2008.05.26 : 29 Reasons (And Counting) Why The New Indiana Jones Film Sucked Ass
In No Special Order, Except For The Last One
- The rehashing of every ridiculous cliché we've all seen at least 100 times.
- Could anyone in any of these movies ever, just once, find something without the bad guys appearing that second behind them with guns to take it away? Could somebody just one time find something and go home with it?
- They literally gave us a wedding at the end.
- Did we really need to see Indiana Jones jump onto another half dozen trucks and punch out the occupants? Haven't we already seen him jump onto about 18 trucks and punch people out?
- And did Marian just intentionally drive an amphibious truck off a 1000-foot cliff into a tree which gently descended and placed them in the water and then launched back up and smacked half the bad guys off the cliff? Seriously? (Going over three 100-foot falls unscathed afterwards was unobjectionable by comparison.)
- Most of the action sequences were completely arbitrary and contrived. Oh! here come the evil natives chasing us! Oh, no! there go the stairs out from under us, run! And (my personal favourite), here comes the rising, roiling water! Why is there rising, roiling water? So we can run splashing away from it! Go! run! here's the rising, roiling water scene!
- Cate Blanchett's absurd accent.
- Cate Blanchett's absurd costume.
- Cate Blanchett's whole absurd schtick.
- Ray Winstone's character was in fact a triple agent – that's precisely what it is to lie about being a double agent.
- The complete waste of legendary English actor John Hurt.
- Shia Labouef as "Mutt" Jones. (Which name is worse?)
- Only George Lucas could imagine that anyone would believe that the kid could catch the speeding truck caravan by swinging from jungle vines.
- No one dares tell George Lucas he's a fucking idiot.
- Indy threw his whip to a guy who was lying on the ground five feet away, down two stairs. Seriously. He did.
- The same freaking music (used to provide the same freaking cues for action and emotion).
- Even the freaking effects were the same – CGI cliff edges, circular swirling debris, yadda yadda.
- Who were those monkey people with the blowguns? Do they just live in the tombs waiting for adventuring archeologists?
- Who the hell were those people in the city who came out of the walls and ceiling, and slunk around in "bad native" creepy postures? Have they just been living in the walls for 3000 years waiting for someone to drop by so they can throw bolos at their legs?
- Were those crystal skulls and skeletons the skulls and skeletons of the aliens? If so, they're dead, aren't they?
- Did they really show us a flying saucer at the end?
- Marian looked like shit.
- Indy looked like shit.
- That stupid thing with the hat being caught by the wind and going to the kid at the end. Are we really in for "Mutt Jones and the Temple of Bullshit" films now?
- The writing was so contrived – Oh, here's a kid on a motorcycle on the train platform telling me about this great mystery . . .
- The writing was so weak and sadly backfilled – Oh, there were legends of a City of Gold because the world "gold" in this obscure Mayan dialect also means "treasure", and their treasure was knowledge . . . Oh, yeah, and "cradle" also means "grave".
- There was no motivation for the characters whatsoever: why do they have to bring this skull back to the city? ("Because the skull told me so." Oh, and so we can see Cate Blanchett get her eyes burnt out. Hey, wait, haven't we seen bad guys with those accents get their eyes melted before? Oh, yeah, we've seen everything here before.)
- Did I mention there was nothing we hadn't all seen at least 100 times before? Except a lot better done? I would have enormously preferred to have just watched Raiders of the Lost Ark for the 9th time rather than seeing this once.
- Story by George Lucas.
