spoiling ramblings on indiana jones

Quick thoughts before I go to bed:

It is an Indiana Jones movie. It is good. The action is fun, the character development is nill, and in the hierarchy of the films it is last. Having said that, I still feel like, if you took these four films as scripts and put them together, you'd see less of a discrepancy between the original trilogy and this new one. Koepp did okay.

What makes Skull nowhere near the other three is its heartbreaking use of CGI. After it was done I had this vision: a retarded, fat fingered George Lucas poking a patient Spielberg and whining: "Add more computerized monkeys! They are funny. They make me laugh."

Take, for example, the scene in which Indy and the Evil Russians stroll into the Area 51 box-hangar. The shot is CGI. Is it completely fucking impossible for you motherfuckers to build one fucking set? An airplane hangar with wooden boxes. WHY DID THIS NEED TO BE CGI????? A cartoon airplane hanger with cartoon wooden boxes with CARTOON FUCKING INDIANA JONES AND CARTOON RUSSIANS.

I dislike digital film as a medium. Bring back the 35 mm. Digital makes everything look...plastic. Film is wonderful for suspension of disbelief. Everything looks "movie." With digital film, everything looks "realer", so it's easier to tell when something looks like "shit." This was probably the biggest hurdle I had to get over. Further viewings, I'll be ready for this ugly, too-defined picture.

George Lucas, I want your head. The computer animated gophers and monkeys, that's you. You fucker. Greaser kid swings from the trees with monkeys. Seriously. Seriously. Seriously??????? Raiders had a monkey. A real fucking monkey. This movie has a real monkey, until you decide to get retarded and make a fucking gang of monkeys attack the villians.

Stunts. The first movie, you had a stuntman roll under a car. The second, there was a bridge (a real bridge) that broke, that stuntmen latched onto. The third, you had a real tank. Real boats.

Nothing in this movie looked real. Nothing. Not a goddamn thing. The amphibious boat going off the cliff onto a tree branch. That's a cartoon.

Jesus. All this whining makes it sound like I didn't like it. I did. I'm extremely protective of the Indiana Jones series.

So here's the thing. I don't want to hear any complaining about the aliens, unless it's related to the retarded CGI aspect of said aliens.

In the first movie, Indy is going after a magic box. With ghosts in it. The second flick he is force fed blood that turns him into "Evil Indy", until he gets burned. He is chasing magic stones that burn holes through bags. In the third movie, he throws a member of the Gestapo out of a blimp in Nazi Germany, and the blimp still takes off (it takes the Nazis a few hours to decide to turn the blimp around). He is chasing a magic cup guarded by an eight-hundred-year-old Templar. The wrong cup in his gallery turns people into skeletons. In Skull, he is returning a crystal (plastic-looking) skull to a temple built by (now undead) Mayans. The skull turns out to be an alien head. A flying saucer destroys the temple. Okay, it's a little weirder than the other flicks, but I can roll with it.

This thing needs further viewings. With beer.