Further thoughts on "Jonesie"

I saw the movie a second time. A second time was more than enough.

I saw it a second time because I was pleased that, amid all of the gaudy CGI, the stupid sight gags, the underdeveloped dialogue, the two-dimensional characters, and the outrageously dumb plot, at least my childhood hero, Indiana Jones, remained relatively intact.

But he wasn't intact. As I watched the film a second time, I noticed that they had given Dr. Jones two new and unwelcome traits: pedantry and patriotism.

We knew from the original movies that Indy isn't always adventuring - that, indeed, he spends most of his time teaching at the fictional Marshall College in Connecticut. We saw in Raiders and Last Crusade how he is a dedicated professor, giving detailed lectures on archaeological methods to classes of enraptured (mostly female) students.

But in Crystal Skull, Lucas and Spielberg take this too far, and turn Indy into a doddering old professor. The gag in the library, when he answers a student's question while escaping on a motorcycle, and the later scene when he begins explaining the difference between quicksand and dry sand while sinking in a bed of the latter, are not only tawdry attempts at humor; they are uncharacteristic of Dr. Jones. Indy didn't pause from fending off snakes in the Well of the Souls to lecture Marion on Egyptian hieroglyphs; nor did he make some dry scholarly remark to Elsa about petroleum's inflammability when they were about to be burned alive in the catacombs. Indy knows to put aside scholarly rhetoric when time or danger do not permit it. By making him a head-in-the-clouds pedant in his later years, Lucas and Spielberg emasculate his adventurous edge.

Further damage is done to Indy's character by making him a flag-waving patriot. It starts with his response to Spalko's question if he has any last words. "I like Ike", he proclaims defiantly. Like all the other gags in this movie, it's cheap writing for a cheap laugh. But I was horrified later to see what they had Indy doing since Last Crusade. OSS? Espionage missions in Berlin? "Spying on the Reds"? The rank of Colonel in the US Military? Dr. Jones, yes; Colonel Jones? What the hell? Part of the allure of Indy has always been his free agency. Sure, in Raiders the US Government asks him to get the Ark before the Nazis do, but in all three of the original movies, Indy does things his own way. He's the independent adventurer, fighting on the side of the good guys, not because he's ordered to, but because he wants to. Putting him in an official military capacity strips him of this independence, and weakens his character.

Some further thoughts:

Jones... -ey?

Jonesey? Jonesie? However you spell it, such a word has no place in an Indiana Jones film. Call him Dr. Jones, call him Indy or Indiana, call him junior if you're his father, even call him just "Jones", but what the hell is Jonesie? And Ox called him Henry. Why? Even Marcus called him Indy, and he's known to the scholarly world by his adopted moniker: viz., when Chattar Lal, upon meeting him in Temple of Doom, addresses him as "Dr. Indiana Jones, the famous archaeologist".

Music

Indiana Jones is inconceivable without the famous Raiders March, written by John Williams, to back him up. But this movie didn't live up to the music for which the original trilogy is known. In those movies, there were separate and identifiable musical themes - leitmotifs - for the artifact, the bad guys, the love interest, and, of course, Indy himself. The theme of the ark made the ark scenes so awe-inspiring; the Nazi theme in Last Crusade is badass enough to rival the Imperial March of Star Wars. But you won't find great music in this film. The artifact and characters themselves were so forgettable that it's no surprise John Williams couldn't come up with epic music to accompany them.

Temple of Doom's shortcomings amplified

Someone I know made the excellent point that the qualities which made Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom the runt of the litter - Willie Scott and Short Round as sidekicks, an artifact not as awe-inspiring as the ark or grail, bad guys not as fun to hate as the Nazis, cheap gags like monkey brains for dessert, the fake mine car chase - are brought back and amplified in Crystal Skull. Mack, Ox, and Mutt are even worse sidekicks than Willy and Short Round. The artifact is just plain stupid. The bad guys are fungible, generic commies with no personality. The gags are cheaper. The stuntwork has sunk to horrifying new lows - oh, how I long to see a bad mine car chase, when presented with crap like surviving an atomic blast in a refrigerator! Lucas and Spielberg, when planning Crystal Skull, should have begun by recognizing what made Raiders and Last Crusade eternally great films, and then imposing those standards on the new movie; instead, it's as if they said, "What made Temple of Doom bad? Let's do those things again - but this time, bigger, and much worse!" Indeed, had they tried to make Crystal Skull a poor substitute for an Indy film, it's difficult to see how they could have had better success.

The idea for the film

It's now obvious to me how they came up with the idea for this movie. Instead of using an intriguing artifact, or even an interesting villain, as their starting point, they clearly began by thinking of what was going on in the 1950s (since, because of Harrison's age, they knew they wanted to set it in that decade). They thus realized they wanted commies to be the bad guys. Then, when trying to think of an artifact, the Roswell incident of the previous decade must have sprung to mind. That this was a bad way to plan the movie is quite simply borne out by the results.

A spaceship

Let me reiterate that there was a spaceship - a fucking spaceship - in this movie. Res ipsa loquitor.

Useless

Besides the teenage joy ride that opens the film, the FBI agents also struck me as a complete waste of time. Their suspicions of Indy are not followed up later in the film, and the scene involving them seems to achieve nothing except set up the part where the dean has resigned and Indy is close to losing his job - also a pointless excursion from the already suffering plot.

Plot-driving device

I already pointed out in my earlier review that Professor Oxley's dementia was a shameful excuse for a plot-driving device. It is worth remembering what served in this capacity in Raiders and Last Crusade. When searching for the Lost Ark, Indy had to find the headpiece to the Staff of Ra, which connected him with Marion and then led him to Cairo and the Ark's resting place in the Well of the Souls. In the Last Crusade, his father's grail diary is the plot-driving device, acting first as a sign that his father's in danger, and for the rest of the film as a guide for his quest. Given these epic precedents, could Lucas and Spielberg really come up with nothing better than a gibbering, deranged lunatic, who somehow possesses only enough consciousness to spout enigmatic riddles? It's more like watching an Alzheimer's patient than one of Dr. Jones's adventuresome colleagues.

Too Little, Too Late

By the time John Hurt's character regains the proper use of his brain, there is not much time left in the film to develop his character. When he delivers his last two lines, "[They have gone to] the space between spaces," and "How much of human life is lost in waiting," we are so used to hearing him babble nonsense that these lines sound no different.

"Three times it drops"

The waterfall scene actually bored me with its sad predictability and continuation of the film's hokey reliance on CGI. The first drop was disappointing but to be expected. The second drop had me yawning. The third drop was an unforgivable robbery of 20 seconds of my life.

KW's review

Crystal Skull Actually Made of Cheap Plastic

The Canon

Allow me to hereby EXCISE Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull from the official Indiana Jones canon. Like the "Young Indiana Jones" series, this pathetic waste of film, money, and talent deserves no place next to the immortal original trilogy of Indiana Jones, and all events portrayed in the film shall henceforth be regarded as apocryphal nonsense.