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

[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.