[Gus Lamb]

Lucas has screwed us again with KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL...

Obviously not in the same league as PHANTOM MENACE et al but I still think it deserves a "Reasons to Hate"... Can you do one please?

To start the ball rolling: Reason 1: the stupid title...

[jerfus17]

Lucas has screwed us again with KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL...

Obviously not in the same league as PHANTOM MENACE et al but I still think it deserves a "Reasons to Hate"... Can you do one please?

To start the ball rolling: Reason 1: the stupid title...

Agreed. Cyrstall Skull is screaming for a "Reasons to Hate".

[Darth Pants]

Let's see:

2) Shia Le Beouf
3) His siblings, the monkeys.
4) Irena Spalco.
5) Indiana Jones surviving a nuclear explosion at less than close range because Georgie and Stevie wanted some fancy CGI in this flick.
6) Totally derived stunts from the older Indiana Jones movies amped X3 - so much for originality!
7) Too little of Marion Ravenwood
8) Movie reeks of CGI
9) A statue of Marcus Brodie, and pictures of Willie Scott and Henry Jones Sr. do not nostalgia bring!
10) It's Nuclear, not Nuculur!
11) Since when did Indy become a goddamn war hero?
12) Since when did Indiana Jones start emulating James Bond?
13) Does anyone give a damn about Charlie and Huxley?

This post has been edited by Darth Pants: 13 August 2008 - 08:08 AM

[georgelucas4greedo]

14) Indy not knowing Spalco's name 5 minutes after she told him
15) 10 Soviets breaking into a "top secret" American base
16) The ancient indigenous warriors that looked cool, but did nothing. deus ex machina any one?
17) The 50s nostalgia that baby boomers, like Lucas and Speilberg, are obsessed with.
18) The lack of a coherent plot

This post has been edited by georgelucas4greedo: 13 August 2008 - 11:08 AM

[Hoth]

Couldn't help myself had to cut in on this one. I remember when "Crystal" was being filmed, Spieldberg said in an interview something to the effect of every seen he shoots he was "thinking of you"...the fans. Due to Spieldberg's reputation & track record (though maybe not so much lately) I truly believed him...still do actually. However I remember being at the theatre watching "Crystal" and there were three things I saw that just came across as unbelievable. Here they are with what I thought when I saw them, in the order they appeared in the movie.

1.) The already infamous "fridge" seen. Obviously a gargantuous stretch, I was willing to overlook the improbabilities (hey this is Indiana Jones) and accept what I had just seen. After all the nuclear explosion was pretty friggin' cool.
2.) The ants who carried off Indy's enemies in the forest. This was pretty small compared to the fridge scene (and even number three), so I was able to brush this off as a normal Indiana Jones "stretch". Hey these movies have always had minor "improbabilities" right? That has always been part of the draw of them. And besides, if I watched a movie to see real life, I wouldn't watch movies. Got to have something that makes you want to jump up and shout "YEAH that was cool!!!"
3.) Shia and the monkeys. It was at this point in the movie shortly after the "ants" scene, that Shia got tangled up in the forest vines, looked around at some monkeys and started swinging around like Tarzan that my wife leaned over, looked at me and said, "okay, this just got real cheesy." She is a MUCH bigger Indy fan than myself and is not very particular...for her to find a reason to not like a movie it has to be pretty bad...so for her to say that it signifies a lot. For me it was almost like a damn breaking, when I saw this all the silly scenes I had already seen up until this point came out of me in one great silliness flood, and it drowned any hope I had of liking this movie.

My hunch and real question is, who's idea were these scenes? Spieldberg's? Lucas's? Considering what I have seen from the Star Wars Prequels, my bet is they were Lucas's, or I guarantee the majority of them were. (I know there were more than these three for most of you) I wonder why Spieldberg would go along with this crap? If anyone truly knows please post the answer, I would LOVE to know...

This post has been edited by Hoth: 11 January 2009 - 12:28 AM

[civilian_number_two]

Two things:

First, Indy started emulating James Bond in the second film, when he showed up at the Obi-Wan wearing a white tuxedo and it became clear that he was going to have a different girlfriend in every movie.

Second, Spielberg was thinking of the fans while filming CRYSTAL SKULL, and in this case that's a failing. I don't want to hear that director was thinking of his fans when he should have been thinking about the movie. "Thinking of the fans" is another way of saying "condescending to our expected demographic." Eg "let's have a chase here. It's been a while since we had a chase, and the fans might get restless." If Lucas and Spielberg made RAIDERS today then no doubt there would have been less exposition and more action. And much less fun.

OK one third thing: the ants should have burrowed into the fallen humans, to have killed them with little bites. How on Earth could they pick them up? Strength doesn't add up through collective effort, at least not in that way; try to imagine how many people you'd need to lift a jet fighter over their heads. The ants thing was just a stupid bit of deus ex machina. It looked to me as though the makers became bored with the conflict and so decided to flush the bad guys down the drain. And it's such a tired quasi-environmentalist bit of bullshit: these guys are using big machines to clear a road through the woods, so nature will get them by having them eaten by ants. That's the sort of thing that might have been written by a 12-year-old girl.

[Toru-chan]

First, Indy started emulating James Bond in the second film, when he showed up at the Obi-Wan wearing a white tuxedo and it became clear that he was going to have a different girlfriend in every movie.

I wish I could find that old Variety/RollingStone (circa 1980) because besides Star Wars it also talked about Raiders to the point, I knew the first quarter of Raiders 2 before I walked into the movie. It was taken straight out of that; the medallion was originally going to be in two halves and he'd have to go to China to get the second half from a nightclub owner. As for the Playboy angle, same interview said in Raiders 1 when Marcus came over to Indy's house Indy would be there sipping champagne with a blonde, but they decided it was a bad idea and dropped it.

