Star Trek and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
- Thread starter Chrisisall
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I enjoyed Indy 4 for the most part, right up until the ALIENS and the FLYING SAUCER...
I really didn't expect that sort of thing out of an Indy movie. Strange mystical forces, sure, but ALIENS?? When did Indy become ET?
Star Trek was way better.
I really didn't expect that sort of thing out of an Indy movie. Strange mystical forces, sure, but ALIENS?? When did Indy become ET?
Star Trek was way better.
Thing is, Spielberg is seriously overrated and not even half as brilliant as legend makes him.
How is that applicable here?
Sorry, but as much as I wanted to love Indy IV (I grew up on these movies) the film was an absolute mess.
While the film was a box office success. It only made money because of the iconic nature of the series.
"Crystal Skull" took a critical drubbing and was nominated for several Razzie awards (it won for worst prequel, remake, rip -off or sequel) while on the other hand "Star Trek" is a dark horse to be nominated for best film at the Oscars.
I respect your personal opinion, but on average ST was critically recieved much better than Indy IV was.
^ The Razzie Awards are complete BS, in my opinion. Sometimes, they can be right on, but mostly whatever wins is whatever movie had the ire of the Internet that year as opposed to a film that truly is bad.
And while I liked Star Trek quite a bit, you honestly think it has a chance to be nominated for Best Picture?
And while I liked Star Trek quite a bit, you honestly think it has a chance to be nominated for Best Picture?
For all its many flaws, INDY 4 was better than Episodes I and II were as fresh restarts to their long-dormant franchise. I know some would disagree with that viewpoint, but at least CRYSTAL SKULL felt like classic Indy and didn't try to remake the classic, accepted universe into something sexier and more advanced for the sake of a more mercurial, short-attention-span audience.
Funny, the latter is, in my opinion, EXACTLY what J.J. Abrams' "Star Trek" is about. By contrast, the Star Wars prequels function on loftier planes, using opulent visuals, combined with more formal dialogue and recitations, to connote a more cultured milieu (with respect to the OT), as well as using structural devices like ellipses and montages to condense and compress events into an epic narrative; epic in the colloquial and the Brechtian senses. As a popular filmmaker with a firm grounding in inter-related disciplines like anthropology and history, as well as a vast knowledge of cinema, particularly with regard to composition and editing, I think that Lucas is without peer. In a way, I also think his filmmaking is too good for the average cinema-goer. Just because Star Wars has been financially successful, it doesn't mean it's understood. It's been this way ever since Lucas' first feature film, "THX 1138". In a hundred years, people might begin to appreciate Lucas and his genius. Or maybe never. Who knows?
Okay, enough with the personal jabbing, on either account.
More personal jabbing -- same message as above. Besides, you got just about everything wrong.Which consisted mainly of a link to a page containing an overlong synopsis in smaller-than-average (and luminous lime-green!
Have I left anything out?
You haven't left anything out that you don't already lack -- like basic comprehension, reading skills, an ability to look beyond the surface and a joy in learning. Thanks for crystallizing (pun intended) the sort of anti-intellectual response I expected to see.
But what the heck, I suppose you could enlighten us yourself by summarizing and condensing for us the conclusion we were intended to have drawn from the hard-to-read page to which you linked above? That really would have been the better way of going about it, rather than simply posting an unexplained link; the linked page should act in support of your contention, not be a stand-in for it.
Dusty Ayres
Commodore
I enjoyed Indy 4 for the most part, right up until the ALIENS and the FLYING SAUCER...
I really didn't expect that sort of thing out of an Indy movie. Strange mystical forces, sure, but ALIENS?? When did Indy become ET?
Star Trek was way better.
Sorry, but I disagree. The Indy franchise is going to have to go that route; they can't have movies set in the '30's and '40's anymore, since Ford is 60-something now and Crystal Skull was set in 1956/7. As I already said in an earlier post about Indy, any future plots will have to involve aliens and outer-worldly devices; also, political realities will mean that (for example) nothing can happen in Egypt or the rest of the Middle East anymore (in the '50's, Egypt and the USA were opposed to each other because of the Cold War and the Suez Canal crisis-that alone means that Indy and Sallah will probably be enemies now due to the way Sallah's government is.) So movies like Crystal Skull will be in the offering, if Lucas & Spielberg can get together to make one, with something like the Solar Grail as the McGuffin of the plot, sought by an evil organization similar to SPECTRE, THRUSH, or HYDRA. You may not like the movie but everybody else did, and a gross of 700 million along with wide critical acclaim is nothing to laugh at.
