directed by Steven Spielberg
screenplay by David Koepp
story by George Lucas and Jeff Nathanson
based on characters created by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman

Short review: “It could so easily have been so much better but oh well.”

Very long not-review:

Somewhere in some press release or other, Steven Spielberg said something like “Indiana Jones really belongs to the fans now, so we owe it to them to get it right.” I made up that quote entirely but I swear he did say something much like that.

I’ve never read any of those Star Wars or Indiana Jones “novels,” but I’ve played a licensed video game or two in my time, and I know what they’re like – they expend an enormous amount of their creative energy on the task of being “on brand.” But a brand – a vague collective notion, a thing that by its nature really does “belong to the fans,” and is therefore the principal resource mined by franchising – can have a life of its own. The brand derived from a movie continues to mutate and evolve as culture chews and rechews the cud, while the original movie sits inert. Raiders of the Lost Ark is never going to change, but the specific cultural memory of it, as of everything, is always in flux.

Over the past twenty years, the only forces at work on the Indiana Jones brand have been nostalgia, imitations and knock-offs, franchise stuff like the video games, and (most nefarious of all) geeky fandom, that slow rock tumbler made of millions of obsessive minds, which can eventually convert any cultural object into a shiny nugget of aesthetic abstraction, suitable for fetish purposes. What I am going to say in a couple paragraphs, after a digression on this last notion, is that the new Indiana Jones movie has no particularly authentic connection to the previous movies – after all these years, they made a movie of the brand rather than the character. But first those paragraphs I mentioned.

I just read this book about nerds and the author, I think, neglects an important nerd-related mental phenomenon: the process of fetishization. The author of the nerd book says that nerds are drawn to models of reality that are rigidly rule-based and logical (which are appealingly manageable to those who have poor social intuition). To me this is the social-skills variety of a more general mental phenomenon, available to all but more important to nerds. This phenomenon, which I guess I’m calling fetishization for now, consists of always seeking out the more refined version of an aesthetic stimulus. Aesthetic rationalization I suppose you could call it. “Cognitive focusing,” the guy who eavesdropped on me in a restaurant told me it’s called.

Okay, here’s a way I can talk about this. I read an article once about research into sexually attractive features on animals, explaining why things like antlers evolve to become more and more exaggerated. The reason is that apparently, to the brain, if antlers = good, then big antlers = more good. I may be misremembering the study, but as I remember it, it was saying that this is not necessarily because big antlers actually connote greater health than small antlers, but rather because the brain always responds this way to pre-programmed sensory stimuli. The more intensely “on model” the stimulus is, the more intense the brain’s response. And apparently the brain rates a bigger version of a thing as more intense, as being more truly that thing. Likewise a version of a thing with fewer other distracting features – a purer version of the thing is more intensely the thing. The article that I remember (Discover magazine maybe?) went on to say that this accounts for the tendencies of human pornography to caricature sexual features. If breasts provoke a response in the brain, impossibly giant breasts may well provoke that response more particularly and intensely. Preposterous exaggerations and simplifications get not just a pass but an endorsement from the brain, because the brain is looking for particular forms on their own terms.

Of course, people are susceptible to this in different degrees and on different fronts. Certain nerds, it seems to me, are generally more interested than most in obtaining the purest, most refined, most inflated form of their aesthetic stimuli. But certainly everyone is subject to this desire to want their next hit of something to be a little stronger, a little more on the sweet spot. And, if I haven’t made it clear already, in my philosophy it’s a desire that we should fight against, because it’s the desire for the world to be a set of products designed for us rather than the other way around; it is a desire that draws us away from things as they are.

Chasing that sweet spot means people – again, certain nerds, mostly – end up preferring their culture with breast implants and huge antlers, all in the name of being truer to their memory of the original stimulus. To them it will always feel like a sincere pursuit of the ideal, or at least like a pursuit of the bigger, better, next thing. This is all by way of saying that the brand of Indiana Jones has made room over the years for a slicker, pared-down, more intense notion of what goes on in Indiana Jones movies.

