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CANNES,
France—It’s
the summer’s most anticipated film, the latest in a
beloved series that’s earned $1.2 billion in worldwide
ticket sales. Add in a premiere at the most prestigious
of international film festivals, and the wonder of
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
is that it avoids being an anticlimax and is
entertaining in its own right.
Though
the film stars a relaxed and capable
Harrison Ford as everyone’s favorite intrepid
archaeologist and boasts supporting players ranging from
Cate Blanchett as a superb villainess to Shia LaBeouf as
the inevitable youngster, the real heroes of this film
are director Steven Spielberg and the veritable army of
superb technicians who turn the film’s numerous stunts
and special effects into trains that insist on running
on time.
Trains
are, in fact, not a bad metaphor for the director’s
motivations for this fourth Indy effort, the first in 19
years. Just like a model-train hobbyist who enjoys
getting more and more expensive equipment as his income
level rises, Spielberg clearly got enormous pleasure
employing a lifetime’s worth of skill and turning out
wave after wave of smartly done stunts and effects set
pieces.
Certainly, Crystal Skull couldn’t have had a more
eager, not to say rabid, audience anywhere in the world
than the one at the Cannes Film Festival for its pair of
Sunday screenings. The chaos at the press entrance was
remarkable at the first screening, with frantic
cinephiles pushing, shoving, attempting to jump over
barriers and engaging in fierce shouting matches with
the guards. And inside the normally decorous Grand
Theatre Lumiere, where the festival’s closing ceremony
is held, there was unprecedented cheering as the opening
credits rolled.
Getting
sole screenplay credit (with story credit going to
series originator George Lucas and Jeff Nathanson) was
the veteran David Koepp, the latest and most successful
of the close to a dozen people who took a crack at this
project over 15 years, according to an article in the
WGA’s Written By magazine. The result may not be as
iconic as Raiders of the Lost Ark, but it’s a
perfectly agreeable outline on which to hang what, with
a budget estimated at $185 million, must be the most
expensive Saturday matinee film ever made.
Koepp’s
script also had to get the approval of Harrison Ford,
who probably enjoyed getting to play his own age in a
story set at the height of the Red scare in 1957, when
Marshall
College’s
Professor Jones, believe it or not, runs afoul of the
FBI and has his patriotism questioned. Though perhaps
ambivalent at one time about Indy typecasting, Ford has
made his peace with one of his most iconic roles and
seeing him at his ease here is like meeting an old
friend after years away.
If Ford
is a known Indy quantity, newcomer Blanchett is a great
treat as Colonel Professor Irina Spalko, three-time
winner of the Order of Lenin and “Stalin’s fair-haired
girl” despite a jet-black hairdo à la Louise Brooks.
The
Colonel Professor and a crack team of Russians manage to
force their way into a secret US Army base in
Nevada
as the film begins. They bring the kidnapped Jones with
them and force him at gunpoint to help them find some
mummified remains from a plane crash that are stored in
a giant government warehouse, the same one,
incidentally, that was featured in the ending of
Raiders. (Here it’s built for real; in the original it
was a special effect).
The
mummified remains have a connection to the crystal skull
of the title, and both deeply interest the C.P., who is
a believer in paranormal research as “a new frontier in
psychic warfare.” She feels if she can find where the
skull came from, great knowledge will be hers.
Naturally, the temple turns out to be deep in the South
American jungle and, no surprise here, not at all easy
to get to.
If the
opening
Nevada segment, which quite literally ends with a bang, complete
with realistic mushroom cloud, is one of the film’s
strengths, the exposition-heavy middle section is
something of a drag. That’s partially because Indy’s
sidekicks, including Ray Winstone as George “Mac”
MacHale and John Hurt as Professor “Ox” Oxley (you may
detect a pattern here) are no better than serviceable.
That is
true as well for LaBeouf as youth interest Mutt
Williams. Introduced as a total copy of Marlon Brando on
a motorcycle in The Wild One, LaBeouf doesn’t
seem completely comfortable in his disaffected teen
role, a part that does not play to the innate
likeability that is one of his strengths.
And
though it is exceptionally pleasant to see
Karen Allen returning as Indy flame Marion Ravenwood,
the film is too intent on spending the first part of
their reunion having them strenuously argue with each
other. It’s so unpleasant, even one of the atheist
Russians is forced to plead, “For love of God, shut the
hell up.”
The
film’s final section, however, with everyone hell-bent
for the temple and the secret of that eggplant-shaped
crystal skull, makes up for lost time. It offers lots of
animal action (monkeys and hordes of red ants,
primarily), as well as great stunts both CGI (“Look out
for those falls!”) and physical, as the Colonel
Professor and Mutt draw swords and make like Errol Flynn
and Basil Rathbone in Captain Blood.
When you
think about it, all the prerelease concern about just
how good the new “Indy” was going to be, though
understandable, is not completely rational. After all,
given its Saturday matinee genre nature and the fact
that star Ford, creator Lucas, director Spielberg,
composer John Williams and editor Michael Kahn, among
others, have all returned, it was inevitable that this
film was going to fall within a very narrow range in
terms of quality. It was either going to be a worse- or
better-than-average Indiana Jones film.
It turns
out it’s one of the better ones and everyone involved
can breathe a sigh of relief. |
