The Indiana Jones Franchise (Steven Spielberg/James Mangold, 1981-2023)

[David Ehrenstein]

This wasn't always the case. His scores for Earthquake and The Long Goodbye are amazing.

[domino harvey]

He'll always be the man who brought us the Home Alone theme to me

[Via_Chicago]

Not to get too off-topic, but I thought his scores for Munich and War of the Worlds were quite good.

[Dylan]

John Williams is one of the most uninventive and overrated composers in Hollywood right now period.

But nobody else is writing big, progressive thematic scores for a huge orchestra anymore, so like his music or not I don't believe he compares with anybody else working these days. He's clearly of the old school, with Goldsmith and Bernstein. I personally believe that John Williams still being around to score films is nothing less than a blessing.

As long as we're naming favorites, The Fury is one of the five-greatest scores ever written with Close Encounters coming in second, and all of Williams' romantic material is astoundingly gorgeous.

This wasn't always the case. His scores for Earthquake and The Long Goodbye are amazing.

He was also orchestrator on Valley of the Dolls, and did a damn good job there, too.

[Antoine Doinel]

I guess the thing to note is that most people are remembering Williams for work he did thirty some odd years ago. Yes, he's certainly talented, but I think his work has just gotten too routine in the last decade or so. I think people like Alexandre Desplat or Danny Elfman has taken Williams' reins and pushed things forward a little more.

[tavernier]

The Onion.

[AWA]

John Williams is one of the most uninventive and overrated composers in Hollywood right now period.

But nobody else is writing big, progressive thematic scores for a huge orchestra anymore, so like his music or not I don't believe he compares with anybody else working these days. He's clearly of the old school, with Goldsmith and Bernstein. I personally believe that John Williams still being around to score films is nothing less than a blessing.

As long as we're naming favorites, The Fury is one of the five-greatest scores ever written with Close Encounters coming in second, and all of Williams' romantic material is astoundingly gorgeous.

This wasn't always the case. His scores for Earthquake and The Long Goodbye are amazing.

He was also orchestrator on Valley of the Dolls, and did a damn good job there, too.

While we're talking about John Williams and Indiana Jones movies, I'd like to bring up a point about Williams *borrowing* from Hermann for the second most indentifiable piece of music in Raiders or for Indiana Jones period...

Watch the 1956 "Man Who Knew Too Much" scene where Jimmy Stewart is on the street that will lead him to the red herring Ambrose Chapel - the music is the same as the music in the Map Room / Dawn in Raiders (the same music recycled for the start of the trailer of the new Jones film).

Don't know if anyone has noticed this before - if so, sorry.

[akaten]

CGI, this stuff looks maybe a few steps up from one of those horrible video games, and in a few years, video games will look as good as the best CGI now, which will date all of this horribly. I just saw some of Return of the Jedi the other day (the original version, mind you), and while it's certainly not a great film by any stretch of the imagination (nor are any of these, really, which isn't to say they're not fun), the effects sure are a hell of a lot more impressive and fun than any CGI they're cranking out these days. Stop-motion or miniatures or matte paintings (in my opinion) will always remain fresh and fascinating (and, yes, far more cinematic).

For recent films, I'd agree that Zodiac utilized modern computer graphics fabulously (the opening shot is astounding). Some of A.I. was brilliant, as well (though a lot of that was miniatures mixed with CG and old fashioned make-up/creature effects, so the combination was good).

Videogames have never been too far off the pace with films in terms of using CGI, even on cheap consumer devices, see this early T-Rex tech demo for the Playstation, made barely a year after Jurassic Park which allows the gamer (it was released to the public to ‘play’) simple input moving the jaw and camera control.

I’ll try not go on too much aout “those horrible games” however they do seem relevant as both Spielberg and Lucas have business interests in them, notably Lucas, founding LucasArts is probably the most notable thing he’s done since the original Star Wars films, an excellent studio, up until the mid 90s, now a laughing stock - mirrors Lucas’ career I suppose, regardless it seems a grave oversight by film critics not to consider whether or not computer imagery and interactive computer imagery (videogames) have had a significant impact on films, and whether this development can only be detrimental to cinema.

What struck me about the trailer for this Indy film is indeed how bad the CGI is, pushing numbers for the sake of numbers (Doom 3 syndrome anyone?) shoddy implementation and yet more of that annoying blurring effect, afflictions which curse many contemporary HD videogames as well. Reminded me of why I stopped watching War of the World, the scene in the car as they flee when the camera pans 360 degrees in and around the actors was simply unbearable to watch yet it’s a very iconic technique in the presentation of 3D world in videogames since Mario 64.

