Infinite Monkeys

Indiana Jones and the Spoiler Alerts for a Boring Movie

Caution: Spoiler alerts ahead!

Good lord, the new Indiana Jones movie is boring.

There's lot of individual elements to like in the new movie. Cate Blanchette is hawt in the Boris-and-Natasha getup. Some of the set pieces -- chase scenes, the nuclear bomb -- are quite well done. But the movie mostly creaks along like a 65-year-old man who is willing to go through the motions but secretly desires a nap.

No offense intended.

I sat back last night, trying to figure out where Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas lost their touch.

With Lucas it's easy: First he started thinking about characters as potential sales on the toy shelves of America's stores. (Ewoks.) And then the rise of CGI allowed him to focus his creative energies on making cool-looking things instead of telling great stories using reasonably talented actors. But he has kept making hundreds of millions of dollars in the meantime -- based mostly of fond memories of his output from 1977 to 1980 -- so there's no real reason for him to correct course.

Spielberg is more complicated, because he's been successful along a broader array of genres. But I'd argue that he lost his storytelling instinct about the same time he stopped trusting his audience to fill in the blanks.

Think about Spielberg's earliest successes. In "Duel," Dennis Weaver is haunted by an unseen truck driver. In "Jaws," the shark is more hinted at than seen throughout the movie. In "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," we don't see aliens until the very end -- and then only from afar, really. Even "E.T." left us wanting a little more -- what was E.T.'s culture like? His world? His technology? If you were a movie-watching adolescent in the early 1980s, these were burning questions -- never to be answered. And in two of the first three "Indy" movies, the most important character -- the one without whom there is no action -- is never seen: God.

Spielberg used to be pretty good at letting moviegoers use their imaginations in conjunction with his. And then it all went wrong.

Me: I blame "Schindler's List."

This, of course, was the movie where Spielberg crossed over from being very-talented-and-less-evil Jerry Bruckheimer -- that is, a great entertainer -- into being something more: An Artist With Something To Say. And once Spielberg had something to say, he couldn't leave it to his audience to fill in the blanks anymore: He had to tell them exactly what to think about what they were watching. He had to answer the unanswered questions.

The most false note of "Schindler's List" near the end. The war is over, the Jews under Oskar Schindler's care have been saved. But Schindler -- formerly a womanizing raconteur -- must be bundled off to safety. As he takes his leave, Schindler breaks down: "I could've got more out ... I didn't do enough." Whereupon a number of the surviving Jews rush to comfort him.

Barf. Maybe something like this happened to the real Oskar Schindler. In the context of the movie, though, it feels like Spielberg is hitting us over the head: "See? He's really a good guy now! He didn't just do good things! His soul's been transformed! Be touched, dammit!" And that's before we get to the modern-day epilogue showing Schindler being honored by real survivors and their descendants. You know: Just in case you didn't get it.

Of course it was Spielberg's most-praised movie. And the game was up after that.

"Saving Private Ryan" was a good war movie that became -- for me -- unbearable to watch by virtue of its modern-day epilogue. The aging Ryan pleads with his wife: "Tell me I'm a good man." And they do. Any ambiguity about the nobility of Tom Hanks' death in World War II is thus erased. "See? He really was a good guy! His soul was transformed! Be touched, dammit!"

Again: Barf.

"Artificial Intelligence" is potentially a good and poignant movie if it ends with Haley Joel Osment on the bottom of ocean, staring up at the amusement-park statue for all eternity. Instead, we get a million-year flash-forward in which aliens arrive on earth and grant Osment his fondest wish. "See? He didn't strive for nothing? There was kind of a happy ending after all!"

And so on and so forth until this week, when we get "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." There are problems with the pacing, and also with the special effects: The early "Indy" movies were created to celebrate the Saturday serials of the 1930s, and if the effects of the 1980s were more advanced than the 1930s, they were still related -- models and matte paintings used to create entire worlds.

Now everything is created inside a computer. And there's nothing wrong with that, exactly, except that one gets the sense that Spielberg -- like Lucas -- has stopped applying his storytelling creativity to technical challenges because there are no technical challenges anymore. And perhaps because that muscle now goes unused, so do others in the storytelling arsenal.

Final spoiler alert. Go no further if you don't want to know what happens at the end.

The climax of the newest movie comes with a closeup of an alien -- a cartoonish little CGI device that, with a scowl on its cartoon face, wreaks a very personal vengeance on Blanchette's character. It's expected. It's like something out of a "Men in Black" movie. And it spells out everything, exactly. There are no blanks left to be filled in, no remaining mystery, no unseen hands. Perhaps this wouldn't matter as much if the scene came at the end of an entertaining movie, but I was -- by this time -- bored.

And trust me: That CGI sequence is just going to look silly in 20 years.

A couple of years ago, I wrote the following:

We’ve reached the end of popular culture.

Now, I don’t mean that we’re not going to have a popular culture anymore. It just means that, right now, there’s nothing new that pop culture can do — because it’s all been done.

The advent of realistic computer special effects means there’s no scenario that can’t be convincingly depicted on screen: monsters fighting each other, spaceships careening through the void. In pop music, most of the variations on rock and hip-hop seem to have been explored decades ago. Not coincidentally, that’s about the time the term “old school” became words of praise.

And let’s face it, the subject matters of all that pop culture — love and adventure, usually — are pretty much what they were when the Greeks started writing their plays a few thousand years ago.

So, like Michael Jordan in his prime, our producers of culture have to find tricks to keep things fresh, make them interesting. Steven Soderbergh makes a movie using 1940s techniques. The White Stripes let themselves have two instruments only, guitar and drums, and see what they can make of it. Justin Timberlake tries to make a Prince album.

Along the way, the audience is asked to appreciate not just the product that was put in front of it — but also how it was made.

You remember those old Ray Harryhausen movies, like “Clash of the Titans” and “Jason and the Argonauts,” where unrealistic stop-motion creatures battled each other and humans? My prediction: Sometime in the next five years, somebody will make a blockbuster-style movie using those long-dead techniques — and be hailed as a genius for doing so.

Then, it was merely an observation. Now, well, after having seen the latest "Indy" movie, it's more of a hope. And what's more, I hope it's something that Spielberg does. He's still got talent. He just needs to be challenged.

Posted by Joel at May 26, 2008 09:27 AM