At the Lighthouse

Having made my way through my Indiana Jones box set and watched both Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom and Last Crusade, the time has now come for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the Indy sequel that came out just last year. And hold on to your fedoras now, because this is going to be one long mothafucka of a review. If you’re starting to get tired of my lengthy Indy blog reviews then maybe you can take comfort in the fact that this is the last Indy movie that’s been made so far, so it will probably be a while before I blog about Indy again. 

(Photo: Paramount Pictures)

So, Crystall Skull. I saw it in the theatres last year, and was somewhat disappointed by it, but I was excited about watching it again now that the first three movies were still fresh in my memory. And I’m glad I did, because I was actually pleasantly surprised by it this time around. I think the ending (which I will adress later in this review – and there’ll be plenty of spoilers so you should stop reading now if you haven’t seen the movie yet) was so awful that it had overshadowed my entire memory of the movie. I actually called the fourth Indy movie a “trainwreck” in a previous post, and I would like to take that back now.

Military Warehouses and Lead-linen Refrigerators
Because the first three fourths of the movie? Awesome. The furious Indy pace we came to know in Last Crusade is there right from the luscious opening sequence in which we find an aged Indy (the film is set 19 years later in history than Last Crusade) in the clutches of Russian communists who want Indy’s help to find some kind of wrecked airplane in a U.S. Military warehouse. The sequence then takes us from the warehouse into the desert of Nevada and from the desert into a fake town (a nuclear test town) where Indy survives a nuclear explosion by seeking shelter in a lead-lined refrigerator! All this happens within the first twenty minutes of the movie, mind you.

And the movie actually doesn’t lose its pace at any point during the rest of the movie. Whatever one may think of the development of the movie’s plot (again, more on this later), in terms of action, Lucas & Spielberg have not lost their touch in this fourth installment of Indiana Jones.

“Not as easy as it used to be”
But of course Lucas and Spielberg have both aged two centuries since the last Indy movie, and so has Ford, and so has Indy. Set in 1957 Indy is probably somewhere in his 50s, Harrison Ford was 66 when the movie opened, and Spielberg and Lucas have wisely chosen (heh) to address this issue head-on. Indy has always been a fallible character who tended to get himself into trouble, and since he relies on dangerous stunts during his adventures, he’s become even more fallible now that he is approaching the age of retirement. “Damn, I thought that was close!” he mutters in the warehouse as he fails to swing himself onto a driving truck by his bullwhip, and when he finds himself surrounded by armed Russians in the first scene he owns up the fact that getting himself out of this situation isn’t going to be “as easy as it used to be”. 

Indy is too cool a guy to be trying to kid himself – and us as his audience – that he’s still physically a match for the guy he used to be in the first three movies.

Fathers…
What Indy’s not cool about when it comes to his age, however, is the fact that  as regards his personal relationships, he appears to have arrived at a kind of terminus. In a touching scene early in the movie, we see Indy at home, sadly contemplating the framed pictures of the two men who have arguably been Indy’s most important father figures: Indy’s father Henry Jones Sr, and Marcus Brody, both of whom have passed on. “Brutal couple of years,” Indy says to his friend Charles Stanforth, the Dean of Marshall College, “First Dad, then Marcus.” “We seem to have reached the age,” replies Charles, “where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.”

The message is clear: As Shakespeare’s childless monarch Macbeth taught us, success isn’t worth a whole lot if you don’t have succession, and Indy is left alone as his fathers die, with no son to follow in his own footsteps. It’s surely no coincidence that in the next scene, young greaser Mutt Williams pulls up beside Indy on a train station and asks for his help, as his ersatz father figure, Indy’s old friend and fellow archeologist Harold Oxley, has been captured along with Mutt’s mother by Russians in the Peruvian jungle, as Oxley tried to recover an old treasure, the legendary Crystal Skull.

