Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull Review (with Spoilers)

"Iiiinnnndeeeeee! The toorrchhh is going ooouuuuutt!!!" Karen Allen, from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I still can’t decide if this movie was the most beautiful car-wreck I’ve ever witnessed or the weirdest brilliant movie I’ve ever seen.

Before we get to that, however, I need to explain my rating system. I don’t judge movies according to how good they are (cos the best thing you can see is a unique snowflake). I judge movies by The Rocketeer. It was the worst waste of my time, bar none. And I’ve seen a film called Les Invasions Barbares (crappy pretentious French nonsense). The reason I hate the Rocketeer so much is the helmet sequence. Snigger all you like, but it’s true. In the movie he sorts his flying ability out by ATTACHING A FIN TO HIS HEAD! Aerodynamics and oh, I don’t know, THE LAWS OF FUCKING PHYSICS had deserted this worthless pile of crapioca. So every film I’ve ever watched since then gets judged by how close it gets to how bad the Rocketeer was.

But, back to Indy. Between George Lucas and Stephen Speilberg, I think the rehabilitation of Erik von Daniken is finally starting. Bastards… Anyway. No, lets go back: Indiana Jones meets a spaceship. I can’t be the only person who will have a problem with this. And I *REALLY* can’t be the only person to look at the trans-dimensional crystal creatures and want smoke whatever Steve-o and Georgie were smoking during THAT meeting. If one wanted to, one might find coy references to all sorts of new age, David Icke / Erik Von Daniken accepting schizophrenia. If one wanted to. There were bits when I expected the Stargate SG1 team to turn in an appearance. Really…

The IJ franchise has a similar formula to James Bond: give the people an intro; then get onto the main formulaic mumbo-jumbo until Indy’s got the gold, the girl and a battering in the process. The intro in Raiders had the iconic rolling rock sequence. The intro in Temple of Doom had the blondie and the musical number. Crusades took us back to Indy’s childhood and featured a sullenly brilliant River Phoenix. Maybe GL and SS thought it was too much to top…

But this intro… The intro felt like an hour, but can only have been fifteen minutes long. And it was beneath crap. I felt sorry for all my jobbies reputations in comparison with this wanton garbage. And yes, I know it was supposed to be Ironic, but honestly when has that ever worked for America? I don’t need to go into much ABOUT the intro, suffice to say that the end of it had Indy escape a Nuclear Detonation. Let me reiterate that for you: INDIANA JONES ESCAPES A NUCLEAR BOMB GOING OFF… by hiding in a lead-lined fridge. Oh, and not just hiding, oh no, he was blown clear of the blast zone BY THE EXPLOSION ITSELF. You saw his fridge fly past some Commie cars which gets roasty-toasted in the process. It was at this very point, I grudgingly had to forgive the film its intro. Yes, the intro was so shit that started thinking fondly about The Rocketeer, but it was SO bad it’s growing on me by the hour. By nine o’clock I may have no objections whatsoever… But honestly: nuclear attack versus Indy: I’d NEVER have predicted THAT result.

But the whole Crystal Skull and Nuclear detonation gubbins is an important point, lost on us… It’s a cultural paradigm where Americans are willing to believe that anything is possible. The photography in Crystal Skull was brilliant, all wide open panoramic vistas and not just BIG landscapes, but droolingly beautiful MASSIVE landscapes. Compare this with, say Neil Gaiman and his BBC fantasy effort: Neverwhere. In it his biggest leap of imagination is that Homeless People fade out of existence until the go and live underneath London. Or China Meiville who built a city in the book Perdido Street Station by suggesting that people would live alongside midgets and sentient insects and generally mill around on Dungeons and Dragons quests for the duration of his work. The UK (and yes, as always I spit that word) is far too grudgingly domestic and empirical for my tastes. We lack the wide-eyed longing to believe that Americans have and the rip-off-your-clothes romance and passion of our European neighbours. They gave us Indiana Jones and we gave them River City and Rab C Nesbitt. Let’s all get in a congratu-circle and pat our backs for THAT one.

But this all stems from that Unionist subservience that our Clan Chiefs got themselves taught when the sold their lands to property developers and fucked off to Eton. We forgot our own primal passions and took up knitting. We swapped Claymores for Grandfather Clocks and right here, right now, I don’t think it was worth it. Not one little bit. The intention behind Jonesy (I think we’ve known each other long enough for me to call him Jonesy) was SO HUGE it deserves props. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I apparently knew more about the Nazca lines in South America than a 1940s Professor of Archeology, but I’m not about to hold that against the American movie industry. If I did, I’d have to explain why I enjoyed the Battle of Stirling Bridgeless in Braveheart…

And that’s my point, the good bits were GOOOOD. And the bad bits were so unashamedly self-mocking and cheesy that they HAD to be intended. I mean… you wouldn’t do that kind of thing on purpose, would you? And if that was the best script they’ve had in 19 years then… well… they should’ve just gone right ahead and used the first one they had. Just for the hell of it. On camcorder when Harrison Ford was out at Skywalker Ranch with Lucas and Spielberg… Get a horse, jump over some stuff… Sound rubbish? Probably. But STILL better than River City. At least Hollywood has ambition.

