Indiana Jones

Last Thursday night was going to be huge. Well, perhaps not huge but adequately large. I purchased the tickets on the night before, although truth be told, they should have been purchased days before that. That was precisely what happened with Iron Man, and perhaps because of this fumble, the Thursday night premiere of Indiana Jones was doomed.

We arrived at the theatre the pre-requisite one hour before showtime and promptly sat down. The regular movie magazine (not sure what they call it nowadays) provided little entertainment. But we kept ourselves amused, until approximately five minutes before six, the emergency lighting in the theatre flickered on and a calm fell upon the crowd. In a few moments we had normal lighting back on, and we could see the projector/computer booting (Fedora Linux, interestingly enough) and then the standard trivia track stuff running. This occured for a minute before an official arrived to tell us they were working on a power problem.

Another ten minutes go by and the same official arrives, this time with goodies, which is not a good sign. Indeed, she reported that they were experiencing brown-outs, of all things, and the movie would not go on. This is just after my friend had purchased an extraordinarily expensive bucket of popcorn that while delicious, has lost some of it's purpose and pricey justification. I feel his pain.

And it turns out to be the entire neighbourhood that was experiencing this brown as, because my house was affected too. It's such a strange thing to have happen: lights on at half power and some devices refuse to power on at all. Quite simply, not enough juice. So we went over to Cales's and watched The Last Crusade to fulfill our Indy fix. And it was glorious. It has been such along time since I've sat down to watch one of these movies that it was quite a treat, and of course it's made better as you pick up on stuff that you have long forgotten.

So it's Sunday night before we wonder over to see Indy again, this time, a last minute decision and arriving a scant ten minutes before the showing. Indeed, the experience has already been sullied.

And the movie was good; I can't go so far as saying it was great, or at the level of the other movies (at least, the first and third). It's difficult for me to draw these conclusions since it's most likely been fifteen years since I've seen the first two. The first time I saw The Last Crusade was in some giant dome in Toronto, on a screen that subtly wrapped around your entire field of vision. As a child this was heaven.

I can accept a fair bit of supernatural and unworldly elements in Indiana Jones, as it has always been present and handled properly, but the sheer amount of unbelievable moments in this movie had the effect of destroying my immersion in it. And unfortunately, I think it had quite a bit to do with the level of CGI in this movie; something we have blamed on Lucas entirely, although Spielberg has been using quite a bit of it too (although more effectively). I really don't want to see CGI monkeys and groundhogs in my movies. Especially this one. Like really.

But really, I enjoyed the characters and Harrison Ford as Indy again; with a bit more harshness in his voice than usual, and Shia, who doesn't a decent job of respecting his acting elders. The humour is good as was the length of the film, and of course, there were the action sequences. In this day of age I can appreciate just about any action scene that doesn't cut two hundred times a second, or at least to such a degree that you're imagination has to fill in for what you should be able to see but alas, cannot.

So that's that; I really enjoyed the movie and was entertained. It was not everything I had hoped it was, but really, what is? If I were to score the film, it would receive a 7.5 out of 10.