New Indiana Jones movie is dreadful

13 May 2008

John Howell

While George Lucas and Steven Speilberg have been trying to keep details of the new Indiana Jones film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, close to their chests, an early negative review has appeared on Ain't it Cool news.

"This is the Indiana Movie that you were dreading," wrote a user who calls himself ShogunMaster. "I remember seeing the two trailers and though I was excited to see the old man in action again, I was kind of worried that they seemed to be missing 'something'. That something was tension.

During the whole of the movie, there was not a single moment that I thought our hero Mr. Jones (actually Colonel Jones as he was a hero in WWII now) was in any sort of peril or even significant inconvenience. In most cases, you were so many steps ahead of the characters that it was really just an arduous wait for them to get through it."

You can read the rest of his scathing review on the Ain't it Cool News website, but be warned, there are major spoilers.

This reminds me of waiting for the first of the last three Star Wars movies: you wait for years and years for a new movie to come out and then, when it finally arrives, not only does it fail to live up to expectations, it clouds your view of the originals because it's so bad. As you probably know, George Lucas was involved with the Star Wars movies too. In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull he is executive producer. According to the UK's Telegraph newspaper, George Lucas originally wanted to call the movie "Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men From Mars". As you can imagine, Spielberg firmly rejected the idea.

Still, this is only one reviewer's opinion (and if anyone was looking for some global attention and wanted to sabotage Spielberg's efforts with this movie, what better way than to release the first negative review onto an expectant public?), so we're not going to know for sure until we get a larger sample. If a few more reviews in a similar vein appear over the coming weeks, it will be enough to dampen my enthusiasm considerably. However, I'll try to remain optimistic. Of course, most Indiana Jones fans will probably go and see the new movie regardless.

The comments are likely to annoy the film's director, Steven Spielberg, who is known to be very particular about how a movie is marketed and promoted before its release.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is due out on May 22 worldwide.

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