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A Technofiction review of
by Roger Bourke White
Jr., copyright May 2008
First off, the movie feels like an
homage. There is a lot of old ground covered here: you can see bits and
pieces from all the old Indy movies, and other Lucas and Spielburg movies,
as well. It feels like a finale.
The action choreography is up to snuff,
and again, covering familiar ground: fights in moving cars and trucks,
traps in ancient temples, temple walls moving around as traps are sprung.
So, my overall impression is similar
to what I have for the movie Independence Day: the movie is not showing
me anything I haven't seen before, but the familiar is masterfully crafted,
so I don't mind watching.
That said, there are many and big technofiction
mistakes.
- If the government is about to run
an important secret bomb test, which A-bomb tests were in the 50's,
the security at the gate the bad guys crash is pretty lax.
- A warehouse of priceless and unknown
artifacts is on a nuclear bombing range? Atomic bombs were not well
understood in those days. The government was pretty good about not putting
stuff close to nuclear testing points. Remember: those bomb tests took
place just as Southern California was starting to become a popular place
to live: it had less than a million people in it, compared to the over
ten million it has today. In the 50's, that whole SW corner of the US
was barren, barren, barren, so there was no reason to put a warehouse
so close to a nuclear test that just riding a mile on a rocket sled
is going to bring one to near the center of a test.
- The Roswell aliens showed up in
the middle of the early atomic bomb tests. That body is only a year
or two old. It would not have been in a warehouse storing archived pre-WWII
artifacts that were ready to be forgotten. (That implication for the
warehouse comes from the last scene of the first Indy movie.)
- Gunpowder is not magnetic, neither
are lead shotgun pellets (steel shotgun pellets are a 90's phenomenon).
And the magnetism that the movie revealed wasn't following the inverse
square law of intensity. If it was, the people who stored the artifact
in the first place would have complained when their shoelace eyes ripped
out and stuck on the crate, not to mention watches, nails from all the
surrounding crates, and the pry bars used to open the crate. Plus, those
first workers wouldn't have been able to pull it off the truck that
brought it in. So... the crate would have attracted notice, and been
stored in a special place and a special way. Instead, the magnetism
we saw displayed was pretty random.
- After the nuclear explosion, how
does Indy get the refrigerator door open? In the 50's, those doors were
so famous for killing kids that you had to take the door off before
sending one to the junkyard. (However, the lead-lined part was cute...
not real, but cute.)
- These secret soviet agents move
around so freely! They go into soda shops, into the middle of a US college
campus, into the middle of an antiwar protest, and there are no policemen
or FBI agents on their tail? The previous Indy movies took place on
remote, neutral ground, such as Egypt, so the presence of so many bad
guys versus good guys was only modestly uncomfortable. Having them invade
top secret US military facilities and college campuses inside the US
with such impunity makes me much more uncomfortable. In the US, these
people should be sneaking a lot more, and a lot more worried about being
found out. They should have had a, "Shh! Not so loud!"-attitude
that was completely missing.
- Not a complaint, but an example
of some of the nostalgic depth of this movie, that jet engine sled Indy
takes off on to escape the warehouse is modeled after a a rocket sled
used for a famous series of high-acceleration tests done by the Air
Force in the forties to test what kind of G's fighter jet pilots could
withstand.
- After all his years of "archeology"
in service of the US government, these government agents have no more
feel for Indy's character than to harshly accuse him? This is strange...
and sadly, pure Hollywood plot device. It's also strange that they interrupt
his work at the university so violently.
- What happens in South America makes
less and less sense as it goes along.
- This secret Soviet spy ring can
pony up a jungle-muncher that would make 2000's jungle road builders
envious?
- The road it makes is flat and wide
enough for sword fights between two racing cars?
- Human natives, as in just average
people, come popping out of fixtures in a long-lost temple? How long
did you say they had been waiting in those fixtures?
- Tell me again: how did the skull
get stolen away from the temple in the first place? What were the thirteen
"skull people" waiting for that they didn't leave before the
skull was stolen? Why did they leave immediately after it was returned?
What had they gotten in the meantime, so that they were now ready to
leave on a minute's notice? These
questions come up only because the skull people did leave so quickly
and dramatically after the skull and the body are reunited. Hollywood
movies usually answer that question. In this case, Lucas/Spielburg didn't
bother to.
Those are the main points I thought
about during and as I walked out at the end of the movie.
My overall impression was that, as
is so common in 2000's movies, Spielburg and Lucas were using the story
to showcase the action scenes rather than vice versa. However, they did
good enough job with the action scenes that I was entertained.
But, like the many James Bond movies,
Jurassic Park Two, and the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, there's nothing
in this movie I'm going to remember for long. It's all special effects
eye candy, there's no story to remember.
-- The End --
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