It doesn't seem to be mentioned in this thread but one thing that I noticed was different when watching KotCS was how (and I don't mean this harshly) "forgettable" the soundtrack was compared to the other three films. Don't get me wrong, there are some good pieces of work invested within the movie, but they don't stand out and achieve what the other films did in my opinion.
It doesn't seem to be mentioned in this thread but one thing that I noticed was different when watching KotCS was how (and I don't mean this harshly) "forgettable" the soundtrack was compared to the other three films. Don't get me wrong, there are some good pieces of work invested within the movie, but they don't stand out and achieve what the other films did in my opinion.
I partially disagree. I find Irinas theme and The Adventures of Mutt theme to be as memorable as themes from Temple of Doom and Last Crusade. I also like the music that plays when Indy has to stare into the eyes of the skull. There are some parts of the soundtrack where it does feel like John Williams is just mailing it in but I think it is a better soundtrack than most fans give it credit for.
I partially disagree. I find Irinas theme and The Adventures of Mutt theme to be as memorable as themes from Temple of Doom and Last Crusade. I also like the music that plays when Indy has to stare into the eyes of the skull. There are some parts of the soundtrack where it does feel like John Williams is just mailing it in but I think it is a better soundtrack than most fans give it credit for.
Funny you mention those specific songs, as those are the more favorable pieces IMO along with some others like "Ants!"
I agree that there are pieces just as memorable from the previous films, as I occasionally find myself with little bits of The Jungle Chase/ The Adventures of Mutt stuck in my head.
It doesn't seem to be mentioned in this thread but one thing that I noticed was different when watching KotCS was how (and I don't mean this harshly) "forgettable" the soundtrack was compared to the other three films. Don't get me wrong, there are some good pieces of work invested within the movie, but they don't stand out and achieve what the other films did in my opinion.
I agree that Skull's soundtrack is the probably the weakest of the Indy scores, yet there's still a lot to like. The Jungle Chase and The Adventures of Mutt are two of my favorites, along with Spalko's Theme and Ants!. I love the music from the warehouse escape and it's baffling to me why it wasn't included on the soundtrack. I had to rip the audio from the DVD special features, along with the Jungle Chase extended version. Why both weren't included on the main release is anyone's guess.
I also love the little variation of The Raiders March at the finale, which definitely took me by surprise the first time I heard it.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DeclaringTiger
It doesn't seem to be mentioned in this thread but one thing that I noticed was different when watching KotCS was how (and I don't mean this harshly) "forgettable" the soundtrack was compared to the other three films. Don't get me wrong, there are some good pieces of work invested within the movie, but they don't stand out and achieve what the other films did in my opinion.
I agree. The score for IV felt lazy and contrived compared to the greatness of the scores from 1-3.
The movie was a dud through and through. May very well be Spielberg's worst ever.
It doesn't seem to be mentioned in this thread but one thing that I noticed was different when watching KotCS was how (and I don't mean this harshly) "forgettable" the soundtrack was compared to the other three films. Don't get me wrong, there are some good pieces of work invested within the movie, but they don't stand out and achieve what the other films did in my opinion.
I think a lot of that is also down to how iconic the original scores are and how long we've had to soak those in. The same was also levelled at The Force Awakens within hours of it opening, its way too early to make such judgements IMO. But with KOTCS going hand in hand is the fact we got a movie thats not as good as the other 3, so it instantly becomes less favourable overall. But I agree with a previous poster that the KOTCS score isn't IMO as bad as its sometimes painted to be.
KOTCS was an ok film and got better the second time I watched it, the first half of the movie was passable but when the aliens came into play it just went down hill.
KOTCS was an ok film and got better the second time I watched it, the first half of the movie was passable but when the aliens came into play it just went down hill.
Considering that aliens came into play in the opening sequence, that's a pretty big problem
Kidding aside, though, I agree that the movie was okay for a while. For me, it really went downhill after the jungle chase. It had some problems before then, sure, but it also had plenty of genuinely fun moments. After the jungle chase, there are simply too many characters that I don't care about, the action scenes lack all tension, and Indy isn't even acting of his own initiative ("because it told me to.")
The final act of a story is when everything should get the most intense and the audience should feel the most invested, but in KOTCS, the exact opposite happened.
For me, the aliens themselves were not the problem. If Lucas/Speilberg/Koepp had crafted a story involving aliens, and managed to avoid the problems I mentioned above, it would have been fine.
I liked the way the novelization handled the aliens, as they're more implied than actually shown. Had they gone with something like that I think it would have worked much better.
For me the problem is not so much the aliens/interdimensional beings but in more in the way that premise was executed. Lucas had so many ideas he was trying to cram into one story. I mean you had the crystal skull, the conquistadors, el dorado, roswell all kind of just slapped together and audiences were confused most of the time and when that happens they stop caring.
Compare that with Raiders, Indy is on a mission to recover the ark of the covenant before the evil Nazis do because the ark has wrath of Godlike powers that you don't want falling into the wrong hands. It's a very appealing and straightforward premise for an adventure that is easy to get invested in.
I think for Indy 5 to be successful, they need to go back to basics with the storytelling no matter if it's aliens or some other judeo-christian artifact.
