Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull [Blu-ray]
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Description:
Archaeologist Jones teams up with former flame Marion and her hot-headed son to rescue an old friend from the Soviets.
Product Details:
Actors:
Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Shia LaBeouf, Karen Allen, Ray Winstone
Average Customer Review:
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0 of 1 found the following review helpful:
An unfortunate sequel and slap in the face to Indiana Jones fans.Aug 22, 2010 If you're a fan of the original Indiana Jones trilogy, save yourself the time and money and skip this disappointing sequel. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg went completely off the mark on this one losing all the essence, spirit, and fun of the previous movies.
Instead of a solidly believable story strongly rooted in historical fact, the audience is force fed an overly elaborate and lifeless story masked in an endless series of special effects and cheesy nostalgic one liners. The Indiana Jones franchise is taken almost totally out of context here and regurgitated as an ill conceived cold war era/sci-fi version of tomb raider.
This movie should never have been made. It was so bad, I actually got up and walked out. In over 30 years of watching movies, I have only done that once before. It's an insult to all Indiana Jones fans.
0 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Lets give it up for Ford.Aug 15, 2010 The terrain is familiiar but the script is weak (not as funny nor as quick and the story is forced)...The special effects are spectacular, the action superb(for the most part).Shia Labeouf is miscast into a part that is poorly conceived and written and the rest of the cast is less than memorable..Its worth a rental for the the visual fun of it and for Fords performance .He is what I want to be like when I am 66 and on Medicare.A standing ovation for Harrison Ford but for the poor script and story 3 skulls .(Blu Ray)
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Indian Jones -need I say more -Great movieAug 09, 2010 Great movie as all indiana Jones movies are usually. To bad H. Ford is getting old, would like to see about 10 more made, LOL..
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
DisappointingAug 09, 2010 When did Spielberg start going downhill? I'd say some time in the late 1980s. You can see signs in The Last Crusade: the stunt-casting of Sean Connery, the silly scene with Hitler, and perhaps the over-extended tank chase. Since then, I haven't enjoyed anything he's made, which is remarkable considering how wonderful his earlier films were. We can gauge his fall by comparing Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with the earlier Indiana Jones movies.
First, despite what the cinematographer says (in a featurette) about duplicating the look of the old films, this sequel is visually much less interesting. Do a direct comparison: the early films have tight compositions, lots of interesting movement through the frame, and dramatic high-contrast lighting. Kingdom's shots tend to be excessively wide, boringly composed, and overlit, making the image look flat and bland. I thought the absolute worst moment was the diner scene, which was awkwardly set up, mostly stuck in one long shot, and with a deep focus that brought out every detail of the busy background and was painfully distracting. You'll also notice, throughout the action scenes, not one close-up of Jones looking frightened, in pain, flustered or relieved, whereas in the early films these shots helped us empathise with the character, adding to the drama and being really a signature of the series.
Kingdom unfortunately models its structure on recent action movies, which means action, action, action, always at the expense of character. The problem with this is that if you don't care about the characters, you don't care about the action. Also, the application of modern techniques eliminates the rough-and-ready quality of the action in the old films, which made them wonderfully believable. The use of motion-controlled cameras, the obvious CG clean-up, the flow of unbelievable stunt after unbelievable stunt, all these make action scenes look slick and fake. That we are supposed to believe a 65 year old man could do all these things (including things much more difficult than in any of the previous films) is the final dealbreaker. Probably the worst offender of the action scenes is the jungle chase, which is ten or fifteen minutes of pure fantasy, most notably Mutt continuing a sword fight for five minutes while astride two speeding jeeps. With so much silly Stuff happening during this scene, it quickly becomes a bore. It's directly followed by the army ant scene, which did have the potential to be a classic Indiana Jones moment, but was undermined by immediately following the exhausting jungle chase, and by being boringly directed. There's some running around and screaming, but our heroes hardly feature.
The story is not bad in itself, but is spoiled by various silly things, such as: Jones walking TOWARDS the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb; Mutt wanting to rescue some old guy for no compelling reason I could gather; Jones mispronouncing "libary" (though I'm sure everyone on set thought it was hilarious); cunningly evading the Russian spies by going home and staying there; Inca ninjas (totally unexplained); reintroducing Marion and then not giving her any decent scenes with Jones; a middle and last act with five potentially interesting characters (six including the villainess) and no interesting dramatic scenes at all; more ninjas; an elaborate gate-unlocking scene which was done for real but LOOKS computer generated; Jones rushing into the skull chamber when a tentative creep would've been more dramatically interesting (but hey, why start now?); the portal to other dimensions looking like a big extractor fan; the villain dissolving in a CGI haze when we all wanted to see her head explode; Jones's "surprise son" looking nothing like him; and the groan-inducing applause at the wedding (a moment which the film had definitely not earned).
So what's GOOD about Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? Well, most of the actors do what they can with their underwritten parts (though I still think Cate Blanchett is overrated), and the production design, costuming, etc, are of a high standard. (John Williams' music sounded good in its featurette, but I hardly noticed it in the film.) There were a lot of good IDEAS in the story: retrieving an item from the mysterious government warehouse, the atomic test village (though it seemed to belong in a different story), the return of Marion, the South American setting. I even think the "aliens" plot had potential. It's just that in almost every case the execution of the idea failed to deliver.
Let's just be thankful they won't be making any more of these.
1 of 2 found the following review helpful:
Weakest by FAR of the seriesJul 11, 2010 I'm a huge fan of Indiana Jones, so looked forward immensely to this installment. Boy, what I disappointed. The story itself was pretty good--introducing Indy's son, old love, etc. was good. I even (in some ways) liked the sci-fi nature of the story . . . the first movies were set during the '30s and '40s, when movies were about adventure and fighting the Nazis and such; this one is set in the '50s, when movies were all about sci-fi and alien invasions/contact, so it fit.
That being said, the digital effects got annoying. They were fine for the alien portions, but were poorly done & inappropriate for the action sequences. Part of the appeal of the earlier films was the ACTUAL stunt work and action sequences. If I wanted to see digitally rendered vehicles in a chase I'd watch Pixar's Cars. And I hate to say it, but Harrison was completely unconvincing in many of the action scenes. Watching him attempt the physical feats that Indy is (supposedly) still capable of performing in his 60s was just embarrassing. Even Indy ages, and the film-makers would have been better off reflecting this fact. Instead, they chose to pretend he hadn't lost a step since his 30s, and Harrison has definitely lost a lot more than Indy probably would have.
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