Before I finally talk about the movie, let me note that at the screening, we saw a preview for Star Wars: It’s Come To This, a completely computer-animated super-slick Saturday-morning-cum-video-game thing coming to theaters this whenever. This is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. 31 years of cumulative fetishization have rendered this into this.

Okay, so finally to the point of all this. When Mr. Spielberg says it belongs to the fans now, this is what he means. The movie he made in 1980 is less important to his new project than the millions of memories it engendered. Which is to say that this is an Indiana Jones movie that could have been made by any schmuck. As with Star Wars: Episode Colon: Attack of the Star Wars et al. – the problem is that it was made by people whose ownership of the property is still a legal reality but no longer an artistic one. Sadly, all it would have taken for them to regain artistic ownership would be for them to believe that it was theirs. But they don’t; they’re now just like any lowly franchise video-game designer, putting all their energy into making sure it’s Indiana Jones-y enough, whatever that might mean. That means that their work falls flat open for us to critique as a mere series of choices because it has no internal confidence of its own. That’s the main sad thing here. The other is that many of those choices are super super stupid.

The stuff in this movie is all new age Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown crap with dubious associations at best. Crystal power and alien pyramids have no pedigree, no class. That’s awe for morons, just one step away Indiana Jones and the Chain Letter of Death. So that right there is a bad choice. When video games make similar choices, you think, “oh well, they don’t know their business like the movies.” Well, neither do the movies anymore.

Dialogue was clonky and styleless. Terrible “riddles” were spouted, solved, and forgotten in the same breath; the screenwriter had no sense at all for how to handle mystery so that the audience can savor it. Tone was erratic to the point of making one uncomfortable. Jokes were unfunny and often confused. Computer effects were, as always, a sore thumb – the CGI people were delegated more than anyone should have to chew in some of the later sequences. A sense of danger or tension was almost entirely lacking. The bad guy spends most of the movie hanging out and chatting amiably with our heroes. At the end I wasn’t sure the movie was even going to kill her, since she seemed so essentially decent. But it killed her anyway, as per the Formula.

The movie didn’t have any energy left over to get that stuff right because its heart and soul had already been committed to the task of BEING ON BRAND. In the most superficial ways, yes, it was undeniably on brand. But I think that that would have come for free with the costume, frankly. If the original idea was to make this like a 50s pulp sci-fi movie, they should have been unafraid and gone all-out; the character, I promise, could take it. Instead they clung desperately to their playbook while they tried to force a few square pegs through the Formula. Check it out, everyone: This time we’re using square pegs!

It felt like we were watching Indiana Jones himself – because hey look! that’s him, the very same guy from those other movies! – being somehow compelled to say and do dumb stuff. That’s much, much better than can be said for Star Wars: The Phantom Clones in which it seemed that we were watching Natalie Portman herself, being somehow compelled to stand in front of a green screen. In fact, it’s good enough for me to walk away without any bile in my throat. Did they make another Indiana Jones movie? No question. Good. Fine. Score one for nostalgia and let’s try not to think about the details.

The second movie is bad too; for less depressing reasons, certainly, but bad all the same. So there’s a precedent here and I’m perfectly happy – truly – to let this one slide. If they want to make another one I’ll go see it. Maybe having gotten this out of their systems, they’re ready to make one that has its own reason to exist.

Probably not though.

The score was just like the movie – A for effort toward being on brand (well, B for effort, anyway), but what an awkward thing to have to attempt. Why not aim higher – or lower? Or aim where you aimed the first time rather than aiming at the first time? The preceding sentence says what this whole entry is saying, but better. Oh well.

I am, however, very happy to report that I ate a special Indiana Jones-themed Snickers bar (with coconut, to evoke jungle adventure), several boxes of Indiana Jones-endorsed Corn Flakes, and one special purchase of Indiana Jones-endorsed Frosted Flakes. As a result, I am now the proud owner of an Indiana Jones Adventure Spoon. If you Google “Adventure Spoon” you’ll see that I am hardly the only person to be pleased by this item. Mine is the one with the skull on it.

And how can I stay mad at a movie that gives me that? Did I mention that the spoon lights up?