Movie 666

By Dr. Theodore Mangrove

Indiana Jones and the Kingdon of the Crystal Skull is so unbelievably cheesy, wheezy and queasy that, on leaving the cinema, I felt like simultaneously chugging a bottle of Pepto Bismol and four double-espressos just to restore my body’s equilibrium. As all the world knows, it is a feature-film showcase for director Steven Spielberg (producer of The Goonies), producer George Lucas (producer of Howard the Duck) and actor Harrison Ford (who once appeared in Love, American Style). The film tells of Jones’s further adventures, or previous adventures (it doesn’t really matter) which take place in the usual mytho-poetic world of cold war politics and pseudo-science.

This can only be described as a Hollywood brain-fart meditation, an insistently elusive cinematic automaton that takes the most caddish and ghastly and baroque subject and turns it into something that - though hardly subtle exactly - is Byzantine and circuitous. It avoids the subject and favors instead to paint a sense of the political temperament and psychological complexion from a time that is long gone, while awful transgressions take place on the ground: largely unseen and unnoticed by our whip-cracking protagonist.

Spielberg’s blockbuster lumbers along like one of the pudgy Englishmen that roam across the screen. Members of a Euro-centric colonialist tribe, all sporting Banana Republic khakis and Orvis shoes and American leather jackets, are forced to do battle with a Natascha-from-Rocky-and-Bullwinkel-style Russian spy, racistly-portrayed Amazonian savages, and other cliché-beasties conjured up on a special-effects guru’s Mac Pro. There are some very good set pieces, but this is just too derivative, and appears amateurishly purloined from the far superior Flashman books by George MacDonald Fraser.

Even worse, Indiana Jones and the Kingdon of the Crystal Skull is pointless and unentertaining. Relying on nostalgia for the original films (which were not especially good to begin with) and cardboard characters from the old Soviet Evil Empire, this film feels like it was made by a machine on the back lot of the recently burned-down Universal Studios, not by human hands. Though the action and dialog is less cheesy and stupid than in Temple of Doom, the film stays true to the racist portrayal of natives, banal writing and idiotic pseudo-science of the previous installments. Altogether Crystal Skull is a plane with only one engine and no landing gear, and there’s no bailing out. As Short Round says in Temple of Doom, “Dr. Jones! No more parachutes!”

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2. Beyond the Hollywood Domain: the Cinema of the Web
3. The Birdgit Jones Basketball Diaries
4. The Hollywood Update
5. Stanley Kubrick and the Death of Cinema

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