Silver Screen in a Red Envelope: A Diary of Time Wasted

I mentioned to a digi-friend the other day that I'd watched this film, and he said he had too, but that the twist was obvious. I get irrationally angry at people who think that that is an appropriate critique. It's a film. Of course it's obvious. What was he expecting? So I told him that if you want unexpected, your best bet is real life. And then I thought about what made me upset. I enjoyed watching the film. I actually looked up the plot on Wikipedia so I knew what to expect. I like films better when they're spoiled for me. And while I understand that lots of people are not that way at all, I wonder if, when we complain that we saw something coming, what we mean is that the film bored us so much that our minds skittered ahead to fill in the blanks. For filmmakers, the ramifications of that possibility are that their burden is to keep the viewer's mind engaged in the present: interested in what is on screen rather than trying to create suspense with emptiness.

Okay, this film has some serious drawbacks for many different kinds of fans. And the people involved in making it. It sees Henry Jones, Jr. older, facing the logical aftermath of one of his failed relationships, and allows a resolution satisfying to some of us in the aging fanbase. In that aspect, this film is well-grounded. As I am frequently a liberal buzz-kill for many a dudebro power-fantasy franchise, I liked it. I want to see more of that, and yes, Marion's character can change that much in the intervening years. I've changed more than that in the last three months. Indiana Jones is dragged into his cold-war anti-russian shenanigans by a greaser and prep-school dropout (Shia LeBeouf, whose acting I do not dislike as much as the internet tells me I should), and goes continent hopping to the nostalgic sounds of your childhood. This film tones down the "native savages as interfering goons" trope, but is still marred by the three or four scenes of it that remai