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Mar. 9th, 2011 11:50 am
Too old for the amusement park
Last week I was musing on the fact that I'd never seen the final installment in the Indiana Jones series. Then Sunday night flipping channels I stumbled on the Indy movie marathon on USA. I knew I'd regret staying up late to watch the whole damn thing, but once I saw Ray Winstone's name in the credits, there was no going back. (Too bad his part was so badly underwritten, but in that respect he wasn't any more poorly served than the rest of the cast.)
Overall, the film was pretty much exactly as lame as consensus has it, but two particular flaws stood out for me. The first was that I know too much to enjoy the half-assed archaeology any more. And I don't just mean catching boners like Maya being spoken in the Amazon Basin (or, indeed, the presence of sheer cliffs there). No, what bugs me is that we've learned so much recently about South American prehistory and none of that made it in; as far as the writers are concerned, it's like the last half century of archaeology (not to mention the last half century of political correctness) never happened. There was nothing in it that you couldn't've read in van Däniken back in the day.
And that was the other problem. In the thirty years since Raiders, these action-archaeology films have become their own little hackneyed subgenre. Not that that film wasn't plenty derivative itself, but it drew from a genre (30s adventure serials) that few of us had direct exposure to, plus it did some clever things with the clichés. Without realising it, I was waiting for some little twist on a par with the "take back one kadam to honor the Hebrew God" in the first movie, and it never came. Like the second film, Crystal Skull was a theme park ride, but one that cannibalised the rest of the series, as well as some lesser imitations.
(Now can someone tell me why it's easier to write about bad movies than good ones? In the past couple weeks, I also watched two Jia Zhangke features and a Satyajit Ray, but I wasn't motivated to post about those. I guess trying to explain why superior films work would only reveal the limits of my own ignorance.)
Overall, the film was pretty much exactly as lame as consensus has it, but two particular flaws stood out for me. The first was that I know too much to enjoy the half-assed archaeology any more. And I don't just mean catching boners like Maya being spoken in the Amazon Basin (or, indeed, the presence of sheer cliffs there). No, what bugs me is that we've learned so much recently about South American prehistory and none of that made it in; as far as the writers are concerned, it's like the last half century of archaeology (not to mention the last half century of political correctness) never happened. There was nothing in it that you couldn't've read in van Däniken back in the day.
And that was the other problem. In the thirty years since Raiders, these action-archaeology films have become their own little hackneyed subgenre. Not that that film wasn't plenty derivative itself, but it drew from a genre (30s adventure serials) that few of us had direct exposure to, plus it did some clever things with the clichés. Without realising it, I was waiting for some little twist on a par with the "take back one kadam to honor the Hebrew God" in the first movie, and it never came. Like the second film, Crystal Skull was a theme park ride, but one that cannibalised the rest of the series, as well as some lesser imitations.
(Now can someone tell me why it's easier to write about bad movies than good ones? In the past couple weeks, I also watched two Jia Zhangke features and a Satyajit Ray, but I wasn't motivated to post about those. I guess trying to explain why superior films work would only reveal the limits of my own ignorance.)