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Indiana Jones 4 Teaser Trailer – Trending Towards Suck
By PopSavant | February 14, 2008 | 
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Hot off the presses, here’s the first look at Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull:
- Raiders was fantastic in every way. Drama, action, humor, all-time-cool bad guy archetypes, good dialog, everything. It’s the movie that sent kids across America into their back yards with bullwhips and made archeology departments cringe at the expectations of every entering class for the next decade.
- Temple of Doom… was simply awful, but you give the sequel to a blockbuster the size of Raiders a bit of leeway because of the pressure to follow up a perfect movie. Spielberg/Lucas went with the little-kid-in-an-adult-world theme (never a good sign, see SW:Episode I for another example), gave Indy a girlfriend nobody cared about, a villain that was a local threat at best, and resorted to trying to gross us out with giant insects and monkey brains. Do you ever see it on the channel guide and clear your Saturday to watch it? No. Nobody does.
- Last Crusade brought respectability back to the franchise, largely through the casting of Sean Connery. The Nazis were back, the dialog was punchy again, a hot girlfriend with the evil-but-redeemable attraction… all in all, not bad. I really liked it originally, but in all honesty it hasn’t stood up nearly as well as the first movie. I’ll never, ever forgive them for turning Marcus Brody into a buffoon; in the first movie he’s a deep thinker, sort of an Indiana who doesn’t leave the classroom. In the third, he’s comic relief.
So now we come to Crystal Skull. Three things jumped out at me instantly:
- [MINOR SPOILER ALERT] Looks like we’re going up against cold war Russkies rather than Nazis this time out; so far, so good. They’re certainly menacing enough, it makes more sense to acknowledge the passage of time that pretend otherwise, and the real-world resurgence of a Russian threat under Vladimir Putin lends bite to the threat. Good.
- Indy hass apparently taken a kid under his tutelage, albeit a slightly older one. Uh-oh.
- Bad-looking CG effects; this is endemic in Hollywood these days. Either most viewers don’t see it or don’t care, but… look at the cliffs during the car chase, those pillars going up. Not even remotely realistic. Distracting, even.
- Cate Blanchett. Now wait, hear me out. I love her. She’s a fine actress – see the original Elizabeth for an example – and is very easy on the eyes. But name one big action movie with an effective female villain? One that makes you really cringe or puts you on the edge of your seat. (Human, that is… the creature from Alien doesn’t count.) Name one.
In short, I’m leery. Oh, I’ll be first in line at midnight on May 22; count on it. And I swear by all that is holy that I hope I’m wrong and I’ll be able to come back and post what a presumptive asshat I was for leaping to conclusions. But right now I’m expecting a movie that’s less filling but tastes great… impressive on the surface but not something that will stick with you five years from now.
Topics: Movies | 4 Comments »
February 14th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Agreed to the bad CGI. But to be fair the Last Crusade was chock-full of fake-looking special effects — all scenes with the zeppelin were horrible — and both Temple and Crusade were also full of impractical / hard-to-suspend-you-disbelief action sequences.
Yes, Blanchett looks more like a comic book character than an actual person, but the franchise veered to the comic book realm after Raiders anyway. She’ll be good.
It’s becoming apparent that Lucas and Speilberg didn’t really take the character seriously until now, thus the run-around on the script — kind of funny. So with that newfound seriousness, I’m hoping we’ll see some care taken with the characters.
Interesting that Roswell somehow fits in!
February 14th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
The CG does look horrible. They should have just built big sets- i am sure it was in the “budget”
May 15th, 2008 at 1:48 am
-’Part 4’s-
The Next Karate Kid
Friday the 13th, the Final Chapter
The Phantom Menace (don’t give me no Part 1 bullshit- that movie was part 4)
Rambo 4
Police Academy 4-Citizens on Patrol
Live Free or Die Hard
Batman and Robin
Alien: Resurrection
Lethal Weapon 4
Hannibal Rising
Star Trek 4-the Voyage Home
Bride Of Chucky
Exorcist- The Beginning
Jaws: The Revenge
Home Alone 4
Beethoven’s Fourth
Omen IV: The Awkening
Leprechaun IV: In Space
Revenge of the Nerds IV: Nerds in Love
House Party 4: Down to the Last Minute
Iron Eagle IV
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:39 pm
okay, really, Russians are people just like everyone else. Would you ever make a movie about evil Americans in Vietnam or even Iraq? I agree that Soviet Union was an evil empire led by a NONE Russian Stalin! But we cannot continue dmonizing Russians in Hollywood movies because that’s just plain stupid and unhuman!