Between Reviews: Indy Movie

INDY MOVIE

FEB 24, 2008 – IT WAS INTENDED TO SEDUCE US, we who had gone so long without this particular kind of satisfaction – and afterwards, the earth was supposed to move. We were meant to exhale weakly, sweaty and short-breathed, still recovering from the intensity of the experience, while flopping back and lighting a cigarette. In short, it should have been the biggest bang in trailer history, the teaser for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Instead, what we have is an incoherent whimper – hardly befitting the latest installment of one of the greatest action franchises of all time, made by one of the greatest entertainers of all time. It begins well enough, with the Paramount mountain morphing into a cartographic likeness – a nice nod to the archaeological moorings of our intrepid explorer-adventurer hero. But then it’s all downhill. We get a few iconic images from Raiders of the Lost Ark (including that unforgettable silhouette shot of the desert dig that results in the first real breakthrough), with the title card: “He protected the power of the divine.”

This is followed by a flashback to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (“He saved the cradle of civilization;” uh, “cradle of civilization?” India? Isn’t it actually Africa?), and finally the famous riding-into-the-sunset clip from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (“He triumphed over the armies of evil.”). “And on May 22nd,”we’re told, “The Adventure Continues.” (Stop the presses! It’s an adventure? And it’s going to continue? I mean, really!) If the whole thing had been any blander, it could have been processed and canned and sold as baby food. Sure, this trailer for Crystal Skull gets the job done – if the job to be done was merely stoking our long-gestating anticipation – but where’s the style, the panache, the joyful edge in the ads for the earlier episodes? (The promotion for Last Crusade winked, “The man with the hat is back. And this time he’s bringing his dad.”) We’ve waited almost twenty years for this particular brand of action-adventure, but the random collage of hyper-edited clips that conclude the trailer make the film seem like something we saw last week, or last year – one of the many anonymous Hollywood outings designed to keep the home fires of the stuntmen’s association burning. Only a couple of moments display the wit and charm we associate with the series, one where Harrison Ford walks up to his fedora lying on the ground and puts it on (actually, his shadow puts it on, outlined against a military vehicle), and soon after, we see how much older he looks in this new movie. (“[It’s] not as easy as it used to be,” he grimaces.) Two, when John Williams’ familiar fanfare takes off, reducing us to Pavlovian dogs with slavering tongues.

Now contrast this with the trailer for another new installment in a long-dormant franchise: Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. It opens with things we cannot yet clearly see emerging from a fog, and the title card intones: “Every generation has a legend.” Having instantly established the mythic grip the series holds over the imagination of a generation, the trailer opens out to what looks like the Tatooine desert, over John Williams’ muted leitmotif of The Force Theme, the one that plays over the binary sunset in (the very first) Star Wars. Then we get the title card, “Every journey has a first step,” followed by shots that establish the geography of the film – spacecraft whizzing over a wondrously wrought cityscape, then an intriguing lady standing by a window that apparently touches the sky. Then there’s the final title card, “Every saga has a beginning,” and then the brass explodes around us, with possibly the most famous movie theme music ever.

And even though the rest of this trailer is – like the rest of the one for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – merely bits and pieces of what’s to come, there’s a constant invoking of the mythology from the preceding entries in the series: the laugh-out-loud line, “Anakin Skywalker, meet Obi-wan Kenobi;” the double-edged lightsabre wielded by Darth Maul; fleeting images of C-3PO fussing beside R2-D2; Yoda’s retro-mumblings about anger and hate and the dark side; and finally, Samuel L. Jackson summing up the film with, “You refer to the prophecy of the one who will bring balance to the force.” Now, there was a great, great trailer, interweaving old and new without losing for an instant the distinctive tone of the series. But then, the movie that followed turned out pretty lousy, so going by the law of inverse proportions, perhaps the ho-hum trailer for Crystal Skull is a sign of the crackling adventure that Spielberg has in store?

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