…and the son.
Because of course Mutt is Indy’s son. Although Indy at first neither realizes this nor the fact that Mutt’s mother is no other than his old flame Marion Ravenwood, because Mutt refers to her as Mary Williams (Mutt: “Mary Williams. You don’t remember her?” Indy: “There were a lot of Marys, kid…” Mutt: “Shut up! That’s my mother you’re talking about!”).

 But Indy and Mutt have great father/son chemistry right from the get-go, and Mutt seems to have inhereted quite a bit of spunk and stubbornness from both his parents. Shia LaBoeuf blends very well into the Indy universe, and I really like him in this part. He’s a charismatic kid, but not too heroic-looking, and he’s good at balancing Mutt’s qualities of “Impetuous Punk” and “Competent Young Man”. One of my favourite moments of the movie is the scene in Peru where Indy, Marion, and Mutt are being held at gunpoint by the Russians. The aging Indy sees no other solution than to cooperate with the Russians, but Mutt will have none of this, so he single-handedly attacks the soldiers and has Indy and Marion make a run for it into the jungle with him, and the following dialogue ensues:

Indy: What the hell are we doing, kid?!
Mutt: They were gonna kill us!
Indy: Well, maybe…
Mutt: Somebody had to do something!
Indy: Something else would have been good!
Mutt: At least I got a plan!
Indy: This is intolerable…

“This is intolerable…” being  of course the line Sean Connery’s character repeated a few times during Last Crusade, whenever Indy made a particularly reckless move and put himself and his father in danger. I thought that was an excellent little detail.

Does this mean that I’m ready for Shia LaBoeuf to take over Ford’s part and be the new Indiana Jones? Hells, no! Ford’s Indiana Jones is incomparably cool,  and I harbour the illusion that Ford’s got at least 30 years worth of action-adventure hero left in him, and that Spielberg, Lucas, and Ford will make several more Indy movies together. But I guess if I have to be realistic, I kind of like to think that there’s a possibilty that my potential kids may grow up with their very own Indy. Although, as Mutant Reviewers from Hell point out The Adventures of Mutt Jones does not have that same ring to it.

The Return of Marion Ravenwood
I’ve already praised Karen Allen’s reappearance as Marion Ravenwood in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in my tribute to Marion Ravenwood, so I won’t ramble on about that again in this review. Of course I loved it that she was back in this movie, and Karen Allen shone in the part. If I have any peeves about her part in this movie it is, perhaps, that the character left something to be desired in terms of gravity. Marion was a lot of fun in the first movie, but there was also glimpses of something darker to her when we were first introduced to her. “Do you know what you did to me, to my life?” Marion muttered gloomily as Indy came to see her in Nepal in Raiders. Since then he’s caused her even more grief by leaving her without a word a week before their wedding, pregnant with his child, in the late 30s. And yet, Marion’s dialogue with Indy in Crystal Skull is kept humourous and banter-ish all the way through.

I also have issues with the scene in which she decides to drive that jeep off a cliff and into a river. Marion was courageous in Raiders, but she wasn’t foolhardy. Driving a jeep off a cliff (while your own son is a passanger!), that’s foolhardy.

But these are minor peeves, really. I’m thrilled that they brought her back. 

Giant Ants and Extraterrestial Over-stimulation
A lot has happened in the world of special effects since Raiders of the Lost Ark, but surprisingly this actually proves to be a drawback for the Indy franchise, I think. In the special features for Raiders there was this really neat little documentary on how they made that melting head from the “Opening of the Ark” scene. First they had made a copy of Ronald Lacey’s (the actor who played Toht) head, and then they added to the model several layers of glycerine, each in a different flesh-like shade, and ending with a skin-coloured layer. The fake head was then exposed to extreme heat from a blow-torch until the glycerine started to melt off, exposing layer after layer, while they filmed. The process was then sped up and inserted into the movie scene.

Simple craftsmanship, and yet immensely effective. I don’t know how they made the equally effective Rapidly Aging Donovan scene from The Last Crusade, but by the looks of it, they used good old-fashioned claymation for the scene.

