Word: spielbergs
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...Paramount logo dissolves into some kind of mountain. Every Indy films opens this way, from one monument to another. (As Veronica Geng wrote in a review of the first movie, "Spielberg" is German for "play mountain.") In Raiders the logo became a mountain in South America; in the second film, Temple of Doom, a bas-relief on a Chinese gong; in The Last Crusade a big boulder in Utah. This time, suggesting more modest aspirations, or maybe kiddingly deflecting the audience's gargantuan expectations, it's a weeny prairie dog hill, from which a critter emerges just before being nearly...
...effectively, as instant nostalgia - a class reunion of the old gang who in the '80s reinvigorated the classic action film with such expertise and brio. So don't expect the freshness of the what-one-man-can-do plot in Iron Man, or the oneiric visuals of Speed Racer. Spielberg and Lucas, and screenwriters David Koepp and Jeff Nathanson, are looking not forward but back, to the first three films. They know that moviegoers would be disappointed not to see the talismans of Indys past reappear here. Shall we itemize...
...beam to another. (Mutt will later show the same swinging derring-do on Peruvian jungle vines.) As for the snakes, there's just one, but indy is readier to die in quicksand than to use it as a lifeline. The nifty new predators are South American red ants, which Spielberg and Lucas may have remembered from the 1954 movie The Naked Jungle, and which can swarm over a man by the millions and drag him into their formicary for a nice fat meal...
...feel like mandatory reprises of the old tropes, but the high-speed two-vehicle fight between Indy's team and Irina's goons is up there with the Raiders jeep sequence, more complex and sophisticated in its engineering of physical action. (In the post-film press conference this afternoon, Spielberg said, "I believe in practical magic, not digital magic," and in "real stunts with real people.") If there's a scene that film students will be poring over, decades from now, this...
...Family revelations. Spielberg movies are often about the separation and reconstituting of a family, and the last two Indy films are no exception. In Last Crusade we met Indy's father (Sean Connery) and learned that Indy's real name was Henry Jones, Jr. Indeed, "Junior" was Dad's apparently derogatory form of address for his son. That gag is repeated here, since - as everyone who's paid the slightest attention to pre-release scuttlebutt knows - Mutt is Indy's son by Marion. (Why is he called Mutt? Presumably because, as we learned at the end of The Last Crusade...