Steven Spielberg has confirmed the fifth film’s start date. But after the awful Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, was anyone really clamoring for another Indy adventure?
I love Indiana Jones. I love Indiana Jones so much that it physically pains me to type these words that suggest we do not, in fact, need another Indiana Jones movie. But there’s a reason for my “please, no” reaction, and it’s called Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Crystal Skull is an aggressively bad film, and it was made by Steven Spielberg and his same team, not some one-off hotshot reboot director. Steven Spielberg looked at that script and decided to make that movie, and by god he made it, Shia LaBeouf swinging through the trees with his monkey friends and all.
At least this movie, which Spielberg says will begin filming in April 2019, seems a long way away, and it will not feature Shia LaBeouf as Indy’s son with Marion Ravenwood, Henry “Mutt” Williams. Hopefully, this is the last time I will ever have to type “Mutt” Williams in my lifetime.
Back in the accursed Crystal Skull days, LaBeouf’s character had appeared to be positioned to take up the iconic fedora and continue his father’s adventures one day. But Ford and LaBeouf didn’t exactly bond, with Ford—never one to mince words—saying that he thought his young costar was “a fucking idiot.” If the thumbs-down from Indiana Jones himself wasn’t enough to cut LaBeouf, the actor did a pretty good job of that on his own.
In 2011, LaBeouf publicly spoke about his disappointment with the way Crystal Skull came out (us too, Shia), taking on a good portion of the blame but also swiping at the movie in the same breath:
“I feel that I dropped the ball on the legacy that people loved and cherished.” He went on to say nice and respectful things about Steven Spielberg, before adding, “But when you drop the ball, you drop the ball. You get to monkey-swinging and things like that and you can blame it on the writer and you can blame it on Steven. But the actor’s job is to make it come alive and make it work, and I couldn’t do it. So that’s my fault.”
Actually, you can blame a good deal of what went wrong in the preposterous, plodding Crystal Skull on the writer and the director. This was hardly a movie that hinged on its dramatic performances—this was an action/adventure movie with giant sets and explosions and ancient alien artifacts. Yet the movie is so, so, so bad, and the responsibility for what made it to the screen lands squarely at Spielberg’s much-vaunted feet. Indiana Jones fans are used to disappointment and curious decision-making—look at Temple of Doom, or spare yourself and don’t—but this was another animal entirely.
Crystal Skull is so ridiculous that it launched a phrase, “nuking the fridge”—based on the scene where Indiana Jones survives a nuclear explosion by jumping into a refrigerator—that is used to express the decline of a movie franchise. It’s a phrase up there with “jump the shark” to describe a plot decision so mind-bogglingly egregious that it throws everything out of whack. As knowyourmeme quotes an early definition of the phrase’s usage:
“[…] a colloquialism used to refer to the moment in a film series that is so incredible that it lessens the excitement of subsequent scenes that rely on more understated action or suspense, and it becomes apparent that a certain installment is not as good as a previous installments, due to ridiculous or low quality storylines, events or characters.”
When your movie begets a phrase that describes the terrible depths to which a once-beloved property can plunge, why are we putting ourselves through this again? The creative team remains the same as Crystal Skull‘s. Screenwriter David Koepp, set to work on this project, also wrote Crystal Skull. He’s written movies like Jurassic Park, but he’s also written movies like last year’s Tom Cruise abomination The Mummy. And he wrote Crystal Skull. That alone should disqualify him this go-round, if go-round again we must.
Please, no more. Not everything needs to be revived. Leave me here heavily drinking from this cup of a carpenter and pretending that The Last Crusade was the last time we saw Indiana Jones.
At least this thing won’t be out by 2020 at the earliest, and by then we might all be dead in a nuclear war unsurvivable by hiding in a refrigerator. Small favors.
(via Empire, image: Lucasfilm)
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