Indiana Jones

Crystal Skull & Raiders of the Lost Ark

Harrison Ford is old. I used to have fantasies, back when I watched The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles every week and Harrison Ford (i.e., Han Solo/Indiana Jones) pretty much defined the masculine ideal for me, back when I first heard there were plans to make another Indiana Jones movie even though Ford would obviously be to old, that they'd make it a different kind of Indy movie, like where Jones is now an old tenured professor, way way smart and cunning and everything but just not able to keep up with all the kinetic action of his younger self, who either has to guide some younger hotshot through some ordeal or has to actually outwit instead of out-athleticize his nemesis. Instead, Crystal Skull is just one giant piece of denial of age. None of the people involved in the original are still up for this sort of thing, and yet here they are trying to do it all over again, in precisely the same way, except this time Jones actually marries the hot Ravenwood chick, happy to take on the full responsibilities of adulthood only about forty years too late, rather than leading her on and leaving her so he can have a new blond bombshell in the next flick. Crystal Skull is fun enough while you're watching it, so its not as complete a failure as the Star Wars prequels, but there's not really much at all to admire about it.

Rewatching Raiders for the first time in I-have-no-idea-how-long, I was surprised at how much there is actually to like about how it's done. It's just a flimsy a fantasy as it should be, but Spielberg really knew how to put together a movie back then, and Harrison Ford actually had the charisma to pull off his non-character. One thing I noticed: just like the original Star Wars, a lot of the strength of the story here is how it is constantly subtly implying a back story that's never quite articulated, so the viewer gets to supply a backdrop that's just as operatic as he or she wants it to be. With Star Wars, that backstory is really what captured my little imagination, even more than the story of the films themselves; they always felt to me like the final conclusion of this huge, impossibly morally complex and sweepingly dramatic, decades-long story that was never actually presented to me. Then when Lucas did decide to present that, I felt betrayed, literally feeling like, watching Revenge of the Sith, "That's not how it happened!" With Raiders, that back story is not as much the point, but it is what allows us to flesh out Jones as a character--since there's not really a whole lot of character development going on here. And how could there be? Like a full fourth of the movie is taken up with that over-the-top chase scene, then there's the opening action set piece, the fight in the bar, the fight in the streets of Cairo, etc. etc. Really, the only time in this movie Harrison Ford is anything more than a stunt man with a few lines are the scenes at the university, and all we learn about here is that he's smart and sassy and likeable. It's the off-hand references to his past, the way characters are all people he's known before and has a history with, that allow us to buy him as a real person. At least a little bit.

Of course, even still, he's not a real person at all. One of his defining lines early in the movie is when he tells Marcus he doesn't believe in "superstitious mumbo-jumbo" or something like that, w/r/t the Ark's power. Of course, at the end of the film he is presented with proof of exactly that, the type of thing--I mean, we're talking actual experiential proof of the existence and power of God, here--that would through a thinking atheist like Jones into, at the very least, a bit of personal crisis. But he's not even phased. He's just happy to get out of it alive with this hot lady from his past. So maybe in the next couple of movies he's more willing to believe that weird things happen sometimes, but he's certainly not a man who's come as close as anyone ever to seeing the face of God and surviving. He experiences all of this religious mythology (and now pseudo-new-age alien stuff) pretty much the same way we, the audience, do--as little more than excuses for some spectacularness.

So why is Crystal Skulls so much less satisfying than Raiders? First of all, I think some of it is all the CGI action pieces. In Raiders, as spectacular as it was, there was still at least something of a sense of real danger, and I have to assume that at least some of that was because they were limited to filming things that a stunt man partly had to actually do. Shia LeBouf swinging through the trees like Tarzan isn't even plausible the way that everything Jones does in Raiders is at least plausible. Plus, when the opening sequence concludes with Jones being blasted a few thousand feet inside of a refrigerator that he promptly stumbles out of, not even dazed, we know we're in a world in which Jones is now essentially indestructible. But the other thing, I think, is that Spielberg and Lucas tried to put some character development into this movie--which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, I think, except it's so shallow. In Raiders we accept that Jones is essentially impervious to character development, so it doesn't really bother us when none of it happens. Here, Jones is treated as more of a character, who's supposed to learn things and, you know, develop, which he kind of does by marrying Ravenwood at the end and kind of trying to suddenly develop fatherly feelings for LeBouf--except that this is the same Jones who, as I mentioned above, survived the presence of the Lord and now has just learned about the existence of trans-dimensional beings, and all he can think about is belatedly doing the right thing by his woman? By trying to give Jones a little depth and failing so spectacularly at it, Spielberg and Lucas force us to notice how kinda dumb and shallow Jones is as a character, and he's instantly a lot harder to love the way we love the unabashedly shallow Jones from Raiders.