Early Review Calls New Indiana Jones Film Dreadful 643
bowman9991 writes "Hope this one isn't true! An early negative review calls the upcoming "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" movie predictable, lacking in tension, and a fan's worst nightmare. SFFMedia believes this new Indiana Jones movie could create a similar reaction a lot of people experienced after watching the first of the last three Star Wars movies, 'The Phantom Menace': you wait for years and years, the anticipation building, and then it's so awful it taints your view of the original movies. Of course George Lucas was involved with Star Wars too." The SFFMedia piece refers to this review on Ain't it Cool News. The trailer I saw (before Iron Man) actually looked great to me, so I'm taking this with a grain of salt.
A good trailer (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, trailers have little to do with movies anymore. Trailer designers and technicians have made an art out of what they do: making the most boring movies look exciting and fun. Honestly, they're good at what they do! By just changing transition graphics, music score, sound clips, and some of the shots, they can make an action movie look like a: comedy, drama, or documentary.
complete BS (Score:4, Insightful)
#4, PG-13.... (Score:5, Insightful)
(1) Odd numbers good, even numbers bad
(2) PG good, PG-13 bad
So I suppose now the question is -- how does Crystal Skull compare with the Temple of Doom?
Nothing compares to original Anything (Score:1, Insightful)
Of course it will be true... (Score:3, Insightful)
If it makes money, the studio will do it. This movie will make money. If you want this nonsense to stop, we need to get people to stop going to see them. I pretty much flat out refuse to see anything with less than a 50% on the tomato meter (in the theater, I'll probably watch it when it comes on TNT).
Re:complete BS (Score:4, Insightful)
Hold up (Score:3, Insightful)
Who listens to critics, anyway?
Well.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:complete BS (Score:3, Insightful)
And? (Score:5, Insightful)
The second one is dreadful by MY standards.
Re:This singular review on aintitcool needs to die (Score:3, Insightful)
But then again, my favourite Matrix movie was the second one, so what do I know... For what it's worth, Ebert [suntimes.com] agrees with me.
no (Score:3, Insightful)
Old Movie - Krull (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Well.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm foregoing modding you up to reply. I completely agree with you. Although I really wish some things had been done differently for Phantom Menace, I found the movie quite enjoyable, and it's the film I like best among the three prequels.
Veering off-topic: the things I wish had been different include having Obi-Wan first meet Anakin as a young adult hot-shot pilot during the Clone Wars (c.f. A New Hope, "When I met your father..."), never revealing the origins of C-3PO and R2-D2 nor revealing why they are always together, and an expanded/more intelligent role for Darth Maul (we never needed to see Sidious during that movie, Maul was all the villain we needed, just like we only needed Dooku in the 2nd movie -- actually both Maul and Dooku are FAR more interesting characters than Sidious and should have featured large in all 3 movies).
(At this point you probably wish I had modded you instead. I'm sorry!)
Classics (Score:2, Insightful)
I stopped listening to movie critics a long time ago. I prefer to make up my own mind. And if I have ny doubt whatsoever about a film, I'll just wait for it to come out on DVD and see it for free (basically) by exchanging it at Blockbuster for one of the ones I get in the mail from my eclectic-but-steady movie list (takes time to go through 350 movies...)
Fear not... (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously though, anyone with high expectations of this movie hasn't seen a movie made by George Lucas in the past 20 years. It'll make a ton of cash, regardless -- that's the really tragic thing.
For all the money spent on this movie you could fast-track the careers of at least one thousand, really talented, new filmmakers.
Of course it does (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:That, my friends, is... (Score:4, Insightful)
I saw temple of doom, hoping it would be as good, if not better, than raiders. It didn't even come close. But it didn't "suck", it wasn't heartbreaking, it just wasn't as good as Raiders. How exactly could it have been? Raiders, and Star Wars (yes, just Star Wars. that was what was on the theater marquee when I sat through it 6 times on the weekend it came out), are Masterpieces; expecting a sequel to even be a tenth as good would be silly.