Nowadays we have computers to do effects like that for us, without us ever getting our fingers dirty or greasy with clay or glycerine. But I think Crystal Skull is proof to the fact that this new clinical approach to special effects is not always a good thing.

In Crystal Skull one of the villains gets punished for her evil ambition in much the same way as Toht and Donovan do in the first and the third Indy movie: Curiosity kills the Cate Blanchett as Irina Spalko basically explodes as a result of extraterrestiral intellectual over-stimulation (!) in one of the last scenes. First her eye sockets catch fire, then the rest of her evaporates while she screams. Sounds like it ought to be an effective scene, no? But it isn’t. It’s nowhere near as horrifying as the scenes in Raiders and Last Crusade. It simply looks too clinical, too smooth, too clean. Computers can do a lot of things, but they can’t compete with the gruelling textural effect that old-fashioned materials can produce. The melting head was (and still is, I’ll venture!) effective, not because it was sophisticated, but because it had an imperfect materiality to it that is recognizable to a spectator. A dying human body isn’t supposed to look sophisticated, it’s supposed to look messy. The Irina Spalko death scene felt unreal and distant in its perfect smoothness in comparison.

Same thing with the giant ants. Creepy crawlies are a tradition in the Indiana Jones movies, but they have never been less creepy than they were in Crystal Skull. Instead of the 8000-10.000 very real snakes they brought in for the Well of Souls scene in Raiders, the humongus bugs in Temple of Doom, or the swarming sewer rats in Last Crusade, the Crystal Skull special effects crew has created computer-animated giant ants for the movie’s obligatory creepy crawly scene. Highly sophisticated – yet utterly dull to look at.

The one scene that did work in terms of creepiness was the one with the Fake Town in the desert. That entire scene, from the moment when Indy realizes that all the inhabitants are an advanced kind of crash test dummies to the time when we see the dummies slowly dissolving during the nuclear test bombing, was absolutely brilliantly eerie, in a Offenbach-esquely uncanny sort of way. Despite the fact that this scene was made in a relatively old-fashioned way: The art directors simply went out and bought the most old-timey-looking mannequins they could find, filled the set with them, and then blew up a miniature model version of the town. I definitely think this is the kind of simplicity the Indy crew should pursue, if they intend to make more Indy movies, rather than plastering the movies with sterile computer graphics.

The Aesthetics of Extraterrestrials and the Phenomenology of Indy
Because the aesthetics are an important part of the Indy franchise, and I actually think that this was part of the problem with the Extraterrestrial plot of the movie as well. Aliens are, the way they’re usually represented in pop culture, stream-lined, sterile-looking creatures: Smooth, greyish skin, large inscrutable eyes, tiny lip-less mouths. Their means of transportation are sophisticatedly smooth and perfectly rounded spaceships.

These are not aesthetics that go well with the Indiana Jones universe. The traditional Indiana Jones universe is charming because it had a sense of materiality, of porosity, of something mechanical to it. Indy was the hero with the scar on his chin, with a ragged hat on his head, and dust and dirt all over his clothes. The Indy landscape was one of dirt and jungles and desserts, of holes that you could fall into, and of booby traps made from nifty, yet simple mechanical devises.

Likewise, the mythological dimension of the movies was one in which if you were willing to dig far enough through the layers of dust of our cultural history, you might find the truth.

This perspective was lost in Crystal Skull with the extraterristrial storyline. The elegant computer-animated extraterrestrials simply didn’t fit into this universe, and Lucas’ absurd idea that the aliens were actually inter-dimensional creatures only made it worse. “Where did they go? Into space?” asks Indy in the Crystal Skull ending as the extraterrestrial escape in their spaceship. “To the space between spaces.” Oxley replies, very cheesily, and the whole thing is just so wrong. This stupid pseudo-metaphysical explanation leaves nothing for Indy to dig his archeologist’s hands into, and leaves us without that thrilling idea of the Raiders and Last Crusade that our own soil hides incredible truths and powers. Who cares about extraordinary powers if they reside in a space that’s not even accessable to us?

