAKE .... Tears! Anyway a character with whom Jones has some history.
Lucas must have then picked up Chariots of the Gods and gone 'this is even better then scientology, I can make a movie of it' and then proceeded to hit the booze until some CGI filled vomit landed on the page.
Ok. I have to say that a lot of my vile hatred for the movie comes from Lucas not being able to leave Aliens out of it. (only they aren't aliens. Once enough people have seen it I'll rant about how I feel about what they were but .... it is stupid.) And that Lucas screams into this movie 'I think this is great. I think this is Great. I know this is my childhood bring brought to life so I can live it again in the great movie that I'm making. La la La. I'm Great.' Editors should have the ability to say to these people, No... That isn't a good idea. Stop acting like a child. Actually I have lots of vile for this movie from lots of things, I'm going to try to walk through some of it here without giving any spoilers away.
So Jones has to recover this plastic Alien Skull that is wrapped up in the myths of Meso America while learning that he as a son and so on...
Acting: None at all. There is lots of re-acting, but you do not leave the movie with any iconic scenes in your head that you will be able to quote to your friends and get them to remember. (The opening scene to Raiders of the Lost Ark, good and useful, show what I mean)
The extras are cardboard cut outs, from the FBI 'looking for hidden Red agents in the USA' to the 'I'm a russian agent slash super thug, come with me or I'll kill some kittens.' Ford I can understand some of his character being limited to reactions and action scenes not really being a tour-de-force, but the other characters are just as lifeless.
Believability: All of the Jones movies step away from the 'real world' it is part of the spirit of the shows. Usually they do this in small steps, from the traps at the beginning being defendable as real (even if you are left asking 'who reloads the darts?'). This movie went 'Magic and Technology are Super Cool' and throws us into a sea of magic from the get go. Jones is able to find one of these Alien Skulls in the first five minutes of the movie by throwing gun powder into the air and following it as it swoshes along a warehouse. Doing some rough sums in my head, if the magnetic field generated by the skull has enough power to move a half gram particle from one hundred meters away it should be strong enough to pull 20 kg objects to it from half a meter... Anyway... The magnetic power of the skulls seems to flux wildly. (Usually when someone remembers that it should effect X or that it really shouldn't have effected Y but did...)
So, magic gets introduced too soon and is too big a part of the movie for me to support it. As for the action scenes? The first twenty ~ Twenty-five minutes of the movie was just like a Forest Gump piece. Harrison Ford goes past a number of Ironic 50's events, from the first rocket car to break the sound barrier to an atomic bomb. (Yeah. They go there.) As I told Trent going into this movie, Jones is really a superhero with a healing factor out the yin-yang. They prove it by just how much he can survive.
The cheeseball level of the fights is ok. Again, Jones wasn't really grounded in reality so each time ramping the action level is fair enough. You do wonder, given the nature of some of the later hiding spots of the enemies how long it takes them to set that all back up after it gets foiled...
CGI: ugh. I love animation, especially when I can see how they did it but still be able to see past how it looks on the screen to accept it as real. In this movie all the animals with the possible exception of one monkey (and I'm personally thinking the monkey was CGI too, just not moving wrong like all the others) were digital. No animals were hurt in the making, but man do they hurt your eyes with all that motion blur to hide the details.
I also spent much of the start of the second act looking at the use of focus on the movie. I couldn't decide while watching it if they were using a soft focus on the background to hide that it was digital, to punch the details on the main actors in the foreground, or to use a digital effect to paint the background with '50's era hues'. It really distracted me at points, which was fine as most of that first part is info dumping on what is going on.
The backgrounds and machines later also are digital, I suspect that when we see the special features on this movie they will be proud of how they only did 10 days shooting on location and the rest was in the studios of X in front of a blue screen...
Plot: Sucks goats. Hard.
Ok, to be fair, all of the others didn't have any depth at all. But in this one the McGuffin doesn't even trade back and forth that much. A > B > C > D > E > F > G > H > I Yeah... 9 scenes say, first scene being one that starts in the middle as per standard Jones, then a call to action, First step on the journey, Find the Map, Descent into the underworld, Find the wise man to guide you, Battle against impossible odds, Use the Map...
And you can guess the last ones if you know where they stole the structure from. (In this rant the use of Scene refers all of the action taking place with both a single location and theme)
The good bits: Rare bits of movie that poke through, hinting at a much better movie that could've come to the light if a better editor had come in and curb stomped the lot of them into cleaning it up. It does have some good moments, but I can't say they are worth seeing the movie for. If it's on TV and you have something else to do while it's playing every now and then it will reward your inattention with something good.
In the end, I knew I was going to see this movie. Seeing it with my friends (my wife is included in that) making it a shared moment when another in the long line of memories from the 80's being raked over the coals of remake this into crap is perhaps going to give it a longer lasting impression in my mind then it should get. But as I sit here I can't think of a good exchange of dialogue that would be worth the energy to type out here and get someone to like it enough to think the movie is worth seeing.
I honestly don't see anything. Which, in a way, means that when they do the Epic Adventure! parody movie or whatever they will be forced to parody the cheeseball and hope for the best. Ugh.
Why can I see so much of the vile trash in my head but I can't envision a glorious movie?