Taken by itself, if Raiders or Star Wars had never been made, what do you think the worlds reaction to Temple of Doom would have been? or the Phantom Menace? they surely are not in the same league as the prior 2, but they are still great movies.
So, I'll watch Indy at the theater on May 22nd, my Birthday, and I really, really, really doubt it will be as good as Raiders. or even Last Crusade. if it's as good as Temple of Doom, I'll consider myself lucky.
Re:A good trailer (Score:4, Insightful)
Great idea! Movies would be only 3 minutes long and completely filled with explosions. You would of course, charge full price.
Then think of all the trailers you could put on the DVD!
Brilliant!
Re:A good trailer (Score:5, Insightful)
BTW that new Mike Myers movie looks horrible! In this case I'm glad they gave the whole movie away so I know not to see it.
High hopes? (Score:1, Insightful)
George Lucas has given up creativity in order to wring every possible cent out of his franchises. Star Wars had begun to take a beating due to poor product quality and overexposure so he is switching horses.
The new Indy flick will probably make a mega-shit-ton of money. I will probably watch it (on DVD), I am just hoping that if I tell myself it is going to suck, then when I see it I might be able to walk away from it and say "It was better than my expectations".
Why... (Score:4, Insightful)
does anyone pretend that the critics matter?
Anyone who takes any critic's word for it deserves what he gets.
As for me, I can't really nail down my decision criteria for what movies I want to see, but I can assure you that the words "critic review" don't enter into it in the slightest.
Re:Not a bit afraid (Score:5, Insightful)
You Can't Satisfy Nostalgia (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing can match the feeling of seeing the movie with friends and family who may be gone now, or remembering a time in your life when things were better, we tend to forget the bad and remember the good, anything current simply can't compete with your memories all else being equal.
It's only about money (Score:5, Insightful)
they are only made to make a lot of money and for that it only has to be (mildly) appealing to the masses.
All those 'fans' will see it anyhow and chances are 90% of them will hate it regardless how 'good' others think it is.
Big Money means:
- the movie is made so a 6 year old can watch it with his parents, nothing too brutal & funny scenes for kids (remember jar jar binks?)
- nothing complicated, keep good and evil clearly separated, you have to know whos evil when you see them, otherwise the kids get confused
- don't take any chances, avoid anything controversial, use the known formula (happy ending, nobody likable gets killed)
- it doesn't have to be good as long as it has a well known name (sequel sequel sequel & why Bush got elected after all)
- a mediocre movie made for the masses makes more money then a excellent movie for insiders
So with that in mind, i expect it to be watchable but nothing special.Re:complete BS (Score:5, Insightful)
They aren't missing the point. You are. There's only so much information you can pack into a 'star rating'
Movie Critics are rating movies by how good they are on a multitude of levels. A 4 star movie has to be entertaining, interesting, thought provoking, well written, well directed, well acted, etc, etc, etc.
The Phantom Menace might hit the entertaining button but its a dismal fail on most other criteria. Its poorly acted, poorly written, poorly directed...
People go to the movies to be entertained for 2 hours. A simple popcorn-muncher is sometimes all you really want.
You are practically admitting it right here, that you KNOW and AGREE they are crappy movies!! But you like watching them anyway. That's fine... I do too... a one or two star rating doesn't mean you won't enjoy the movie and shouldn't go see it, but rather you shouldn't expect it be a 'Godfather II'.
I'm personally looking forward to the new Indy.
Me too. However I'm now expecting it to be 'summer popcorn fun' not 'groundbreaking brilliant'. (Which if you'd seen the previous 3, 'summer popcorn fun' is really what you should have been expecting all along.)
The other thing that ruins reviews like this is a fanboy gets his crush on, and waits in anticipation for 10-20 years, and has all these grandiose ideas of what the movie should or shouldn't look/feel/smell like, and then there's no possible way for the movie to live up to that much internal-hype.