Unlike videogame designers; I get the impression that most film directors have no idea how to use CGI in any meaningful way, to complement rather than distract from the integrity and meaning of the frame they wish to convey. The death of cinema indeed…and yet I feel there are notable exceptions, such as AI as Dylan mentions, but I think more notable examples are Mamoru Oshii’s Patlabor 2 and the more extensive use in the first Ghost in the Shell of digital colouring and computer generated imagery within the confines of hand animation.

Hand drawn cels and lines are complimented by the use of digital colours and tones which do not break the structure of the frames, and computer generated imagery is mainly used sparingly for filters and effects. However when they are used to fill the entire screen it is done so as HUD screens, deliberately contrasted with cel animation throughout as a means to convey a thematic preoccupations regarding the manner in which we increasingly view upon and inhabit our world.

[Cde.]

Akaten, I'd be interested to hear what you thought of Oshii's use of CGI in Innocence.

On a more related note, one can't help but be struck by how unnecessary a lot of the CG looks, like CG is being used simply because it can be used.
Probably not the most original commentary in the world, but looking back at the old Indy films there is plenty of invention in the stunts and set-pieces, all accomplished without computer assistance. CG does actually seem to be ruining the film. Think about how much more impressive the scene of the massive wheel flying from the explosion would look if that were shot -maybe not from the same camera angles- with a real massive wheel being launched forward from an exploding car. They have the budget, that can easily be filmed safely...so why cheapen the whole scene? Just another example of CG for the sake of CG and because audiences will just accept it, even if they're being cheated and the film looks worse.

Thankfully I have free tickets to this. Curiosity could have lead me to pay them for it.

[HerrSchreck]

Sokurov's The Sun, particularly Hirohito's dream sequences, features perhaps the most artistic use of CGI I've seen. Or at least one of the rare times I've seen CGI used in an 'art' film. Successfully anyway. Of course he'd done so in Russian Ark as well.

Without wanting to push this thread further into the pros & cons of CGI, I do agree with Ehrenstein. View the chariot race in Ben Hur (silent or Wyler), or the battle scenes from Lawrence of Arabia or Spartacus, and your jaw drops in awe. Watch the same scene as it would be done today, with thousands of replicated digital images forming a charging crowd, and its about as breathtaking as an unpopped corn kernel in your popcorn.

[John Cope]

LOL. Of course.

My favorite line...

Spielberg turns a jokey, lowbrow movie reference into a distillation of character and an anthropological theorem.

[tavernier]

Jesus.

That's why I didn't want to even look at Armond's review--any one of us could have written it knowing exactly what he'd say.

My favorite line (from the first couple paragraphs):

Unique for a Hollywood entertainment enterprise, it was made during the era when pop filmmakers could experiment in philology—as in the self-reflexive overture sequence of The Last Crusade: It made Indy’s backstory both a biological jest and a catalog of chase-movie conventions.

And there's also the final line:

Having transcended genre—especially recently in A.I., War of the Worlds and Munich—Spielberg returns to his Indy genre for the very reason Godard outlined in Histoire(s) du Cinema: “Form tells us what is at the bottom of things.”

[Antoine Doinel]

Armond White must be getting paid by the word.

[Barmy]

Is it safe to assume that the review includes the following?

To an even greater extent than The Witnesses, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull pursues an aesthetic of disorientation, replacing realism with something closer to cubism - a prism, or kaleidoscope, in which all places and times encompassed by the narrative are omnipresent; or, rather, an attempt to visualise both life and money as loose quicksilver in a nest of cracks.

[tavernier]

Something like that.

[David Ehrenstein]

That's utterly idiotic. The Witnesses is a realistic film about real people and events. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crystal Meth is about absolutely nothing save its ability to distract prospective spectators from so much as considering real films like The Witnesses.

[Tom Hagen]

Then, he needs to work through the geo-political quandary of post-9/11 pop. This is what makes the series of cliffhangers more than rote; their flamboyance becomes trenchant. Last Crusade taught Indy his place in global politics; but when that lesson was applied in Brett Eisner’s Sahara, the example of political engagement went unappreciated. Going back to the “naiveté” and isolationism of Raiders would be unconscionable, so Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp patch together an intermediate solution: These action scenes are reminders of courageous effort, the impetus that has seeped out of American pop culture except when practiced by characters who are gangsters or drug dealers. (Courage is anathema in today’s mainstream depictions of soldiers at war.) Crystal Skull may lack the contemporary political relevance of Sahara, but it sublimates post-9/11 paranoia into a version of Spielberg’s cosmology while also depicting past political lessons about which we are no longer naive.

This stuff reads like a college sophomore's paper on Foucault and Leo Strauss based on whatever movies happened to be on TNT the night before it was due.

[domino harvey]

I hope the irony of using Godard to praise Spielberg is not lost on White.