The Domestication of Indy
The ending is, however, almost saved by the wonderfully sweet ending, where Indy and Marion tie the knot and walk down the aisle with Mutt as a happy little family. Some might argue that this is a pitiful domestication of the wayfaring Indy, but as this very poignant article by FilmChat argues, the domestication of Indy has been anticipated by the first three movies in which Indy’s carefree lifestyle is always interrupted or complicated by representations of domestication or of family: In Raiders his relationship with Marion is complicated by the fact that Marion’s father was (yet another) father-figure of Indy’s and had disapproved of their relationship. In Last Crusade Indy flirted with Elsa, but the movie’s most important relationship was the one between Indy and his father. And even in Temple of Doom it is the Family that prevails and we’re introduced to a father-mother-son constellation that might be said to foreshadow the last scene of Indiana Jones: 

In Temple of Doom, Indy is at his most Bond-like, boldly promiscuous and telling Willie that he has done “years of fieldwork” in “primitive sexual practices” — but the greatest bond in that film is either fraternal or filial, not erotic, as Short Round declares “Indy, I love you!” before causing him the necessary pain that will free him from the spell that Mola Ram has cast on him. The film ends with man, woman and child happily united in a sort of makeshift family.

(FilmChat)

Special Features
There are a lot of special features for Crystal Skull – a whole seperate DVD with special features is included in the box-set. It’s almots too much I think - as should have become obvious by now, I’m a big Indy fan, and even I was bored with some of it. There’s a pre-production feature, a post-production feature, a production diary, a feature about the special effects, just to name a few. The best feature, for me, was the documentary “The Return of a Legend” in which the cast and crew discussed how it was that Indiana Jones was brought back to life in 2008.

I especially enjoyed the part where Lucas, Spielberg, and screenwriter David Koepp discussed how they came up with the title for the movie. Among the working titles they mention are the insanely corny Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men (Lucas’ idea), Indiana Jones and the Attack of the Giant Ants, and my personal favourite, the wonderfully clunky and expositional Indiana Jones and the Son of Indiana Jones, which I liked enough to make it the title of this review of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

So, I re-watched Temple of Doom for the first time since I was a little girl. I thought it was ok back then, mostly because it made me feel cool to tell the boys at school that no, indeed, I did not have to cover my eyes during the gross parts, thankyouverymuch. But even as a child I never thought it was a good movie, so after having embarked on this whole Indiana Jones craze I’ve been cultivating for the past few weeks, I’ve been dreading the time when I would re-watch Temple. If even an eight-year-old is able to catch on to a movie’s lack of quality, that can’t be a good sign.

Turns out I had every reason to be dreading it. Temple of Doom really isn’t a very good movie. It feels wrong from the very beginning of the film – it simply doesn’t feel like an Indiana Jones movie, the atmosphere is that much different from the atmosphere in the first and the third movie. And I sat there throughout the movie trying to guess why in the world Spielberg and Lucas would do this – what were they going for with this marked change of ambience in the second movie?

Even the poster for this movie seems wrong. Why is Indy posing like a skinny emo teen boy in this picture?

The special features on the DVD gave me some clues as to the answer to this question. As Spielberg explains in the feature ”An Introduction to The Temple of Doom”, he and Lucas intended to make a trilogy out of Indiana Jones, and Lucas wanted to make the second movie of the trilogy a slightly darker movie than the other two, because apparently that was the formula he’d used for his Star Wars trilogy (I wouldn’t know. I have never seen Star Wars). So this was their reasoning behind this plot where Indy enters into the hellish world of darkness and evil that we find in the Kali Ma cult.

And you know, I can kind of see how that might be an interesting idea: Our hero Indy retreating into a world of evil which he has to defeat from within before he can make it out on the other side. There’s something almost Dante-esquely interesting to that thought.