To a point, but I don't think it affects the movie's rating overall as much as all that. The last crusade came out in 89. Anyone under 25 is pretty much immune to that effect and will see the movie for its own merit. A lot of people under 30 haven't even seen the first 3.
That's what happened with the new Star Wars trilogy (although Jar-Jar made me want to stab Lucas in the throat...)
No. The new Star Wars was just shit. The originals were defining movies for a generation. Most kids today have already forgotten the new trilogy. They had no pent up expectations, and they still couldn't care less about them. Face it, they just weren't that good.
None of the new star wars movies made the imdb top 250. All 3 of the Lord of the Rings movies made the top 30. Both trilogies had MASSIVE fanboy followings and pent up expectations and both movies faced the wrath of the screaming fanboys. But at the end of it all Star Wars competely sucked. LotR didn't. It's just that simple.
Re:Just about the exact same thing occurred to me (Score:5, Insightful)
There was a pall in the theater you could sense. Everyone knew it was crap, but there was still light applause at the end. Why? Because we hoped we hadn't seen what we'd just seen. And because for some reason the franchise got credit for having been good once.
That doesn't make it Episode 1 into anything other than it was, however. A big, stupid, pointless special effects debacle.
JarJar would have said... "theesa movie suuuuucks ballce!"
Re:A good trailer (Score:5, Insightful)
He basically makes a stupid quip, pulls a rocket launcher out of the back seat of the truck he's in (he's in the back seat) makes another stupid quip, then fires the rocket through the front wind shield at the bad guys - all with bad timing.
If it was old style Indiana, he would have skipped the quips, scrambled frantically for something that would get them out of their predicament, found the rocket laungher, gotten dragged out of the window of the truck, losing the rocket launcher in the process, used the elephant (they were in a jungle) running next to the truck from 3 scenes earlier to help kick himself back onto the roof of the truck, grabbed the rocket launcher, lost the rocket launcher to the nazi, and had the nazi accidentally shoot the rocket at the bad guys after he got knocked off the truck by a tree branch or a vine or something. Then after it was all done, Indiana would have had some kind of one liner to seal the deal.
This movie is going to be bad.
Re:complete BS (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't say that Half-Baked presented a milestone in script writing, or was an acting disaster...I would say that it was hilarious and a well done stoner-movie. I wouldn't say Shawshank Redemption sucked because there wasn't enough comedy in it, or because it was insanely slow paced...I would say that it was amazing because the actors truly were the characters and even though nothing much really happens throughout it, somehow they manage to keep you very pulled in to the story for hours on end.
It's just like Speed Racer. SO many critics have said Speed Racer is dull, empty, devoid of meaning...ARE YOU SERIOUS? It's a movie based on a series that practically INVENTED the word cheesy...it isn't supposed to be Citizen Cane. It's just supposed to be entertaining. And you know what? It did a damn fine job of entertaining me. I wasn't looking for some underlying reasoning behind it, or for Oscar winning performances, or for some new level of thinking...I was looking to simply be entertained by a bunch of crazy coloured race tracks with cars slamming into each other.
You can't judge all movies by the same metric. That is, unfortunately, why so many critics hate so many movies. You shouldn't expect Dumb and Dumber to have the same nuance and impact as Jane Eyre. It doesn't work that way.
Re:Well.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Aside from the fact that we, the fans, know Anakin = Vader, what should have been done is have Anakin turn to the Dark Side, Kenobi fights the duel with him and he's left for dead. He should be left for dead in such a fashion that we can all assume he's dead and gone. Then when Palpatine is moving openly, his new lieutenant is 6'5" of scary black menace, this Vader dude. We are left to assume he'd been in the wings all the while but, being the titanic cloud of scary-ass doom that he is, Palpy couldn't have afforded to have him out in the open so easily. All we should have seen of Vader is leading the Jedi slaughter in III. Then we see IV and can assume that Kenobi's explanation of Anakin's seduction to the Dark Side is selectively edited. Kenobi doesn't know who the true Dark Side master was, assumes that there's Palpy, Vader, maybe a few others, knows Vader lead the slaughter of the Jedi and that Anakin turned at some point and it was probably through contact with the Sith, however many there actually were. While it was Kenobi who killed Anakin (or so he thought), Anakin was sent on that path by the Sith so it was convenient to say that Vader seduced and killed Anakin. So through all this, the big reveal at the end of V becomes so shocking. Anakin ain't dead? He's Vader? Oh, shit!
