Cate Blanchett as psycho Soviet psychic.
Film
Raiders of the lost art
by David Larsen
Has the Indiana Jones franchise forgotten how to have fun?
When you’re watching a beloved film trilogy attempt to become a beloved film quartet, there are two words you do not want to hear: “George Lucas”. So the good news is, despite having its story co-written by the of The Phantom Menace’s creator, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is not, in fact, a train wreck.
For anyone hoping the good news would be slightly better than that, there’s one more crumb of comfort: it’s no more implausible for a 58-year-old archaeologist to survive one of these films than it was for a 36-year-old, so the fact that Harrison Ford is nearing retirement age is neither here nor there. Indiana Jones can still dodge as many bullets as 20 rent-a-thugs care to send his way. He can still shrug off a savage beating the way most of us would a peck on the cheek. Drop him over a Niagara-sized waterfall and he might wince a little, but he won’t lose his fedora hat. In summary, he’s still Indiana Jones: he cracks whips, he cracks wise, he cracks jaws. It’s nice to see him again.
For a while, his return even seems as though it’s going to be thrilling. The film’s opening shot is a wide Mid-western vista, with Elvis blasting out at us as four teenagers in a hotrod drag-race an army convoy down an endlessly straight road. It looks and sounds nothing like an Indiana Jones film. It looks fresh. It could go anywhere.
Indy is a prisoner in the convoy, which is made up of Russian agents under the command of the most memorable villain this franchise has yet fielded: Cate Blanchett, blissfully chewing the scenery as a psycho Soviet psychic with an accent twice as broad as the Kremlin. Indy commandeers an experimental rocket sled and escapes right into the middle of an imminent nuclear test. Welcome to the 1950s, Dr Jones.
This opening sequence looks much like a promisory note from Steven Spielberg: “I haven’t spent 20 years waiting to make this film just so I could repeat myself.” It allows Indiana Jones to stay himself, and it has the courage to change everything else. Or almost everything. We still have to accept the relentless overscoring of John Williams, whose busy strings and blaring brass quickly repossess the soundtrack from Elvis; never has 50s music made the present seem so dated. But the overall project appears to be to let our iconic World War II hero loose in the Cold War era, and see what sparks can be made to fly.
If only Spielberg and Lucas really had it in them to be that daring. They did once. But where the original Indiana Jones film – and the original Star Wars – was a lively act of nostalgia, reinventing and reinvigorating the movie serials of the 1930s, this one is hamstrung by nostalgia of a more self-referential kind. Apparently fearing that fans will riot unless Indy ticks every box on the “What Did He Do in the Last Three Films?” list, Spielberg abandons the crisp lines and new directions of his opening, and sends us off in search of tombs to raid. The plot machinery driving this shift to the ancestral mode is not particularly intelligible, and it isn’t trying to be. The point is to deliver Classic Indy. Relics, riddles in lost languages, ancient mechanical death traps, humorous bits of business with snakes, Indy jumping a jeep convoy … it’s all cleanly enough executed, and who needs a story when you can plod through a greatest hits playlist?
The result is a film too determined to honour its own legacy to do much about living up to it. There’s an instructive comparison with last year’s reboot of a long-lapsed action series, Diehard 4.0. That film was under no illusions that it was a cinematic landmark. It didn’t get to launch itself at Cannes. But it did know how to have fun.
INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL, directed by Steven Spielberg.
