I’m going to have to buck the trend here and offer a qualified “meh”. Even in the trailer there is too much (fake looking) CGI, too many self-referential lines, and too many action sequences that appear (admittedly without knowing anything about the plot) to exist merely for the purpose of having an action sequence. I’m seeing signs of the same thing that made Temple of Doom such a tiresome and ill-conceived story, albeit with a handful of good individual action set-pieces.
I have to admit, however, to having unreasonably high standards. Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the best pure adventure films ever made, and moves so quickly and engagingly that it never really allows you to sit and question the absurdities (like why Indy doesn’t just drop down the open shaft over the pit in the opening sequence rather than go through this whole business with the spiders and rolling ball, or why the German army is conducting a massive archeological dig in the desert of British-controlled Egypt), a quality that its immediate successor and imitators lacked. Raiders had an immediacy, and at least in-cinema plausibility that the back-projection and green screen effects of Temple of Doom took away. (To be fair, The Last Crusade also had some charitably unconvincing green screening, but made up for it in other areas and the inclusion of Sean Connery.)
And it has been well established that Indiana Jones films without Nazis don’t work. Commies just aren’t as comically menacing. An Indiana Jones film without a Nazi is like a Die Hard film without Alan Rickman.
So while I not might wait until it comes out on DVD, but I’ll at least give it a few weeks until the crowds thin out and catch it on a sparse Sunday matinee.
Stranger