Reading back over that, it does seem overly convoluted but that's the corner Lucas wrote himself into with the constantly morphing background of the original trilogy.
More rehashes (Score:5, Insightful)
In 2007, as Harper's points out, most of the top 10 movies were not only sequels, but sequels where "version > 2". Since Hollywood management does fads, we have to expect a run of more such sequels. Hence Indy #4.
As I've remarked before, Hollywood has a major idea shortage. History has been mined out. Comic book resources have been drained; the big franchises are done, and productions are digging deep into obscure comics for material. Hollywood is now down to recycling 1960s TV shows. Are there any up and coming directors with new ideas? Who's the next Spielberg?
Incidentally, the trailer for "Clone Wars" looks like a video game ad for a bad video game, one with a low poly and keyframe budget.
Entertainment may be a depletable resource. When everything ever made is easily available, anything new has to be better than anything done before. Everybody has already seen the best of everything. This makes it hard to excel. Consider music. Nobody has done a major new symphony for decades. Rock music peaked decades ago. House music is stuck. Rap doesn't shock anybody any more. No wonder the RIAA is in trouble.
Film got a "midlife kicker" - computer graphics. At last, you could film anything you could imagine. After about a decade, most of the backlog of things directors always wanted to do, but couldn't afford, have been done. Big shots of alien or historical cities, nonhuman actors, and massive war scenes, have all been competently put on the big screen. Viewers are no longer impressed.
Desperate hacks, like playing with color saturation, have been tried. There's the under-saturated look ("Sky Captain") and the over-saturated look ("Speed Racer"). There's the high-contrast black and white look ("Sin City"). There's the high-contrast black and white look with a bit of color ("The Shadow"). OK, been there, done that.
Finally, there's the trick the movie industry tried the last time things got really desperate, back in the 1950s - stereoscopic 3D. It didn't work last time.
Re:complete BS (Score:2, Insightful)
"Impossible", you say?
"The People are of infinite wisdom, especially large numbers of them"?
Well, look around the room, and try to find anyone with the insight and breadth of movie knowledge of a Richard Corliss, Roger Ebert, or even a Rex Reed. Go ahead, take your time.
Nothing yet? Okay, maybe I should check back with you later.
In the meantime, for blessed once, give education some credit, will ya? When you really know movies, you react differently to them, and THAT'S NOT A PROBLEM!! IT'S A GOOD THING!
Thanks for letting me vent.
Re:The time period is way way too late (Score:3, Insightful)
Say what? They made several tongue-in-cheek references on how Doc ("thank god I've still got my hair") and Strickland ("didn't that guy ever have hair") looked exactly the same. Especially in the 2nd movie where Doc shows Marty that he had plastic surgery...except he looks exactly the same.
Re:That, my friends, is... (Score:2, Insightful)
Studio: "Next!"
Doesn't Lucas bankroll his own stuff? It was going to get made irrespective of what the whole of fandom thought. Phantom Menace was the movie Lucas wanted to make, and he made it because he was paying for it. The End.
Re:That, my friends, is... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you consider Temple of Doom to be the first movie, Indiana Jones is playing more of the mercenary lifestyle, digging up treasure for a Shanghai mobster. After the events of Temple occurs Raiders and Crusade - both of which are similar in style and formula (globetrotting adventure).
After Indy's experience in India and becoming a believer of Hinduism, he goes back to the states and alternates between teaching and rescuing artifacts for the museum (which happens in Raiders, which proves Judaism, and Crusade, which proves Christianity).
