Indiana Jones & The Truly Awful CGI.
Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. I have no idea who wrote this script (it turns out it was George Lucas) thinking it was a good idea but it wasn't. This really wasn't the way to bring Indy back. To take all the best ideas from Raiders & claim it's a new script. Have him return to the famous crate warehouse (from the end of Raiders) to find part of the downed spacecraft from Roswell. Bad idea. Have him caught in a town that's part of a nuclear test site. Super bad idea. Also where the movie jumps the shark too as if it hadn't after the Roswell idea.
There's no chance in hell that Indy could survive even a 1 megaton nuclear blast by hiding in a lead lined fridge. The thing would have melted, cooking him inside it and our movie is over and done with. You Wish! Nope, you have to meet Mutt (Shia La Beouf) as the Rebel Without A Clue, then get dragged off to Peru to find a skull. This movies 3rd strike comes when Indy blows a poison dart back down a blowpipe at some native. Only trouble there, they only poison the end facing AWAY from the person blowing so that wouldn't have worked.
I am glad to see Karen Allen back as Marion (again, from Raiders) & we discover that Mutt is actually called Henry & is Indy's son by Marion (Isn't that a funny Indy Jones in-joke seeing as he called himself Indiana after the family dog & now his own son is just calling himself Mutt! No, I didn't think so either). We are also reintroduced to Indy's fear of snakes (yet again, from Raiders) when Mutt tries to pull him from quicksand by throwing him a snake to hold on to.
I like John Hurt as the semi-mad Professor Oxley aka Ox but I don't much care for Ray Winstone's badly typecast British Agent turned Soviet helper Mac McHale (who later claims to be a CIA double agent). The whole getting free inside an army truck then beating up the driver to steal it (done to death in Raiders). Mutt fencing with Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett who is as bad a Russian as Alison Doody was a German) looks pathetically bad & must be a CGI background as it looks truly awful & must have cost all of 10 pence to film. Oh and can anybody say "stolen from Footloose"?. Did anyone else struggle to believe that anyone would design an amphibious car with a machine gun on it capable of firing into the boat its actually mounted on the front of? No? Good, I'm not the only one then.
Likewise Marion's idea of driving off the cliff, hitting the tree that bends so they can drive into the river. Ludicrous, just like the previous scene with the very bad CGI ants. Truly, truly awful. Only to be made even worse by being able to survive drops from 2 different waterfalls (without anyone falling overboard, being swept away or drowning) and then a 3rd but at least they fell out on the 3rd drop. Exactly how Ox got past the warriors without the skull the 1st time? I guess we'll never know. Likewise we'll never know where all the new Russians turned up from who were with Irina at the bottom of the 3rd waterfall as the tree whiplashing back up had killed all the men who were with her.
At least with the warriors between Indy and Irina (and the steps he used to get down all gone) there would have been no possible way for her & her men to catch Indy & co up. Or so you think. If they can create Russians out of thin air they can also kill an army of native warriors as easily and do so. I assume it was Mac (as a triple agent?) dropping all the homing trackers that Irina kept finding. I don't think anyone was surprised the alien came back to life after reconnecting with it's skull (possibly the worst idea in the script?) although Indy doing the "I've got a bad feeling about this" line from Star Wars was the highlight of the entire movie (which speaks vloumes about how bad it was).
Did Mac stealing the jewels remind anyone of else of Bob Hoskin's performance of Smee from Hook? We finally get Ox being lucid (I assume the alien released his mind) & telling us the aliens are "interdimensional beings", not "spacemen" as Mutt thought. John Hurt must be bored of portals as pathways to other dimensions seeing as his character as a young man went through that in Hell Boy at the start. The aliens circling Irina and sending thoughts into her mind is very similar to the ghosts ending in Raiders. It is VERY difficult to understand why Indy tried to save Mac after he betrayed him so many times in this movie? It's also very stupid that Indy can't see the method Irina & her men used to get down to the bottom of the shaft (or were they at the bottom of a different but completely identical looking shaft?) with some even more truly awful CGI when they reached the top.
As for the silver spaceship? That was asking us to suspend disbelief just a little too far for my liking. the film ends with Indy being made assistant dean at his college and marrying Marion (at long last) making for a poor ending to a extremely poor movie.
Not recommended, even to the die hard Indy fans.
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