Vaelor wrote:
I saw it last night.
I liked it, but it just wasn't as good as the other three.
Well, it's better than Temple of Doom.
Before I criticize it, I'd like to reiterate that I liked it. Didn't love it,but I did enjoy it.
[spoiler]Anyways. My primary issue with the movie was that it laid the paranormal on too heavy (like ToD) and had less connection to history and legend (also like ToD.) Crusade and Raiders had a good balance there, and that's what made them so good. There wasn't enough history/myth to make it boring, there wasn't enough paranormal to shatter suspension of disbelief and there was just enough action and good plot to make them awesome.
This movie tried to take three separate myths and legends and string them together into one, and that didn't really work too well. Crystal skull and El Dorado, I could see that working. But once they threw in the alien stuff, it got a bit weird. While the crystal skulls and El Dorado are both perfectly feasible and have deep roots in history, aliens advancing the Mayan civilization is a bit out there. With Raiders and Crusade, the artifacts of both movies, while paranormal, are both things that almost certainly existed at one point in time (albeit in less mythical forms) and the story around them in the films is taken from a very prominent book in today's world, some of which is based on what we now know to be factual history.
However, there is no good evidence to suggest that aliens had a hand in the development of ANY prehistoric civilizations. We've gone from semi-factual to pure speculation here, and as a result, suspension of disbelief is breeched (I say all this as an agnostic, by the by. I was raised Christian, but have since chosen my own beliefs. Thus my ability to suspend belief where Raiders and Crusade are concerned but not here has nothing to do with my religion.)
And the reference to Roswell might as well not been there, for all the good it did to the story.
Also, the final scenes in the pyramid seemed to me to be ripping off the Mummy franchise big-time. In the treasure room, (itself being reminiscent of the one in the first Mummy film) when Mac is lost? Replace "Akator treasure room" and "Mac" with "Hamunaptra treasure room" and "Benni" respectively. Situations differ slightly, but they're essentially the same scene.
Secondly, remember The Mummy Returns? Remember when the oasis of Ahm Shere is sucked up into the pyramid, which is then claimed by the desert? The scene where the pyramid is destroyed as the UFO emerges looked a hell of a lot like that, didn't it?
Also, Producer Frank Marshall said that the film would use traditional stuntwork so as to be consistent with the previous films. Personally, I didn't think it looked that consistent.
Then there's Spalko...for a villain, she's not very good. And I'm not referring to the acting. That was fine. No, I speak of the fact that she's not very...villainous. The most "evil" aspect of her is that she's a high-ranking Ruskie in a movie set during the Cold War. Her motivation is to gain knowledge for the good of her country, which is only evil is you take the position of an American during, again, the Cold War. Her methods aren't very extreme either, and the dirty work is done, for the large part, by the big dude who gets eaten by the fire ants (oh man, remember how they poured down his throat? Remember the scarabs from The Mummy? Yeah.)
A few more minor gripes:
The Tarzan scene. Wut.
The groundhogs. Wat.
Marcus Brody is dead, and his statue's head didn't even kill anyone. Laaaaame.
The fridge scene. Cool, but takes Indy's invulnerability to anything death-inducing too far.
Karen Allen is old. D:
Henry Jones Sr. is FUCKING DEAD. HOW FUCKING LAME IS THAT SHIT?[/spoiler]inb4tl;dr
Spoilers, dude. Not everyone's seen it yet
[spoiler]I do agree with most things here. Though I do think that the whole "aliens helping the Mayans" thing would have been pretty beleivable in the world of Indiana Jones. I did have a few problems with it, but minor ones, like they could have done without some of the special effects they put in.
The fact that Henry Jones, Sr. is dead is just because Sean Connery didn't wan't to be in the movie. I did want to see a cameo, but it didn't happen. I'm glad they at least mentioned him, though.
I didn't even notice The Mummy similarities, but now that you mention it...And the ants were just the classic "oh...gross!" creatures, like the snakes in Raiders, the bugs in Temple, and the rats in Crusade. Although none of those things ever killed anyone in those movies. [/spoiler]
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