Nýjasta mynd Steven Spielberg Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull hefur fengið misjafna dóma hingað til, en þó eru þeir allir að minnsta kosti tiltölulega jákvæðir í garð myndarinnar, sem verður að teljast gott.
Joe Morgenstern hjá Wall Street Journal hlaut Pulitzer verðlaunin fyrir kvikmyndagagnrýni árið 2005, og er hann því einn af þeim virtustu í bransanum.
Hann birti dóm um myndina í morgun og fór vægast sagt hörðum orðum um upplifunina. Hann tekur fyrir hvern leikara fyrir sig og finnst lítið til koma þegar kemur t.d. að skoplegu hliðinni á myndinni, sem hann segir vera eitt stórt samansafn af lélegum innkomum leikara inní atriði. Hann segir að tæknibrellurnar heppnist alls ekki og að myndin sé yfir höfuð þreytt alveg útí gegn.
Við ætlum ekkert að reyna að þýða dóminn, en hann er hægt að lesa hér fyrir neðan.
Near the very end of the very nearly
interminable „Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,“
an old colleague of Indy’s who has been half-mad and speaking gibberish
suddenly turns lucid and philosophical. „How much of human life,“
he muses, „is waiting.“ How true, how true. Sitting through Steven
Spielberg’s slog down memory lane means waiting for surprise, waiting for
delight, waiting for daylight after turgid trudges through Peruvian caves,
and waiting for an abstract story to coalesce. Most of all it means waiting,
in vain, for the sort of dazzle, dash and clarity that made us love the
series in the first place.
t’s been 27 years since the first installment
and 19 years since the last one: Harrison Ford, still snapping Indy’s whip
at the age of 65, is no longer a whippersnapper. He’s not the problem,
though. Both the actor and the character draw on deep reservoirs of goodwill.
You want them to be wonderful from the moment Indy makes his entrance —
actually he’s preceded by a witty shot of his fedora — and it’s great
to see him looking like a grizzled desert rat with a glowering smirk, or,
moments later, a smirky glower. (The film, set in the 1950s, is distinguished
by witty entrances, if little else: Cate Blanchett’s villainous Soviet
agent, Irina, looking like Garbo in „Ninotchka,“ Shia LaBoeuf’s
pompadoured biker, Mutt, looking like Brando in „The Wild One.“)
It’s also touching to see Indy coping as well as he does — very well indeed
— with the knock-down, drag-out challenges of being an action hero at
an advanced age.
No, the problem is all around him, and
it’s movie fatigue, which can be just as damaging as metal fatigue. A couple
of early set pieces dispense spasms of excitement at the expense of plausibility
— an atom-bomb test that trivializes the force of nuclear weapons for
the sake of lame comedy, a chase that skids to an awkward finish in a university
library. But then the movie, seemingly weary of itself, settles into a
soporific succession of episodes having to do with a search for the skull
of the title, plus extrasensory perception, extraterrestrials and, ever
so fleetingly, flying saucers. All of it amounts to a been-there-done-that-better
recapitulation of Mr. Spielberg’s career.
See a clip from „Indiana Jones
and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.“
One unwelcome surprise is the level
of craftsmanship — widely variable cinematography, continuity glitches,
characterizations ranging from perfunctory to nil. (The script was written
by David Koepp, while the story is credited to George Lucas and Jeff Nathanson.)
Another is the level of performances. Ms. Blanchett, a movie star of rare
intelligence and grace, gets to carry a sword, read minds, fight fights
and strike one sultry pose after another, but she’s only a decorative presence,
and a charm-free one (though her character’s mind eventually catches fire).
It’s good to see Karen Allen back as Marion Ravenwood, the love of Indy’s
earlier life; it would have been better if she’d had something livelier
to do than drive an amphibious truck on a chase through trackless jungles.
Mr. LaBoeuf, a manifestly talented young actor, isn’t funny, and there’s
no sign of him having been helped by his director. Nor is there much excitement
between him and Harrison Ford as they play out a relationship that’s the
movie’s worst-kept secret.
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The least surprising aspect of the lumbering
production is its abuse of computer-generated images — what were generally
called special effects until they stopped being special. Even in that department,
though, the banality is striking — all those clattering digital ants and
groaning stones. I was equally struck by the movie’s disrespect for the
physical world. Sure, computers can do anything these days, but do we want
them to? There’s no logic, and therefore less drama, in Indy’s escape from
a mock town that’s about to be atom-bombed, or in that amphibious truck
finally going over a series of stupendous waterfalls.
None of the complex CGI sequences in
„Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull“ can hold
a candle, in fact, to the moment when a conspicuously youthful Indy, confronted
by a black-robed warrior chuckling ominously, watched and waited while
the guy twirled his scimitar, then pulled out his revolver and simply popped
him with no further ado. But that was a long time ago, in a film that feels
far, far away.