The problem is, however, that the idea doesn’t work at all in the movie: I didn’t sit back with a sense of having seen a sinister movie about a hero overcoming evil. This post shall be dedicated to answering why I didn’t feel that way.

The Absence of Dr. Henry Jones Jr.
I think one of the main problems with the movie was that Indy simply didn’t seem real the way he’d done in Raiders. Raiders was so compelling partly because it depicts Indiana Jones as a whole person – not just as an adventurous hero. In both Raiders and Last Crusade we get to see Indy teaching a class, and these scenes are wonderful in that we get to see Indy as a normal person who, just like the rest of us, relies on his regular occupation in order to put food on the table. In Raiders we even see him show Marcus Brody some antique pieces that he intends to sell to Brody’s museum in order to make enough money to go on one of his adventorous trips. It’s little details like these that makes me engage in Indy as a person – that makes him seem realistic enough for me to want to follow him on his out-of-this-world adventures of wild car chases and melting Nazi faces.

And there is none of this in Temple. We never get to see Indy in a classroom or even at home – the adventure starts in Shanghai where we find Indy at a nightclub wearing an elegant white blazer in a scene that would be perfectly fine if it were a James Bond movie scene. But it’s hard to recognize the loveable and slightly dorky college professor in these surroundings, and it almost felt wrong to hear Short Round insistantly refer to Indy as “Dr. Jones” throughout the movie.

“Oki-doki, Dr. Jones!”
Speaking of whom - Short Round is a problem in the movie as well. Retrocrush listed him as one of the most annoying movie characters ever, but I wouldn’t go that far. It speaks to Short Round’s advantage that the kid is really cute and as far as child actors go, I actually don’t think he’s half bad. But his character is simply too much of a bumpkin – his relationship with Indy doesn’t seem believable. I simply can’t believe that Indy would hire a ten-year-old orphan as his personal bodyguard and procede to make him drive his car, and take him with him on a journey to a temple infamous for kidnapping children and turning them into slaves. The Indy we know from Raiders is protective even towards the adults with whom he cooperates (like Sallah and Marion), and certainly wouldn’t have dragged a poor orphaned child with him on a dangerous quest. Thus robbed of any believable backstory, Short Round is reduced to functioning as a means to make the sinister movie more kid-friendly.

“Primitive Sexual Practises”
It’s pretty much the same problem with the character of Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw a.k.a. Mrs Spielberg), the leading lady of the movie. She’s on Retrocrush’s list as well, and I definitely agree with them there. I’ve already mentioned in my tribute to Marion Ravenwood how annoying I used to find Willie’s screaming when watching this movie as a kid, and it was even worse than I remembered it. Willie Scott screams and whines her way through the entire movie. Now, I wouldn’t have a problem with this if only her screaming and whining made sense, but most of the time it doesn’t. For instance, who the hell would waste time whining when they’ve just realized that they’re aboard a crashing plane? 

The whining seems to have been exaggerated for comical effect, but not only is it not very funny, it’s also completely out of place in a movie that’s supposed to be about a quest into the sinister and dark places of the human world. Which is a shame, because can you imagine how great this movie would have been if they’d pared Indy up with a woman that we actually grew to care about? The scene where Willie is being lowered into a pitful of fire would have been terrifying! The way it is now I almost – almost - kind of want the Kali Ma guys to just kill off Willie and get her out of the picture already. 

And then Willie’s character serves to make Indy seem even less recognizable. Because why on earth would the cool, intellectual Indy we met in Raiders fall for a clingy airhead like Willie? It doesn’t seem right, and it doesn’t help things that there is zero chemistry between Ford and Capshaw. It’s almost as if Spielberg and Lucas have realized this – in any case they’ve directed a dialogue between Indy and Willie in their love scene that’s way over the top, as if to compensate for the lack of sparks flying between the actors:

Indy: “You wear your jewels to bed, princess?”
Willie: “Yeah. And nothing else. Shocking?”
Indy: “Nothing shocks me. I’m a scientist.”
Willie: “So as a scientist, you do a lot of research?”
Indy: “Always.”
Willie: “And what sort of research would you do on me?”
Indy: “Nocturnal activities.”
Willie: “You mean what sort of creme I put on my face at night? What position I sleep in?”
Indy: “Mating habits.”
Willie “Love rituals?”
Indy: “Primitive sexual practises.”
Willie: “So you’re an authority on that subject?”
Indy: “Years of field work.”

