Udvarnoky said:I'm not watching that video. I don't need some snarky guy on the internet explaining to me what was wrong with Crystal Skull for 15 minutes.
What was wrong was perfectly evident to everyone would watched the movie. It is a bizarrely lethargic film with lazy writing and a lack of considered ideas. I can't think of a movie more disinterested with itself. Throwing out all these promising concepts that it refused to develop - Spalko's psychic powers, the FBI subplot that was utterly abandoned after Act I, the side characters it didn't know what to do with.
It lacked any of the decent one-liners or memorable cliff hangers that all the previous movies had. The much-maligned Doomtown sequence is the only thing in the damn movie that even resembles a classic Indy setup. We're given clumsy swathes of exposition that were only necessary because of the goofily unwieldy plot points (somehow both undercooked and overcooked at the same time) that could have easily been streamlined. The whole hand-waving business with Oxley's letter, the pointless shrouding of Marion's identity, and the inconsequential mystery of the conquistadors were just set dressing, elements that served to take up running time but didn't add up to a damned thing.
The movie was wall-to-wall with missed opportunities that came to be downright distracting - Indy never once trying to outwit his captors and instead assisting them at every opportunity and even complaining upon rescue, the jungle cutter that was immediately destroyed, the natives that served as nothing but a gag, the obelisk puzzle that Indy isn't allowed to solve. It feels like a first draft that they somehow took 19 years to write.
There was no menace or stakes, the material de-fanged to the point where Indy never once fires his gun. At one point the lead villain allows Indy, Marion and Mutt to play out their Jerry Springer routine at the jungle camp, before finally cocking a gun behind Marion's head. In response, Indy and Marion keep right on quipping. If the characters don't see the villains as a threat, why should the audience? It's no wonder Marion doesn't care, considering she seems fully aware that she's in a movie, like when she drives gleefully off the cliff onto the tree, confident that she will survive.
The movie has a strange, cheap look to it, with Kaminski imposing this glow-y, diffusive style that doesn't just make it seem out of place with the other movies, but at times like it's set on a different planet. This boggling creative choice is aggravated by the stagebound nature of the production. The previous movies were shot in striking locations like Tunisia, Skri Lanka, and Petra. Crystal Skull was filmed in Los Angeles and...the surrounding area. They did not expose one frame of film outside of the U.S. during principal photography. And why bother physically filming the jungle chase in Hawaii if the whole thing is going to be digitally molested to the point where it all looks green-screened anyway?
The movie was even outright incompetent at times. The demise of Mac is the most embarrassing bit of staging I've ever seen in a Steven Spielberg film.
There were no moments of gravity, and when they were attempted the movie had to invoke the previous films, like when they reprised the Grail Theme during Indy's horrible "Knowledge was their treasure" wrap-up at the end without having earned that right at all. That scene is perfectly indicative of how the movie never stands on its own two feet, and relies entirely on our goodwill for the previous movies to get by.
And that's what makes Crystal Skull so objectionable, at the end of the day. It merely gets by, and not because its reach extended its grasp, but because that appears to have been the height of its ambition. It doesn't even have the decency to be bad in a memorable way. It's just a dull, soulless, inert movie. At the time I remember there being a contingent of people chiding others for their bloated expectations, but what was so unreasonable about expecting something even along the lines of the previous movies? No one was anticipating brilliance, just for the Beards to be able to come with something more than mediocrity.
That was a very in depth explanation of what was really wrong with it. The 'Everything Wrong With....' clip also highlighted wrongs, but they were in the manner of instances in the viewing. But that is what they do for their format of critique.
Udvarnoky, your essay approach more appropriately sums up the larger conceptual issues surrounding the entire movie.