Crystal Skull musings

[dvandom]

I'll lead off with the nitpicks.

For reasons of making Mutt's age work, they set the movie in 1957 (and there's some topical music/TV cues that agree with that time), but a lot of the early scenes assume more of a 1951-1952 setting...McCarthyism in full swing, above-ground atomic tests in New Mexico, etc. Essentially, the movie treats "the Fifties" as a homogeneous mass, where all aspects of any one year of the decade applied across the entire decade.

Thing is, one of the guidelines to getting audiences to accept your more fantastical elements is to get the mundane stuff right. So either the movie makers didn't care about getting the mundane stuff right, or they assumed no one would notice or care. Neither attitude is a good thing, since it can result in a certain contempt for the audience (no matter how justified that contempt may be) that bleeds into the rest of the movie.

But, like I said, that's a nitpick. It's likely true that most of the audience will have no idea that some of that stuff is out of place. Nor will they have any idea of the differences between Incan, Mayan and Aztec (the movie certainly doesn't).

No, the main issue I had was that the mystical stuff comes to the fore way too soon. Now, I've only seen the last 20 minutes or so of Temple of Doom, so I can't really say if they follow this formula too, but Ark and Crusade had a pretty successful pattern: imply mystical stuff early on, but make it clear that it's all mechanical and at least has the veneer of plausibility. Ancient mechanisms may have no right to still be working after centuries, but at least at first gloss it's something that could happen in the real world, maybe. But then bring out the indisputably fantastic thing in the final reel, and Indy (and most of his allies) run like hell while the bad guys reap their just desserts.

Crystal Skull drops aliens in Area 51 into the mix in the opening sequence, even if it's relatively subtly presented. The main evil hottie is a telepath, although Indy's too strong-willed for her to probe his mind. And the titular skull pops up around the midpoint, and is doing minor magical stuff left and right (mangling minds, diverting swarms of ants, magnetically attracting gold). By the time we get to the Big Damn Magic Thingy at the end, it's sort of lost its sheen. I mean, we've already seen alien corpses near the midpoint. We've seen psi weapons used. It's just another, larger mystical effect, rather than a qualitative shift from what has gone before. Even in Last Crusade, all the traps before the Grail Room were mechanical and rational (and given that there was a guy around to maintain 'em, it was even plausible for them to still be working, unlike most web-covered tomb traps Indy encounters).

Oh, it was a fun enough movie. But it's drifting into the dreaded "trying to be campy" camp, which is never a good sign. The best camp plays it with a straight face.

Comments

[z4nd4r.livejournal.com]

I think they showed the alien corpses early on so the audience could get used to the idea of aliens in the Indy universe. I initially balked at it but during the course of the movie I was able to think it through and rationalize it.

I was thinking they were blending Native American civilizations. Wondering why Mayan was used to translate the language, El Dorado being a Aztek thing (and supposedly located in North America).

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

And the head-wrapping thing was, IIRC, Incan. There's been no city-building civilizations in the Amazon Basin prior to European invasion, AFAIK. (Which is in part why I stuck El Dorado in the Amazon Basin for my ASH setting (http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/ASH)...it was deliberately in the wrong place.)

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

I don't have a problem with aliens in the Indyverse per se. It's just that Indy doesn't do sci-fi, he does antihero swashbuckling with a thin glaze of supernatural horror and physical/verbal comedy.

I can see _why_ the writers threw aliens into the mix (set in the 50s), but I just wish they'd resisted making them the focus of the story. Make them the McGuffin instead - everyone *thinks* something is aliens, but it turns out to be a much more interesting mix of ancient human mystic stuff and modern human greed.

[jarodrussell.livejournal.com]

My plans to rewatch Iron Man while the mom goes to see Indy feels even more justified now.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

You know, Temple of Doom gets a bad rap. It's often seen as the worst of the three pre-Skull Indy movies, and I don't know if that's because of Kate Capshaw or Dan Ackroyd. But being the worst of the Indy movies is still like being the worst shot on a Navy SEAL team. Definitely worth a watch. (And it got relatively supernatural right after halftime, IIRC. Even Dana Scully by that point is pretty well convinced that Something's Up Here.) It's much less lumbering than Last Crusade, but the latter had more narrative horsepower. Doom was still purely pulp fun, admittedly pulp, but still fun.

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

One cool way in which Skull *did* follow the pattern, though, is that when the Big Damn Mystic Crap did come out, Indy's reaction was to get out of the blast radius. He's seen it before, once the truly inexplicable powers start flying around, you want to be anywhere but there....

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Oh, and one of the best lines of the movie, after Russian Evilbabe chides Indy for not believing in higher powers: "Oh, I believe. That's why I'm down here." Said as he backs the hell away from the plot device.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

I felt that the movie was summed up by the second-to-last scene, where Indy looks over a largish bunch of ancient architecture which we know to be full of mechanical deathtraps and gold relics and stuff. That's a nice representation of and metaphor for the Indy franchise itself. And then a freakin' interdimensional space-saucer appears and pulverises the lot.

[photonex68.livejournal.com]

For reasons of making Mutt's age work, they set the movie in 1957

It's also been 19 years since Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was released, and I've heard that everyone involved wanted to acknowledge that passage of time.

Essentially, the movie treats "the Fifties" as a homogeneous mass, where all aspects of any one year of the decade applied across the entire decade.

The "Red Scare" lasted through the majority of the 1950s, so while yes, McCarthy and the HUAC hearings were in the early part of the decade, there was still a lot of anti-Communist hysteria sweeping the nation.

I quite enjoyed the movie, though I found myself wondering at first why they brought aliens into the fold. I realized afterward that not only does it fit the time period in terms of "if this were a pulp adventure in the 1950s..." but also fits in with work some archaeologists have done over the decades that created the legends of extraterrestrial beings visiting Earth in ancient times. And I found it far less campy than Last Crusade, which made Marcus Brody and Sallah into big freakin' jokes.

[1boringperson.livejournal.com]

According to Wikipedia, there were still plenty of atmospheric nuclear tests (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob) going on in '57. What does it say about me that the thing I found hardest to swallow in the whole movie was Indy surviving that ride in the refrigerator?

[andrusi.livejournal.com]

For the record, Temple starts out trying to be a 007 movie (there's just... no other way to describe it). Then it takes a turn for the mystical much earlier than the other two (haven't seen Skull yet), with an apparent curse on a village, a guy who rips a man's heart out of his chests with his bare hand (and he's still alive afterwards, and the heart keeps beating, and then they lower the guy into fire and the heart catches on fire too), a (badly misplaced) voodoo doll, and Indy spending some time under Evil Mind Control. This all happens before the mine cart scene, which you probably know about. Actually, the mystical stuff has kind of started to taper off by the end.

So maybe we're starting to see a larger pattern here, where Indy 5 will follow the same pattern as Raiders and Crusade, and then Indy 6 (if there is a 6) will introduce the mystical elements early on again.