Raiders 1 was excellent. Raiders 2 was pretty bad - "Spielberg out of control". Raiders 3 was alright, but that was it. Raiders 4 was really disappointing.

Second, Spielberg was thinking of the fans while filming CRYSTAL SKULL, and in this case that's a failing. I don't want to hear that director was thinking of his fans when he should have been thinking about the movie. "Thinking of the fans" is another way of saying "condescending to our expected demographic." Eg "let's have a chase here. It's been a while since we had a chase, and the fans might get restless." If Lucas and Spielberg made RAIDERS today then no doubt there would have been less exposition and more action. And much less fun.

Yes. This 'Homage' crap. For God's sake, do something new and different. Otherwise you might as well have Indy searching for the Ark of the Covenant again: "Oh no! The Army has misplaced it! Can Indy find it before the Nazis?" Same for "thinking of the fans". I think any film maker who uses those worlds should be covered in Honey and dropped ten metres from a real ant nest just to teach them that ...

OK one third thing: the ants should have burrowed into the fallen humans, to have killed them with little bites. How on Earth could they pick them up? Strength doesn't add up through collective effort, at least not in that way; try to imagine how many people you'd need to lift a jet fighter over their heads. The ants thing was just a stupid bit of deus ex machina.

It was just to remind you that you were watching a CGI movie. The same way the Homages, Tarzan yells and the like jolt you out of any movie you might be sucked into. This is what I look for in a movie; being sucked into it. It need to be over the top action to do that either; WALL-E did it in the first half of the film. LOTR - now that was masterful scriptwriting. Even a well-made slice of TV life drama can do it. But as for Star Wars and even Raiders - I no longer get sucked into it. I'm constantly reminded by Lucas/Spielberg I'm watching a movie.

Oh yeah the CGI: If you look in the archives here you'll see an early post about PR for Raiders 4 saying they'd DELIBERATELY DECIDED TO GO LIGHT ON THE CGI. That was actual PR with interviews with people in production. When I saw those swirling CGI rocks, CGI spaceships and CGI aliens, I lost my lunch.

It looked to me as though the makers became bored with the conflict and so decided to flush the bad guys down the drain. And it's such a tired quasi-environmentalist bit of bullshit: these guys are using big machines to clear a road through the woods, so nature will get them by having them eaten by ants. That's the sort of thing that might have been written by a 12-year-old girl.

Yes, and like the unexplained natives that would show up and go away with no apparent agenda, it was just crap storytelling.

[Hoth]

Second, Spielberg was thinking of the fans while filming CRYSTAL SKULL, and in this case that's a failing.

Thinking about the fans is NEVER a failing...if this type of approach was used in any other medium it would be considered idiotic and eventually end up in complete failure...would a musician make music without caring whether or not people would like to hear it? Of course not, but for some reason in movie-making it's considered "artistic integrity" if you ignore what the people who will be watching your movie might think of it...that's just ridiculous.

This post has been edited by Hoth: 11 January 2009 - 07:28 PM

[civilian_number_two]

Thinking about the fans is NEVER a failing...if this type of approach was used in any other medium it would be considered idiotic and eventually end up in complete failure...would a musician make music without caring whether or not people would like to hear it? Of course not, but for some reason in movie-making it's considered "artistic integrity" if you ignore what the people who will be watching your movie might think of it...that's just ridiculous.

Not what I said at all, Hoth.

If you read "thinking of your fans" to mean that you consider whether a song is any good (and in the case of musicians they have an advantage in that they can play an unrecorded song over and over again to test audiences, while films pretty much have to get made before the audiences are brought in), then yeah sure. That's good business. But if "thinking of your fans" means looking at your old movies for things people liked, like the bit where Indy shoots that guy instead of having a sword fight, and you decide to repeat the same joke in the sequel, then you are making more of the same, which in the end is less. Think if a musician decided that people since liked a certain riff in one song, he should use the exact same riff in ever song from now on. That's how Lucas and Spielberg thought of their fans in this movie. Every decision was craven and condescending. Lucas said of his films that folks didn't want much story, that they just wanted a roller-coaster ride. Well, given that a lot of folks liked WILLOW, he's probably right. But RAIDERS had something more going for it, a successful application of serial-adventure nostalgia that was only going to work if the filmmakers were careful and diligent. With RAIDERS they were careful and diligent. With CRYSTAL SKULL they second-guessed and condescended. Who seriously could have been excited about working on that thing?

Here: I know a guy who worked on GALAXY QUEST, rendering digital images for the big rock thing that chases Tim Allen around. He said that he loved the work and was excited about doing it, even if a lot of it got cut (it's on the DVD), because he loved TREK and thought that as parody went, the thing he was working on was clever, well-plotted and most importantly, sincere. I haven't asked him for his opinion about CRYSTAL SKULL, but I can't imagine him coming home and boasting that he was rendering CGI ants and monkeys for a lame action sequence in a sequel destined at best to bruise the memory of one of his favourite films of all time.

[Chefelf]

Maybe off topic but I was SHOCKED at how much I enjoyed Galaxy Quest. That movie was unexpectedly fun. I'm glad it was fun to make too.

Still haven't seen Crystal Skull. I asked for it for Christmas but everyone seemed to love me too much to get it for me.

[Toru-chan]

Still haven't seen Crystal Skull. I asked for it for Christmas but everyone seemed to love me too much to get it for me.

My buddy played down my expectations so I might enjoy it. He didn't play them down enough.

I'll try: "It's okay up to the fridge"

[J m HofMarN]

Chef- It's because they want to protect you, probably. Just like I havent asked you to try Muscle Milk [the quasi energy drink made of soy milk and chalk] because I want to protect you.