I ran across this video in my various feeds, and love it: Â it’s a comparison of the first three Indiana Jones movies against the four (somewhat hated) movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Â The first movie was 1981, and the most current one was 2008.
While I didn’t care for the plotline for Crystal Skull, and a few bits were over the top, I did enjoy the cinematography: it felt like the first three movies. Â It feels like it could have been made in the same decade as the first one, with one exception: Â the effects are much better. Here’s the comparison video:
In fact, besides age, even Indy was still Indy. Â It didn’t pull a Die Hard, where McCain gets so used to it all, he now just grunts and grimaces every time something bad happens – Â the original McCain was an “everyman” type, but after the third movie, he became a grizzled veteran. Â Â Indy doesn’t: Â he remains Indy, skeptical of myths (even with what he’s seen), all that good stuff.
But, that plotline… geez. That was a bit hard to swallow. And “Mutt” is a character I hope to never see on screen again (which is sad, in a way; Shia really did spend a lot of time trying to “be” that character. Problem is, the character sucked. And I’m not a fan of Shia either.)
It was fun, it was another brainless Indy adventure (I subscribe to the theory that if Indy hadn’t have been involved with any of those adventures, they would have still turned out just fine: the Nazi’s would have melted themselves with the Ark, the Grail would have still killed the Nazi’s, etc.) The action was good, and the whole thing was fun. Just… hard to swallow. 🙂 Looks wise, if you watched the video above, it’s perfect: everything from Indy’s actions, the bad guys actions, the effects, the stunts, to the style, is a perfect match for the previous movies.
Now, if you want to know what’s wrong with the movie, you could go with “Everything Wrong With Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull” – it’s about 15 minutes to cover it all! But, they made some mistakes:
He mentions other adventures, and they ding it with “A plot that would have made a way better movie than this one” more than once. They could have just watched them from the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, which were compiled into movies (and are canon to the Indiana Jones plot line, like running around with Pancho Villa). And there’s an interesting debate about Indy surviving the nuclear blast that involves him having drank from the grail…