Basically, I love both films, is what I'll say.
Hey, I always liked the Star Wars prequels, and many times, I've posted reviews that mentioned the underlying themes in all three movies; in fact, I'll post a link to it again: Star Wars Blogging: Episode I-The Phantom Menace
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Yeah, baby.
I enjoyed Indy 4 for the most part, right up until the ALIENS and the FLYING SAUCER...
I really didn't expect that sort of thing out of an Indy movie. Strange mystical forces, sure, but ALIENS?? When did Indy become ET?
Star Trek was way better.
You make aliens sound like a bad thing. I loved the Crystal Skulls film alot cause of it. An alien ship landing/crashing in some ancient society, and the occupents being looked at as gods....that sounds VERY reasonable to me. In fact, I believe that is what's behind many of our cultures.
I'm not here to nurse-maid anyone. Sheesh. Anyone would think you need someone to summarise because you're too lazy/dumb/inept (take your pick) to read the page yourself. Now, you're not saying that, are you? As for the text being hard to read, which you throw around like some impervious, catch-all criticism: yes, it's hard to read; yes, the author should have picked a different colour; yes, one can copy the text into a separate text reader, or if one has a half-way decent browser, switch to a basic page style (black text on a white background) at the click of a button. Even if I was so inclined, which I'm not (although I often go out of my way to explain things to people), no summary would abide, since the beauty of that author's analysis can only be appreciated in full (and, ironically, a person would be less inclined to believe any summary I might give; though you've trashed the full analysis without ever reading it, anyway; thanks for confirming my belief that the average message-board interlocutor prefers sounding off and mocking anything of substance that comes their way).
Hey, I wrote those notes regarding Crystal Skull. Thought it might be good to explain them. Sorry you hate the text size/color, this is intentional, we want to keep anyone who is not really interested from partaking, it's like keeping membership in a secret society. Only the strong continue deeper.
We all think, maybe even assume that plot is the most important element to drive the essence of stories, and though plot is crucial in novels and television, it is only one facet of film storytelling. In most masterpiece filmmaking, the plot is sometimes just a 'cover story' the characters are parts of. In fact, the characters of films like The Matrix, The Shining, Vertigo, Star Wars, Inglourious Basterds 'act' as if they are purposefully connected to the mayhem that surrounds them, but like us in our worlds, they are barely aware. The directors are weaving very different things in the undercurrents, this is what makes them repeatedly viewable. In the place of plot, masterthinkers like Lucas, Spielberg, Kubrick, Tarantino create paradoxes, mirrors, inversions, duplications, even clones and then combine them with forms, mostly visual, that tell a 'truer' story, a story that characters like Indiana, Neo, Aldo Raine are completely unaware of. The 'real' story of Crystal Skull is unknown to everyone in the film (perhaps Oxely and only when he's in his fog) and in here (except, of course, Cryogenic), and this is the point of Lucas and Spielberg, they know that repeated viewings of their film are a given, they spend immense amounts of time finding a crucial missing link to taunt an audience with, and they do it without robbing a mass audience of basic action pleasures.
I'll give you one very cool example: In War of the Worlds, when Cruise is washing his face, he splashes the dust of dead humans onto his mirror, and Spielberg shows us for a second a mirror with a starscape on it, and Cruise doesn't look at his face, but he 'reads' the stars and divines a decision to leave. Spielberg specifically surrounds the mirror with a navajo 'sky portal' wallpaper that explains exactly what he is doing, it means 'read the stars'; the wallpaper is both proof and it mirrors the activity by defining it. How this fits into the context of the film gives the film a complexity most sci fi films lack.
Now I'm someone who knows in place of humans studying Dickens and Tolstoy, we should be moving onto Griffiths and Hitchcock, but we haven't. People see film as an escape from reality when it is also a master-form that seeks to reshape our species's culture and lead us into new frontiers of even science.
I know all of you in here are here for the pure pleasure of your fandom, but take note, compared to the real doers above, Abrams is not a master thinker, he is merely an able and cocky plot manager, and I would say he's probably hates women (no women in command roles) and mistakes the genius of Roddenbery (in the old Trek, Kirk used his sexuality to integrate with enemies, here he just wants to chase tail).
