May 25 2008
Indiana Jones Movie Review
Short version: 2.5 stars out of 5.
Long version: to enjoy this movie, park your brain at the door and enjoy what’s good about it. The premise is complete bosh. The bad things you have heard about the movie are true. But, I couldn’t hate the movie. There were some good things in it, but not what you would expect. The action sequences and CGI effects were with a few exceptions not so good. The human moments in the film were its highlights. I know, I know, you don’t expect that from Lucasfilm. And there were some of those moments that were creaky and didn’t work. But overall that is what to me redeems the movie from 1.5 to 2.5 stars. I don’t want to list my favorites as that would leave spoilers. Some of the acting is good. This too is uneven, though - Indiana Jones has aged believably, but he is set against a villainess who would have to go buy herself some y-coordinates to be two-dimensional.
I should say that I saw the movie with someone else who rated it a 5/5 just for the entertainment quotient, so, there you go.
Now for a long technical maunder on its cinematography. Why on earth would I care about it? Mostly because the cinematographer for this film was Janusz Kaminski, who won a richly-deserved Academy Award for being cinematographer for Schindler’s List. Now that movie was a masterpiece, helped to be that by Kaminski’s work. (Kaminski won another Oscar for Saving Private Ryan). But his work in this Indiana Jones movie was as frustratingly uneven as the rest of the movie. First, in the beginning, in the “desert,” I had heard that you can see arc lights and unmotivated hair lights, and it’s true. That’s bad.
Second, the movie is set in 1957, and it appears to me that Kaminski has chosen film and/or processing or post-processing to duplicate the look of fresh Kodachrome but just washed over with an overly warm-brown (tobacco maybe?) filter. This, plus an admirable attention to prop detail, definitely puts you back at that time… but Kaminski’s effect there is too obvious - it’s just overdone, to me.
Third, I must say, Kaminski does “dark” well - the characters often end up in this or that cave or tomb, and Kaminski manages to put enough light on them to pick them out of the murk. But, I thought, perhaps unkindly, “Let’s not think too hard about the motivation for that light there,” and “This extra lighting will help, when this goes to DVD, as too-dark films tend to go even more black on the small screen.”
High points in the cinematography: the scene at Indy’s home, when he is speaking to the other faculty member. Beautiful light in every shot - very mixed and layered lighting. That’s also true in the coffee shop when Indy talks with Mutt.
So what’s the problem here? I’m glad Kaminski is working and I hope Spielberg paid him a mint. But that kind of photographic talent applied to this movie? Not good. There were some cases in which I was thinking, “This scene is a turkey, but is sure is beautifully lit and photographed…” and even, “I wonder if Kaminski was doing this because he didn’t know any better than to over-do this, or, if he really went all-out on purpose, hoping that his exertions would be the kicker that would subtly help the audience think this scene is better than it is?”
Folks, when the audience is thinking that, it ain’t good.