It doesn't make Temple a better movie, but for me, it made it fit better in the grand scheme.
Re:That, my friends, is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Or the longer a country fights a war (and the more people die) the longer they must continue to fight that war so that the dead will not have "died in vain".
My Answer: YOU'RE ALL TOO OLD!!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's Easy to Spot The Stinker (Score:3, Insightful)
The kiss of death. I still haven't forgiven him for having aliens that are allergic to water attempt to invade a planet whose surface is 70% water.
Re:That, my friends, is... (Score:5, Insightful)
An era gone by... (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, those guys ARE the establishment. They are offering pretty much the same production values they originally brought to us but we, as the audience, are, dare I say, bored with their filmmaking. If not bored, we have very high expectations because of the impression the original movies left on us.
It's kind of like going back to a place you haven't been to since you were a kid and it's much smaller and less interesting than you had it in your mind.
This isn't to say that these guys are terrible filmmakers or that their craft is not up to par. I'm saying that the hype created by the media in ourselves only makes one feel disappointed when the movie is just that--another movie.
I think the industry itself is in a pretty bad place right now. Movies are made that really shouldn't have been made so the overall quality from the corporate movie studios is just abysmal.
Story is king. Unfortunately, visual effects and spectacle have become the story supported by the script. They keep trying to make blockbusters instead of focusing on the craft of filmmaking. The indie films are doing so well because they have to have good scripts--there's no budget for Michael Bay/Brett Ratner/Roland Emerich epically expensive multi-million dollar set pieces.
Unfortunately, like all corporations, the studios are most interested in delivering profits to shareholders. The just don't understand that if you "build it, they will come"--a good movie with good special and visual effects that serve the story will do well. They just want to make gimmicky pieces that will turn into money makers.
So, don't be surprised if Raiders is disappointing. It's just a cog in the wheel of the dark machine that is Hollywood.
Re:complete BS (Score:3, Insightful)
It also looks like he didn't even review Beerfest. It's not on his written review pages, and the review on the show is done by Roeper and some chick [go.com].
Re:That, my friends, is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This singular review on aintitcool needs to die (Score:3, Insightful)
Simple. People get successful and it goes to their heads. When they start out, they have to break their backs, to fight, to compromise, to take criticism... and then they get successful, and they take away the wrong less from that. Instead of crediting hard work, compromise, and criticism, they say, "I'm just brilliant, and everyone who ever criticized me doesn't get that, and if people would let me do whatever I wanted, my work would be even better".
They forget that quality doesn't come from being brilliant so much as hard work, taking criticism, and compromising with people who may know more than you about certain issues, and working with others. Because they are successful and powerful, they have the power to ignore or silence your critics, instead of listening to legitimate criticism. They can take shortcuts, instead of doing hard work, and people will let them get away with it. They can surround yourself with sycophants, yes-men, and hangers-on who just tell them how wonderful you are, instead of telling them the truth. They can get away with half-assed work. It takes discipline and humility to survive being a success and to still produce good work.
Re:The time period is way way too late (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree. I mean, come on, Indy got Hilter to sign his book last time. What's next? The trope would be overused (and given Spielberg's history, the Nazis are overused).
Re:That, my friends, is... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Too bad the Hovitos don't know you the way I do, Belloq" - That's right, Indy and Belloq used to be fellow travelers, then after the events of Temple, they developed a "difference of opinion". Belloq is Indy five years before.
This also ties in the Crusade teaser, in a broader sense. See Indy the idealist in full force, living the first experience that will turn him cynical. Then back to Raiders, look at the way Marion receives him, with a sucker punch to the mouth - Indiana the cynical bastard we see at the beginning of Temple getting a taste of his just desserts.
As for personal taste, I found the action in Temple to be more than passable, while I found myself grimacing during several points in Crusade, a wholly unsatisfactory experience, as compared to the monumental achievement that was Raiders.
Re:That, my friends, is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Keep repeating that.
Re:Well.... (Score:1, Insightful)