2023-11-27 11:33:00
Cannes, Sunday 18 May 2008, 8.30am: festival-goers and journalists, after having necessarily spent a short night, wait en masse in front of the Grand Théâtre Lumière to attend one of the scheduled events: the screening of the new film in an official selection out of competition by Steven Spielberg, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
In the room the excitement is palpable and you can hear, just before the lights go out, the audience joyfully whistling the famous theme song composed in 1981 by John Williams. Two hours later, the lights come back on and timid applause mixes with some very loud whistles. The fall is hard. But what could have happened?
Despite the mixed reception at Cannes, the reviews will be rather enthusiastic from the Anglo-Saxon journalists (summarized by the score of 77% on the Rotten Tomatoes website), and relatively friendly from the French side, sensitive to the capital sympathy of the Spielberg-duo. But in the following years, on increasingly powerful forums and social networks, the film was derided, above all for the introductory scene in which Indy protects himself from the nuclear fire by taking refuge in a refrigerator, but also and above all for its second half, a long journey through the jungle full of visibly sloppy computer-generated imagery.
The saga has not yet received its first poisoned darts: after the notable critical and public success Raiders of the Lost Arkwe remember itIndiana Jones and the Temple of Doom had been criticized for its violence and darkness, back when Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade it was already considered by some to be one film too many. But the situation of this fourth part is not comparable, its shame seems much deeper.
Such a long wait
The first reason is perhaps the most obvious: the result of a very long gestation (almost twenty years between the third and fourth parts, the longest pause the saga has known), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was to appeal to an audience of early admirers, who had aged, while flattering a younger audience, not necessarily sensitive to the trappings of characters they hadn’t grown up with. To do this, Steven Spielberg had to allow himself a great departure that constantly gives the impression that the director is trying to create something new from something old, to offer surprises and emotions to the audience, while respecting some fundamentals.
The most important of these fundamentals is obviously the presence of Harrison Ford in top form to embody, at almost 65 years of age, the most famous archaeologist. On this side the contract is respected: nineteen years later Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (and fifteen years after his brief appearance to open and close an episode of The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones), the actor, as seductive and irritating as he can be, plays a hero who has certainly aged, but is still alert, aided by some well-felt lines, characteristic of the saga.
In terms of intrigue and action, a lively introduction (concluding with the famous refrigerator theft) and an investigation that pushes our heroes from a motorbike chase to an adventure in a gothic cemetery (full of masked, twirling and equipped with deadly blowguns) put on the show very correctly.
The problems began shortly after, mainly the result of a pre-production that saw several screenwriters (including Jeb Stuart, Jeffrey Boam and Frank Darabont, already author of the screenplays of the television series dedicated to the hero) before Jeff Nathanson. and David Koepp (Spielberg’s regular collaborator) did not sign the final version of the screenplay, drawing ideas from the work of their predecessors.
This chaotic succession of feathers partly explains a confusing plot (chase with Soviet agents, search for a scientist, indecipherable South American cult and suspicion of extraterrestrial interventions… yes, yes), as well as a plethora of characters revolving around Professor Jones . On the bright side, Ray Winstone as Mac, the true false friend, and Shia LaBeouf as the filial apprentice seem quite comfortable.
The same cannot be said of Karen Allen, spot on as a vengeful Marion Ravenwood who then smiles blissfully, and even less of the great John Hurt, who doesn’t seem to really know what to do with a character whose usefulness remains to be discovered. .
Among the villains, the question is thornier: it didn’t arise so much in the first three films, where Ford’s charisma and the action were enough to keep the spectators’ attention. Who honestly remembers Paul Freeman in Raiders of the Lost Ark or Julian Glover and Alison Doody The Last Crusade ? In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doomthe character of Mola Ram left a strong impression on viewers, but in the West everyone also forgot who his interpreter Amrish Puri, a star of Indian cinema, was.
The gentrification of Indiana Jones
In a sign of a harmful gentrification of this fourth work (which remains, at 185 million dollars, its director’s most expensive film), Steven Spielberg sought out Cate Blanchett to play the antagonist. Already with an Oscar (deserved) for her portrayal of Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator by Martin Scorsese, the brilliant actress seems singularly out of place in this imaginative universe and creates a villain with the consistency of a cartoon character rather than the expected nemesis.
The second pillar (the first, some would say) of this failed enterprise is obviously its director, Steven Spielberg. It’s an obvious truth, but it should be remembered: the Steven Spielberg of 2008 is not the Steven Spielberg of 1989. In almost twenty years the director has changed radically and with him also entertainment cinema. Schindler’s List et We have to save Private Ryan revealed a harder side of Spielberg’s cinema. As well as blockbusters, like Minority report OR War of the Worldswhich show his cinema grappling with more tragic themes (even if The color purple OR Empire of the Sun had already begun to take this path a few years earlier) and above all a darker aesthetic.
Because the real schism in Steven Spielberg’s filmography is perhaps the decisive meeting with the director of photography Janusz Kaminski, for the shooting of Schindler’s List. Until then, the director changed cinematographer depending on the type of project: Allen Daviau for the more character-focused films (ET, The Empire of the Sun…), Dean Cundey (former collaborator of John Carpenter and Robert Zemeckis) for films that used numerous special effects (Hook, Jurassic park) and Douglas Slocombe for the top three Indiana Jones. And it is the work of Slocombe, a veteran of British cinema (he was already 60 years old and had more than seventy films under his belt when he began shooting Raiders of the Lost Ark) which largely creates the aesthetics of the adventures ofIndy.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: poor digital effects
When construction of the fourth part begins, the august director of photography is almost a hundred years old and almost blind. And Janusz Kaminski has nevertheless become inseparable from Steven Spielberg’s work. If in the first act of the film we tried to adopt the style of Douglas Slocombe, the naturalness of Janusz Kaminski quickly returns at a gallop: burnt whites, lights diffused by artificial fog, very grainy film: this Indiana Jones certainly does not resemble the previous ones. Purists will appreciate it even less.
The abyss in between The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and the preceding parts are all the more wide-open as entertainment cinema has been massively colonized by computer-generated imagery since the early 1990s. This fourth work is no exception, unfortunately, for the worse. Rather discreet in the first half of the film, the computer-generated images increase in the second, a long sequence of chases and fights in the South American jungle.
Moreover, it is this second part that accumulates the most damaging defects of the film: the plot is dispersed in useless twists (the turns of Mac’s jacket can no longer be counted), while the characters are tossed around in oversized scenes: the triple dive dizzying digital waterfalls never forget the breathtaking sequence on a dinghy in the rapids at the beginning ofIndiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
The excess of action, combined with a faulty screenplay and lame digital effects, therefore weighs on this second act, which does not redeem an open epilogue, certainly touching, but quite conventional. Audiences weren’t so tough at the time, which gave the film an enviable place at the box office in 2008: second behind The Dark Knight by Christopher Nolan, for its worldwide exploitation, and third in the United States, behind the same Dark Knight and another superhero movie, Iron Man by Jon Favreau. A sign that a new era for entertainment cinema had just begun.
So, to the fire, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ? Not necessarily. Like every episode of a saga that shook our youth, we accept it with its (major) flaws, even if it falls significantly short of what we have the right to expect from a Spielberg film. And after all, Hollywood has dealt us much worse hits since then. The fifth part, Indiana Jones and the Clock of Destinywhich will be screened on the Croisette this Thursday evening (18 May, like in 2008!) and will be released in cinemas on 28 June, will it redeem this misstep? The suspense remains!
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