Abrams represents a kind of conservative 50's backlash against the real experimental scifi we should be imbibing.
We all think, maybe even assume that plot is the most important element to drive the essence of stories, and though plot is crucial in novels and television, it is only one facet of film storytelling. In most masterpiece filmmaking, the plot is sometimes just a 'cover story' the characters are parts of. In fact, the characters of films like The Matrix, The Shining, Vertigo, Star Wars, Inglourious Basterds 'act' as if they are purposefully connected to the mayhem that surrounds them, but like us in our worlds, they are barely aware. The directors are weaving very different things in the undercurrents, this is what makes them repeatedly viewable. In the place of plot, masterthinkers like Lucas, Spielberg, Kubrick, Tarantino create paradoxes, mirrors, inversions, duplications, even clones and then combine them with forms, mostly visual, that tell a 'truer' story, a story that characters like Indiana, Neo, Aldo Raine are completely unaware of. The 'real' story of Crystal Skull is unknown to everyone in the film (perhaps Oxely and only when he's in his fog) and in here (except, of course, Cryogenic), and this is the point of Lucas and Spielberg, they know that repeated viewings of their film are a given, they spend immense amounts of time finding a crucial missing link to taunt an audience with, and they do it without robbing a mass audience of basic action pleasures.
I'll give you one very cool example: In War of the Worlds, when Cruise is washing his face, he splashes the dust of dead humans onto his mirror, and Spielberg shows us for a second a mirror with a starscape on it, and Cruise doesn't look at his face, but he 'reads' the stars and divines a decision to leave. Spielberg specifically surrounds the mirror with a navajo 'sky portal' wallpaper that explains exactly what he is doing, it means 'read the stars'; the wallpaper is both proof and it mirrors the activity by defining it. How this fits into the context of the film gives the film a complexity most sci fi films lack.
Now I'm someone who knows in place of humans studying Dickens and Tolstoy, we should be moving onto Griffiths and Hitchcock, but we haven't. People see film as an escape from reality when it is also a master-form that seeks to reshape our species's culture and lead us into new frontiers of even science.
I know all of you in here are here for the pure pleasure of your fandom, but take note, compared to the real doers above, Abrams is not a master thinker, he is merely an able and cocky plot manager, and I would say he's probably hates women (no women in command roles) and mistakes the genius of Roddenbery (in the old Trek, Kirk used his sexuality to integrate with enemies, here he just wants to chase tail).
Abrams represents a kind of conservative 50's backlash against the real experimental scifi we should be imbibing.
startrekrcks
Fleet Captain
I didn't think Kingdom was as good as Raiders Temple or Crusade what do you think of those films?
Raiders is by far the masterpiece of the lot, followed by Temple of Doom, Skull is a very close third. Crusade is the one that has the least going for it. Crystal Skull though is a continuation and advancement from Raiders in terms of 'what myth means', the core theme of this series and though it has the fewest thrills, it has the most hidden complexities. The problems I have with Skull is that it's clear Spielberg can't seem to decide how to build his thrills (physical or digital) and whether they have any true threat-level (the Tarzan thing though a great idea, was ridiculously executed), also his and Lucas's films become less dangerous as they (Lucas and Spielberg) get older because they want the films to attract an audience beginning somewhere around 8 years and up and they're somewhat unsure about how dangerous to play with violence. Raiders feels far more dangerous than Skull. Where's that vaporised blood? Also Janusz Kaminski has a hard time exposing pure blacks, his frames are entirely too bright for a film like this, that's where Douglas Slocombe was great at.
I'd say that was a fair assessment.
Seemed logical for a story set in the 1950s just as Nazis and mystical objects work in a 1930s and 40s setting.I enjoyed Indy 4 for the most part, right up until the ALIENS and the FLYING SAUCER...
I really didn't expect that sort of thing out of an Indy movie. Strange mystical forces, sure, but ALIENS?? When did Indy become ET?
Star Trek was way better.
You make aliens sound like a bad thing. I loved the Crystal Skulls film alot cause of it. An alien ship landing/crashing in some ancient society, and the occupents being looked at as gods....that sounds VERY reasonable to me. In fact, I believe that is what's behind many of our cultures.
Raiders RULES, the next three are hugely entertaining yet lack that initial perfection.