[Tom Hagen]

I hope the irony of using Godard to praise Spielberg is not lost on White.

The level of intellectual dishonesty that White reaches in this review is simply breathtaking. While neither his knee jerk contrarianism nor his usual Spielbergphilia is particularly surprising, I still can't believe that he is invoking this cash grab of a film as the paradigm of Godardian genre subversion.

[HerrSchreck]

I stopped reading when he said Spielberg was more talented than Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, FW Murnau, Huston, Rouben Mamoulian, Wyler, Dassin, John Ford, etc, when he called der Spieler "the most talented Hollywood filmmaker since DW Griffith.."

[Tom Hagen]

I stopped reading when he said Spielberg was more talented than Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, FW Murnau, Huston, Rouben Mamoulian, Wyler, Dassin, John Ford, etc, when he called der Spieler "the most talented Hollywood filmmaker since DW Griffith.."

As unbelievable as that statement is, its not even the most patently absurd evaluation that White has made of Spielberg's work vis-a-vis the rest of the canon.

[Murdoch]

If Spielberg and Lucas could somehow mate and have offspring I think I would have to destroy Hollwood to ensure the safety of the world. Ford was just bored in the movie, but I guess that's true of any performance he's given in the past decade. Labeouf rode in like the Wild One, and then all the self-referential jokes to the franchise started, basically if you're a Shia Labeouf fan and an Indy fanboy, it was your wet dream. Blanchett was fine, and Karen Allen lent herself to the role well. But this tops the list for top five cinematic crimes perpetrated by Spielberg in the past 20 years, it was the unnecessary sequel that will please the general audience, but anyone outside the loop will find it tiresome in its dull plot and characters that only seem like their there to throw one-liners. The biggest problem with this is the sense of danger from the originals is gone, you never get the sense that anything really bad will happen to anybody and it's all just this rollercoaster ride with no risks. I actually felt the same way about the third one, but Connery was fun to watch as Indy's dad so I just went along with the whole thing.

[Donald Trampoline]

I stopped reading when he said Spielberg was more talented than Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, FW Murnau, Huston, Rouben Mamoulian, Wyler, Dassin, John Ford, etc, when he called der Spieler "the most talented Hollywood filmmaker since DW Griffith.."

Actually, he said "the most versatile Hollywood film artist since", not "the most talented Hollywood filmmaker since."
Believe me, I profoundly disagree with his idiotic statement, but I am just clarifying, because there is a difference.

[AWA]

Saw this tonight and while passable for an Indy film - it's no worse than Temple Of Doom was - it is like Lucas is some kind of cancer to his own creations - it was like the film took the occasional pause for Lucas to yank his pants down and take a steaming dump on everyone with obvious cute toy endorsements (CGI gophers, CGI monkeys, CGI ants, etc etc etc) and then Speilberg had to work overtime to catch up. Had some of the obvious compromise between Speilberg's "old" methods and Lucas' desire to CGI the whole thing up a zillion notches been left to simply just Speilberg's approach, it might have worked... but it just seems like Lucas is more interested in advertising merch and what graphics LucasFilm can do for your film (order your CGI moment in history today, call now! LucasFilm does it all!) rather than serving his character's universe that he has created. Ford did well considering, I thought Allen was trying too hard and ended up being a paper thing comic sketch of her previous character and LeBeauf was tolerable.

Worse part is, they've supposedly wasted all this time "waiting for the right script". If that is their idea of the "right script", they need to stop thinking money will buy them a good idea. Some of the "person story events" of the film are handled with as light a touch as a novice D major college screenwriter might handle them, which was really disappointing.

And even worse than that, to add insult to injury, the back story given about Indy's time in the war and afterwards yells out "why did you not make that *&(@$#() movie in the 90's instead of wasting all our time waiting for this one?" Indy sent on a archeological mission behind enemy lines in Nazi Germany with the aid of the Soviets - who turn on him, and America in the process - would've been a great idea plus added some back story to the whole Indy/Soviets thing. They spent so much time trying to fill in the backstory it almost became bothersome - why weren't some of those stories filmed for crying out loud - you waited for this instead?

Oh well. It did entertain and had some of the old Indy magic in places, which I think is 100% Steven and 0% George. If they are to make 1 or 2 more (and considering the ending, I'm thinking that is more than possible), it would be best if Lucas left the whole thing to Speilberg and kept his dirty CGI merching fingers out of it.

2.5/5

[Morbii]

I believe that Lucas needs to be stopped.

I just got back from the midnight showing here. IMO there WAS a lot of fun to be had, but there was also a lot of stupidity. I do like Speilberg (well, not like Armond White does) and I think this film could have been so much more without Lucas involved at all.