Um, ew? Excuse me while I go bathe my ears with alcohol. They have just been linguistically sullied by an Indiana Jones movie. I suppose you could argue that the dialogue is entertaining because of the sheer outrageousness of it, but mostly it’s just gross.

 “Dr. Jones! Don’t drink, it’s bad!”
Towards the end of the movie there’s a scene which I’d completely forgotten about since I was a kid, and which is probably the movie’s most intense sequence. This must have been the scene that Spielberg and Lucas had in mind when they declared that they wanted this second Indy movie to be a quest into darkness. In the scene, Indy is forced by the Kali Ma cult to drink the Blood of Kali, and the blood somehow transforms Indy into a Mr Hyde-type version of himself and thus a member of the evil cult. Transformed!Indy proceedes to chain a screaming, incredulous Willie to the crane that will lower her into the fire, and to hit a poor, defenseless Short Round across the face and laugh at his pain.

This could have been a memorable scene that might even have overshadowed the overdone comic relief of the movie and made it into the dark movie that it was apparently supposed to have been. But the problem is that this evil force that takes control over Indy is an entirely alien one. The extreme evil doesn’t seem to be rooted anywhere in Indy’s own personality and thus the sequence can’t be said to deal with Indy’s battling his own demons. And so, apart from the fact that it’s interesting to see Ford play an evil character, the scene becomes a pretty dismissable one.

Especially because it’s so easily resolved. Apparently, all it takes to cure Indy (and anyone else who’s drunk the Blood of Kali) is to be burned with fire. Somehow Short Round knows about this (how?? And how is it that no one in the firery Temple has caught on to this cure before?) and burns Indy who turns back into his old, heroic self just in time to save both Willie and Short Round.  Too easy, writers.  

“Chilled monkey brain!”
Finally there’s the fact that the movie has a pretty strong undercurrent of racism. India is apparently a somewhat backwards civilisation doomed to perish by the hands of evil and primitive native cultists if the British empirialists aren’t there to keep an eye on things. And I realize that the whole Snake’s Surprise/Eye Soup/Chilled Monkey Brain dinner sequence is probably added mostly as a nice and effective gross-out factor, but it still comes off as very xenophobic. As in, “Oh, those crazy Indians and their weird food! Will they ever learn?”

Indiana Jones and the Scenes that Actually Aren’t All that Bad
But this is not to say that the movie is all bad. It is pretty entertaining in its places, and while I think this is definitely the worst of all four Indy films, it does have its moments – moments that ultimately make the movie a watchable part of the Indy Quadrology. Here’s a list of these extenuating circumstances:

- The last part of the movie, including the roller coaster ride out of the Temple, and the nerve-wrecking scene on the suspension bridge. You can almost feel the sinking feeling when Indy, Willie, and Short Round rush through the temple corridors in their cart, or when Indy hangs on to the collapsing bridge while Kali Ma cultists plummet to their deaths below him.

- The scene where Indy succesfully uses an inflatable raft as a parachute, as he, Willie, and Short Round have been left
on an airplane with no pilots and no fuel. Simply because that idea is so fantastic.

- The fact thatWillie actually does go through a slight character development in the movie, and she seems changed after her near-death experience in the pit of fire. It’s especially refreshing to see her being subsequently protective of Short Round, whom she’s mostly ignored up until this point. She still does whine up until the very end of the movie, (when Indy shuts her up with a kiss that she totally hasn’t deserved).

- The fact Ford is shirtless in his evil Post-Kali Ma Scene. Yes, I’m that shallow. Boy, is that man goodlooking.

