WARNING: These will be riddled with spoilers.
I'm not going to bother with the preamble... we all saw RAIDERS when we were young, we all loved it, we can all quote the movie chapter and verse, we all wore our Indy Costumes to work on the Thursday CRYSTAL SKULL finally opened (OK, that may have been just me), we all know where we're all coming from, so I'm just gonna pick up my Louisville Slugger and start swingin'.
ISSUE NUMBER ONE: C.G.I.
Think about the famous truck chase from RADIERS... Indy is riding a white horse along the cliffs above and behind the truck convoy. He comes to a stop at an impossibly steep ramp and pauses... Spielberg seems to be saying, hang on, cuz you're about to see some shit.
And we did... see some shit. A lot of it. And it was all happening in a real world, OUR world, and even as a 36 year-old Adult (Kid), I have no trouble believeing that someone (even if it wasn't Harrison Ford) did everything that happened on that screen.
Not so with THE CRYSTAL SKULL. Forget about the refrigerator tumbling end-over-end through a nuclear cloud for a second, hell at least that was interesting to look at... let's talk about the moment where my shoulders finally sagged in defeat and I said to myself "damn... I hate this."
Two boat-jeeps are careening through the jungle side by side and Shia LaBouf is straddling them, one foot on each, sword-fighting with Cate Blacnhett... except he wasn't. Not really. He was in a small bright green room standing on two bright green boxes, while, somewhere off camera, Steven Spielberg (or, hell, maybe even some random second unit flunkie) shouted things like "OK now she's over here" and "Now DUCK, here comes a tree branch."
EVERY SINGLE OTHER thing you saw on screen in that moment was created out of whole cloth, inside a computer, and digitally inserted into that shot long after Shia and company had gone home for the summer.
And that sucked. What's the point!? If I want to see a movie that only exists in a computer, I have Roland Emmerich and Tim Story and Stephen Sommers and Pixar making those movies and pumping them out one after the other each and every day. The market is positively LOUSY with them.
The beauty and charm of the Indiana Jones series is that it's based on Saturday afternoon serials that Spielberg and Lucas loved when they were kids... the kind of movies where you had to put a little extra thought into the how and the where and the when because you couldn't just run back to the studio and get another 10 million for computer generated F/X shots.
Even if they HAD had access to the kind of F/X budget they clearly had access to during the making of CRYSTAL SKULL, I firmly blieve they would not have used it because... well because that was the WHOLE GODDAMNED POINT of making the movie in the FIRST goddamned place!
Which brings me to the Alien...
Seriously... a goddamned Alien... right there on screen, smilling and blinking and pointing and eventually flying off in his goddamned space ship.
What the hell was THAT!?
And fer crissakes it didn't even LOOK very good.
And that's what's fascinating to me... there's really only about a half dozen F/X shots in RAIDERS altogether, and because they are practical effects, they fit much more seamlessly into the movie as a whole. OK sure, you can probably tell after a dozen or so viewings that they used a stop moion effect used to make the German version of Peter Lorre melt before the power of the Ark... but as far as special effects go, I'll take that sequence over what was, essentially, the exact same gag (except not done on a computer) that had Donovan ageing a thousand years in 5 seconds after drinking from the false Grail in THE LAST CRUSADE.
And let's talk about THE LAST CRUSADE for a minute, which despite the fact that I HATE HATE HATE what was done to some of the characters in that film (Sallah and Brody to name just two) has some fantastic action sequences built-in that are done almost exclusively through the use of practical effects and stunt work...
And when they do jump to CGI effects, which thankfully is rare, it's almost always immediately noticeable and off-putting... as it is when the CGI Messerschmidt, green and shiny as it attemps unsuccessfully to contrast with the background onto which it's been fused, crashes into the mountain tunnel.
There is almost no sequence in KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL, including by the way, going over a waterfall in a boat (something that was done MUCH more spectacularly, AND with ACTUAL stuntmen in the shot, in ROMANCING THE STONE), which is not created primarily, or totally, within a CGI world...
And that's just a shame.
I'm not even going to get into the CGI Army of Monkeys, or the goofy CGI grins pasted on the prairie dogs in the opening sequence. Those crappy shots are not even deserving of our scorn.
More to come in future installments.
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2 comments:
It seems as though this is the sentiment among everyone that saw this movie. Such a shame that they had to ruin a great franchise like this.
Well they're going to get what they want out of it, which is a pile of money. And Lucas has already intimated that he would like to continue the series with Shia LeBouf. But for my money, the series is over... for good. There may even come a time where I refuse to acknowledge this installment, the way I ignore the existence of a third GODFATHER movie, or a third TERMINATOR flick.
Blech!
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