… but I’m not. I really respect what Messrs. Ford, Spielberg and Lucas pulled off and I really enjoyed it, so I shouldn’t say anything bad. And as a couple of friends pointed out, they worked hard to make the movie accurate: they used the 48-star flag as was flying over America at the time of the movie; they used period-appropriate villains (Communists) and monsters (aliens) and I’ve even heard that they used shots more typical of a 50’s B-movie.
But…
A friend who hates a lot of modern movies described the 48-star flag bit as "the only good thing in the film, if it can be called that." A lot of us made fun of him saying, of course he’ll hate the movie … but when The Last Crusade came out, he hated that movie right away, whereas I was lulled into enjoying it for at least 15 minutes – and that movie has aged very badly (more like milk than cheese, no offense to Messrs. Ford, Spielberg and Lucas).
On some fundamental level, I can take Raiders of the Lost Ark seriously … and the rest of the movies, I can’t. And I don’t think it’s just "saw it when I was young" or any such nonsense … I will argue that the on-call troupe of swinging monkeys that appear in Crystal Skull are somehow goofier than anything that showed up in Raiders, and that cheapened the movie without aiding it. In fact Crystal Skull has oodles of the same X-marks-the-spot goofiness that makes Last Crusade so embarrassing to watch.
But at least it was a *pretty* movie and was nowhere near as astonishingly gawdawfully craptacular as the Temple of Dumb. And I had a lot of fun, and there are scenes in it which I will probably remember for the rest of my life, particularly the "this is how they should have done it in the Mummy Returns" ending.
But, I recall the snark I made before seeing Kingdom: "Wouldn’t it be nice if they made another Indiana Jones movie? Cause they haven’t made one yet." At this point, I tend to think, yes, at this point they have now indeed made a second Indiana Jones movie, and I’m glad. Maybe 15 minutes from now, I will go over to my buddy’s side and think they still haven’t.
Or maybe not. After all, I’m the guy who saw Phantom Menace 10 times in the theater, so what do I know from bad?
-the Centaur