-   Indiana Jones. Even if he’s not depicted as a whole person, he’s still undeniably cool to watch. No one else can pull off a line like “Prepare to meet Kali – in Hell!” and not sound cheesy.

Remember the time when this blog was about other things than Indiana Jones? When there’d be entries about Keats and Marie de Frances lais, and about opera and stuff? Those were the days, huh?

Well, I promise you that those days are not completely over. It’s just that right now I feel like blogging about Indiana Jones. I’m very focused on writing my very serious master thesis at the moment, and somehow that has made me crave the Indiana Jones-movies with all their treasure-hunting and booby traps and fedora hats. They’re simply the most entertaining and satisfying movies I’ve seen in a long time. So after I wrote my elaborate ode to Marion Ravenwood and Raiders of the Lost Ark last week, I actually went out and bought the entire Indiana Jones box set, containing all four movies. I’m in the process of watching them, and last night I watched The Last Crusade, and I feel like reviewing it.

I’d actually seen The Last Crusade once, as I’ve mentioned before, when I was about nine or ten, but I’d pretty much blanked out all of it except for the part about the rapidly-aging Nazi sympathizer, which traumatized me, so it was a lot like watching it for the first time.

Cutesy opening sequence
And what a great experience that was! Arguably, the opening sequence was a little tame. It’s a sweet idea to have River Phoenix portray the young Indiana Jones, and the sequence served to set the atmosphere for the father-son story that the movie is by showing us young Indy with his distant father. But other than that I thought it was all rather too cutesy and heavy with reference: Indy getting his hat, Indy using a whip for the first time (and getting the scar on his chin!), and then the light comedy music of the score – it just lacked the suspense that the Raiders opening sequence had.

So I drew a sigh of relief when Harrison Ford’s face finally appeared on the screen, and the movie was an absolute thrill-ride from then on. Truly fantastic! I mean, Indy got around in Raiders, but in this movie he’s all over the place! From boats in the canals of Venice, via castles in Austria to flying a plane off of a zeppelin, my God! And the photography is so beautiful – everything looks bright and smooth and colourful in every shot, while the numerous stunts and fist-fights are wonderfully choreographed.

“She talks in her sleep”
As to the female lead of the movie, I was all ready to be disappointed with her, because she wasn’t Marion Ravenwood, but I actually didn’t mind Elsa all that much. I wouldn’t say that I loved her either, although the “Ah, Venice!” kissing scene was terrific. But then that seems to be the point exactly: Indy’s love interest isn’t supposed to take up a lot of time in the movie – the father/son relationship between Indy and his father is the main focus. And Sean Connery is wonderful as Henry Jones Sr. It isn’t fairly noticeable that Connery is only 12 years older than Ford, the two actors have an incredible chemistry, and Connery does the aging geek surprisingly well, never falling into the trap of being the charming ladies’ man that he’s used to playing – he makes sure to leave that to Indy - while still maintaining the authority that ensures the competitive dynamic between father and son. Their banter is priceless, even better than the Indy/Marion banter in the first movie. My favourite line is Connery’s ruthless remark when Indy chastises him about being distant during his entire childhood: “You left just as you were becoming interesting!”

And then I love how the writers had obviously decided to do a humorous spin on the issue that Freud believed to be the trauma of a father/son relationship – the Oedipal complex. Because of course as it turns out both father and son have managed to get themselves seduced by the same woman, by Elsa. I read somewhere that Henry’s Sr.’s line “She talks in her sleep” (after Indy asks him how he knew that Elsa was a Nazi) was actually an ad-lib from Connery. I hope that’s true – it makes it all the funnier – but the line is hilarious in any case, not least because of Ford’s puzzled reaction. The fact that they break this tabu of father and son sleeping with the same woman becomes an important key in the recovering of their lost relations, and the humour of the storyline makes it work.

