Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, DVD Review

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Movie:

Way back in 1981 George Lucas and Steven Spielberg released Raiders of the Lost Ark onto the world and in the process influenced what action adventure films would be like for many years to come. Now almost 20 years after the last movie in the trilogy that spawned from the original, Lucas and Spielberg have collaborated again to bring us Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I think that it can pretty much be taken as a given that had Harrison Ford not wanted to re-don the fedora then this movie would never have happened, Ford IS Indiana Jones the same way that Hoovers are Vacuum Cleaners and Durex are a prophylactic. But of course Ford did say yes and he did re-don the fedora.

Moving away from the Germans, this time our bad guys are the Russians, set in 1957 at the height of the cold war which is quite clever really as the film makers had moved the movie time forward by almost the same amount of real life time, which is a good way to recognise that Ford may not be able to do some of the things that he used to do in the previous films, but also sets a fresh canvas for the new Indie movie to be painted on.

We get to meet Indie very soon into the movie as both he and his sidekick Mac (Ray Winstone) have been kidnapped by some Russians led by Irina Spalko (Cate Blancett) and taken to a large, (supposedly) secret warehouse in the Nevada desert where they force him into tracking an artefact that he had helped discover 10 years previously. The fact that there is a big 51 painted on the doors of the secret warehouse gives a not so subtle clue as to where the group are.

After a close escape with the ruskies Indie discovers that the FBI thinks that he maybe a danger to national security and forces him to be fired from his job as a professor. He decides to leave town but meets a very Marlon Brando-eque Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf) who has information that leads Indie into a quest to find the Crystal Skull which in turn takes him to Peru in order to search for the lost city of gold called Akator, more commonly known as El Dorado.

I have heard bad things about this new movie. Ford was too old, or the story was crap and not up to standard and whilst not perfect (few ever are) by the time that the credits had rolled I felt that the criticism that I had heard, criticism that had influenced me NOT to see the film at the cinema was more than a little unfair. Some of the rumours must have been created by die hard purists that thought that Raiders of the Lost Ark was the mother of all adventure films, and to even attempt to do another Indie film was sacrilege. The joke is most of these people would be hard pressed to string together some decent footage of their family with a camcorder.

Ford obviously cannot continue playing Indie for long, I believe that he is 65 now and although this particular film makes things all a little more believable by having it set 19 years after the previous movie therefore explaining why he has aged they cannot do that forever and so his and therefore the franchise should really close soon. Saying that though Harrison Ford does still make this movie, his presence is fantastic, and the way he takes on the Indie character is so believable both as the college professor as well as the daredevil adventurer that we can forget that the man is in his mid 60s.

Another welcome return is Karen Allen (Marion Ravenwood) whom we saw way back in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was nice to see her paired back up with Indie. She is still just as feisty and you can feel the chemistry between the two of them as if this film had come within a few years of Ark.

Shia LaBeouf as Mutt Williams I wasn’t really sure about, he seemed to be stuck awkwardly between rocker rebel and gleaming frat boy and I am not really sure that it pulled off; when we first saw him my first thought was Marlon Brando Wannabe and the word wannabe stayed with me throughout the film.

Cate Blanchett as Russian Col. Dr. Irina Spalko threw me initially as although I have not seen Blanchett in many movies I’ve never ever associated her as the “baddie”, but once I got used to her in the role it is obvious that she relished it, the accent, the uniform everything, she seemed to have great fun.

The other supporting actors did well. Ray Winstone in many way drives some of the story on and it is through him that indie finds himself in many situations, (I cannot really give away more or it will give away a bit of a spoiler) and lastly two British Actors John Hurt and Jim Broadbent are effective within their characters shoes.

I think the one real complaint I have is that there is possibly too much action in the film, there are not many scenes that allow you to catch your breath for any decent length of time, instead we have action scene after action scene with much of it having a fair amount of CGI support. Whilst I find nothing wrong with CGI you can sometimes tell those scenes apart from the others, but overall it was the relentless action or dramatic things happening on a constant level that I felt went a little too far. I also found this with King Kong too. Sometimes less is more and whilst this didn’t spoil to film to the point of it being terrible I did feel that there needed to be some calmer moments within the running time.

But apart from that gripe I thought the film was a great adventure true to the days of the original Indie, there are the witty lines and the sometimes silly goings on which has always been the hallmark of a good action film that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Extras:

On disc two there are a wealth of extras, the best of which is a 1 hour 20 minutes making of documentary that is of great quality taking you through every possible area of making a film with talks from pretty much everyone involved in the making of the movie.

All the other extras are short in nature and look at very specific areas such as the warrior make up and props etc. They are all pretty good in there own way but it is the making of that is the one to watch.

Overall:

A really good entertaining 4th instalment to the Indiana Jones franchise. It isn’t perfect but then no movie is perfect but it certainly fits into the niche that the original Indie films forged.

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