So lets write a big formulaic blockbuster for Scotland. Indy has what Lucas calls “McGuffin’s” (he got that idea from Hitchcock, but don’t tell the Daily Record cos I don’t think they know that based on their piss-poor review of the film). A McGuffin is a simple device used to propel what, if any, plot there actually is. So, Raiders had the Ark of the Covenant; Doom had the Sankara Stones; Crusades had the Holy Grail and Crystal Skull had… erm a Crystal Skull.

For a Scottish Blockbuster, the McGuffin HAS to be the REAL Stone of Destiny. It’s black, carved and shiny and can be ascribed magic powers I, as the writer, don’t have to quantify outside of the film… Our hero has to be someone who either HAS a sexy job, or someone whose job can be sexed up a bit for effect. So Tax Accountant is out. Let’s make our hero an Abseiling Instructor caught in a web of intrigue surrounding the whereabouts of the real, mystical Stone of Destiny. There needs to be baddies: I’d suggest the Royal Family. It’s hard to imagine Jug-ears as anything other than a baddie, so he’ll do. And the plot needs something to get the hero from his sexy Abseiling Job to the secret group protecting the Stone of Destiny. I’m going to go with the Lewis Carroll inspired “Rabbit Hole.” This is a concept in fiction where something small propels the protagonist inevitably towards the story, but makes the audience feel as if he is genuinely being drawn in (thus drawing the AUDIENCE in with him). So… Abseiling guy is giving lessons to some gorgeous model type from Edinburgh (we’re using Hollywood rules here, remember) who is mysteriously kidnapped at gunpoint from the Log Cabin she is renting in Glencoe (for the panoramic sequences). Abseiling guy reports this to the police, but they don’t believe him (the guy renting OUT the log cabin mysteriously doesn’t remember hotblondie…) Abseiling guy investigates to satiate his own conscience (he’s a decent guy, he’d do that kind of thing). And between his original inquiry to the fight sequence in the Cave with the Royal Family member, he has a rip-roaring adventure bookmarking ALL tourist trails and panoramic landscapes that Scotland has. And we HAVE A LOT.

That’s my point, though. If, on a crappy internet blog, you can get a formulaic idea which IS STILL better than what you get on BBC1 Scotland, then our TV license money is not being spent well enough. My advice is to rip up your TV License, cancel your Direct Debits and send the fucking paper back to them.

Back to Indy for a bit though: one of the most genius things that Steven Speilberg / George Lucas Inc did right was to bring back Karen Allen in all her smouldering, hot glory. Marion Ravenwood (love interest in Raiders, and love interest in Crystal Skull) was a BIG LOSS to the other two Indy Films (presumably to make Indy a “ladies man” like a certain Jimmy Bond). She is THE ONLY actress ever to have to had genuine sexual chemistry with Harrison Ford (unless you count Carrie Fisher, which I don’t, cos she has Sexual Chemistry with EVERYONE in Star Wars – including that wee Ewok in Return of the Jedi). Karen Allen makes it okay to fancy women in their 50s. That’s how good she is in this film. Karen Allen was so good, I haven’t even mentioned Cate Blanchett (woodener than Mahogany, sorry).

This is one of the few films to treat old age with the respect and contempt it deserves. The line that I think of doesn’t come from Indy; it comes from Vila from Blakes 7 who once said: “I’ll live forever or die in the attempt.” That’s Indy right there. And that’s what we’ve lost, I think: our cantankerous fighting spirit. And not in a “lets draw dirks” way, but our ability, as Scots, to endure problems. Instead of persevering, or holding out relentlessly we seem to want the cheap, quick way out. We lack the admirable qualities of the people we watch at the cinema, and instead celebrate the mediocrities of the non-entities we are force-fed every fucking night of the week in soap-opera-land.

And bear in mind, Indiana Jones HAD to be as self-mocking as it has turned out to have been. In the 19 years since the last one, we’ve had uber-unreality in the likes of NYPD Blue, 24, Battlestar Galactica, Friends… Entertainment has evolved because of films like Indiana Jones. My favourite moment in 24 is when Jack Bauer threatens to torture someone by force-feeding them a towel. (Now there’s a scary thought for you…) Indy can’t do that. And unless there’s a bit of tongue in cheek, the film couldn’t have worked unless they were so big, and so far over the top.

It’s just a shame that Scotland seems so content to live in such mediocre and bland fictions as it does. We invented EVERYTHING. In the real world, we rock! In the real world we’ve invented, protested and changed things. In our art, we’ve become staid, bland and feeble. We tell the world nothing. We don’t challenge the stereotypes, we put them on and wear them to Scotland games and try to “take the joke.” But it’s not a joke. We are for not trying to do better. America takes big ideas and turns them into theme parks. We take big ideas and water them down until they’re inoffensive enough for everyone to watch. There’s something wrong with that. There’s something VERY wrong with that.