Booby traps and rapidly aging villains
I was naturally somewhat nervous about the last part of the movie that takes place in the Canyon of the Crescent Moon, having been so efficiently traumatized by it when I was little. But seeing it now, I rather enjoyed it. The booby traps were very inventive, although I have to say that I think the one where Indy had to spell the name of Jehova doesn’t make that much sense. The “kneel before God” trap and the “Leap of Faith” trap make sense in as much as they presupposed a humble, faithful attitude that harmonizes with a Christian morality. But why would God want to off some poor honest fella just because he didn’t happen to know that in Latin, Jehova is spelled with an “I”? Doesn’t seem reasonable to me. The whole point of Jesus (and, in extention, of the grail) was that God was compassionate, loving and forgiving, not that he’d strike you down for being dyslectic.

But I’ll let that pass, and the subsequent scene with the knight and the grail was very nice. I watched the movie with The Boyfriend and a friend who convinced me that I ought to watch the Wrong Grail scene, so that I’d get over my childhood fear of it, and I did, and it wasn’t half as scary as I remembered it, but I can see how it caught me off-guard back in the day. Apart from the rats in the Venetian sewer (which, personally, I don’t find to be all that scary), the movie has been surprisingly devoid of gore up until this point, so the very graphic scene does come as a bit of a shock. And then I still think that it’s a great fear factor that Donovan is actually holding Elsa by the shoulder the whole time, addressing her while the gruesome transformation takes place in him, while the poor woman screams with horror. It’s hard to imagine how one would feel if one were to age about a century within a few minutes, but it’s only too easy to identify with Elsa and imagine what it would feel like to be a first-hand spectator to the process. The scene also allows for a little bit of exploration of the more complex sides of Elsa’s character: She obviously deliberately hands Donovan the wrong grail, so we know she’s not an out-and-out villain.

She’s just really ambitious, and in Indiana Jones that’s never a good thing. I like that in the Indiana Jones universe ambitious characters (such as Elsa, Belloq, or Irina Spalko) turn out the losers while love for one’s neighbour prevails. Indy finds the grail and lives to tell about it, not because he wants to be the winner, not even because he’s a devout religious person, but because he’s desperate to find the cure that the grail would provide for his father who’s been fatally wounded. Of course, one should always be cautious of reading too much into an Indiana Jones movie, but this is one of the subtleties of the action/adventure series that I think make them enjoyable.

Extra material
There’s a lot of extra material in the Indiana Jones box set, and the material on the Last Crusade is great. The best part is an interview from 2003 with “Indy’s Women”: Karen Allen who played Marion in Raiders, Kate Capshaw who played Willie in Temple, and Alison Doody who was Elsa. The three women offer interesting insights into their characters and also into their own experience as actresses in the respective Indy movies. Karen Allen was obviously the one to be the most enthusiastic about her character, and she’s positively beaming as she describes how she fell in love with Marion right away. Her audition was the bar scene where Marion drinks that big man under the table and punches Indy, and Karen Allen says that she thought it was the best introduction to a character ever.

Kate Capshaw is, not surprisingly, less enthusiastic about her part in Temple, and her experience seems to have been the bizarro version of Allen’s. Capshaw was put off by her needy clingy character as she read it in the script and had no love for her, and only warmed up to her somewhat while filming. ”I told [Steven] when we wer filming it that there was too much screaming!” Capshaw says bitterly, while Alison Doody remembers having a difficult time doing anything with her rather limited part in the father/son-centered story (“Sean Connery stole my part!” she says humourously) and trying to be sexy in spite of the harsh, cold Austrian accent that was required for the part.

There’s also a feature about “Indy’s Friends and Enemies” that offers some insights into various secondary characters in the movies, which is nice, although it does grate to have to listen to Steven Spielberg talk about how funny and beautiful Willie Scott was. Like, give it up already, Spielberg. Nobody liked her.

Finally there’s an introduction to The Last Crusade where Spielberg actually makes some good points about the relationship between Indy and Henry Jones Sr, the casting of Sean Connery, and the metaphor of the holy grail.