Crystal Skull is by no means a terrible film I think, it is however a missed opportunity to do something great. And it does contain some poor ideas which I`m sure have been discussed thoroughly in this thread and others. I must say though, for me the most annoying and disappointing thing in the entire film... worse than Shia, worse than the monkeys, even worse than that god-awful "say grab the rope" snake in the sand pit gag... is this shot;
This is quite a key scene; Indy admitting that the skull is, either directly or indirectly communicating with him, and that he is being pulled towards something significant. Its not comedy, its quite an important bit of exposition and its ruined for me by the fact that Indy looks...well...silly. And its because of his hat, the way its pulled down so that his ears are bent over at the top. Granted he`s just been through it a bit by this point, but Indy has looked battered and beat up many times in the previous films, and thats always represented in his appearance as it should be. But he`s never been made to look foolish before, and in this shot he looks like a clown, (those of you old enough to remember Freddie 'Parrot Face' Davis will know what I mean). Should've used a different take, Mr Spielberg.
Another key point is that the Russians just don't quite have the same threat and menace as the Nazi's. Both Raiders and Crusade have that instant without needing to think twice about it audience reaction of not wanting the Nazi's to win, whatever the mcuffin might be. The Ark for example, an invincible power, but who do we really not want to have it? The Nazi's.
Temple of Doom was the other movie with the weaker threat. Did the audience really care about the power of the stones, not really. Rescuing the children was the key part, but even then that's easily forgotten until the moment that they are freed. Temple has the momentum of the action to support it though, but until Skull came out ToD was generally considered to be the weaker of the first three movies. I said generally, before somebody chimes in with it being their favourite.
Of course you can't really go back to the Nazi's when you resume a film series and the star is 25 years older. If they ever do a reboot of the series, I propose they keep the films in the 30s and 40s for this reason.
The Sankara Stones lack the gravity of the Ark or the Grail but the stakes of the rescuing the children and the menace of Mola Ram made up for it. His whole "We will rule the world" spiel may be outlandish but at least he could back up the threat with actual black magic; by this point in the film we've seen him brainwash a number of people and cause a guy's heart to burst into frame. Plus he's actually scary.
Spalko gets a similar speech but there's no reason to believe the skull can actually be harnessed, and the movie makes the weird choice to undermine her paranormal abilities from the opening scene, to the point where we're left to wonder if she even has them in the first place. So she just kind of comes off as a crackpot who is a danger to herself more than to the heroes, which proves to be the case. And because Spalko's most ruthless actions happen off-screen and are carried out by her henchman, she's deprived of a real villainous moment, which even Donovan had.
I think a weak villain wouldn't have been as much a liability if the film had raised the stakes in other areas, but it consistently refuses to do so. The most egregious example is the whimper with which it initiates the third act. Indy proceeds to the lost city because the skull tells him to. That's it. It's a complete cop-out that the skull drives Oxley mad but affects Indy just enough that he can hear its commands but not actually suffer ill-effects. Imagine if Indy was losing his sanity and they had to return the skull to restore it. That would give the journey into Akator some urgency in the same way that shooting Connery turned up the heat on the Three Trials.
I wish we had seen more of the skull's power. The novelization did a good job of showing Spalko's obsession with it and how she was able to tap in to its power. It made the skull more menacing and added some urgency to Indy's mission, which the film would have benefited from.
I wish we had seen more of the skull's power. The novelization did a good job of showing Spalko's obsession with it and how she was able to tap in to its power. It made the skull more menacing and added some urgency to Indy's mission, which the film would have benefited from.
The novelization is far and away better than the finished film. It includes the full uncut Nazca cemetery sequence, and features a greatly expanded and much more technologically impressive Akator. It also avoids a lot of the slapstick moments that make the film seem like a parody of the original trilogy.
Sorry if this is a redundant question (I'm new here), but is there still a way I can access the Darabont INDY IV draft? I heard his was considerably better, particularly how it explored the Indy/Marion reunion...
I'm not a fan of Crystal Meth. The stunts were ridicularse. No 65 year old bloke could do any of that - hell, I'm 46 and even I'd only just about manage to survive a nuclear blast in a fridge.
And I'm still trying to work out what the fork the story was about, 10 years later. That scene in the coffee shop and then at Indy's house when they explain the plot? WTF was all that about - something to do with tracking down a spanish version of Avatar?
And the monkeys should have eaten Mutt's face off.
Last edited by genericfanboy : 10-10-2017 at 08:40 AM.
Let me re-address a point made earlier in the thread about the look of the film. I argued that this movie looks significantly different from the first three movies. It was counter-argued that the first three movies have their own stylistic differences from each other.
To this point, the following are DVD screenshots from the main site. They are exterior, daytime shots of Indy with his hat from all four films:
Talk all you want about the nuanced differences in the photography between Raiders, Temple and Last Crusade. There's a clear outlier here.
This is the biggest issue with the movie for me as well. No question. Excellent job laying it out there with perfect examples, Udvarnoky. Thanks for this.
First three, clear, sharp and bright. Fourth one exhibiting glare, haze, almost some type of out-of-focus technique.
In that fourth shot of CS, the sky looks like the wrong colour. It looks like it has a film of smoke or haze that reduces the shade of blue that the sky would normally be.
Thus the film is not out of place for how the sky actually looks like these days. But in 1957 the sky would not have looked like this. It would have been a deep blue.
I have noticed this in films more and more to the point where all films now show it: unexplained horizon-filled haze (even at sea), cityscapes filled with what looks like the smoke from a giant forest fire, but there is no forest fire nearby. Any rational person should be getting very alarmed at what is the blasé portrayal of some insidious form of very visible pollution occurring in the real world and now being a constant feature of movies and that is never talked about.
Even pristine country and mountain landscapes are filled with this anomalous haze. What's going on?! I'm old enough to remember when this was not the case. The air used to be clear and looked clear. Horizons and landscapes were easily seen. Film makers seem to be not able to exclude this visual conundrum because it is so widespread, so their movie making efforts help to normalise it in a way.
Frank Darabont's script
