Past the Popcorn: first look at Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Is this the Movie Event of the decade thus far? Well, if it is, we can always remember that The Phantom Menace was the Movie Event of the last decade… right? George Lucas has a funny way of mucking up expectations.
Greg Wright finds Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to be something of a mixed bag. “What’s really enjoyable about the Indiana Jones films,” he says, “is the way in which familiar bits of cultural trinkets are assembled into something that feels rather fresh. Raiders had that in spades; Last Crusade recaptured the magic.” Crystal Skull tries to mine the same vein, with references to dozens of film, including most of Spielberg’s and Lucas’s. But Greg advises that “we also get what’s rather tedious about the franchise. I’m not sure that ‘this film delivers exactly what you’d expect from it’ is the strongest recommendation in the world. Frankly, once Mutt and Indy left the States for the jungles in Crystal Skull, I felt like I’d seen all of this stuff in other Spielberg and Lucas movies before. Still, the film is never boring, always interesting, and knows how to tell a bloated tale (since we must).” And he finds Forbidden Kingdom and Iron Man to be the more original and entertaining films so far this summer. Let the dissenters begin howling.
Also in limited release this week is The Children of Huang Shi, a historical tale set in World War II China. It felt to Jeff Walls as if he were “watching a B-movie version of Lawrence of Arabia.” But that’s not always such a bad thing. The story of one man’s struggle to protect the orphans in his care, adds Jeff, “is a great story that deserves to be told, and The Children of Huang Shi is an adequate, if not great, method of delivering this largely untold tale of a heroic figure.”
