Indiana Jones v. Iron Man

In trademark law there’s a term called “tarnishment” and it is exactly what George Lucas specializes in. He destroys his own brands, and make you wonder if you were an idiot for liking them in the first place.

So why was Jones 4 such a bust? The comparison to Iron Man is a good reminder of what’s gone wrong here.  IJ 4 while entertaining, was fundamentally tired and lame. It had that Brezhnev-film feeling: line up and eat your entertainment, whether you like it or not. But maybe a few specifics can help.

1. Acting. Alot of it is just about Robert Downey Jr., who actually got to play himself to a degree we assume, while Harrison Ford was forced to play a boring-as-can-be family man who can still “rock it.” Jones 4 could have been made in the Code era.

2. Pointless action. Jones 4 had this in common with Phantom Menace and the rest of those films – a certain pointlessness and forced feeling to all the chases and action scenes. It felt like “chase” was put into the script, and someone was delegated to try and make it interesting however possible. The audience even if it likes the effects, feels the difference between a chase that actually has something at stake, and one that is just sort of an independent set piece.

4. Forced Nostalgia. Both films are based on old franchises, but in Iron Man they just throw references around in ways you might not notice, especially if you’re not a comic reader (i.e., the references to SHIELD and War Machine). Meanwhile Indiana Jones just waterboards you with the whole “remember Indiana Jones” stuff, from the fetishization of the fedora onward.

There’s something sticky and gross about forced nostalgia — it destroyed the apocryphal star wars films, and IJ 4 shared a bit much of it too.

5. Bad sets. Indiana jones looks like it wasn’t actually filmed anywhere like it was supposed to be, with the exceptions of the scenes at Yale. Lazy and kinda lame.

6. Overuse of CGI. Jones 4 had, as usual, boring CGI that makes you wish you’d stayed home and played with photoshop for a while. Iron Man had some too, but the ratio of reality to CGI was just different. Huge parts of Jones were like a video game.

In the end Jones 4 had maybe the crippling disadvantage of being the fourth; Raiders of the Lost Ark, though I haven’t seen it for a while, was better than Iron Man. But still, Lucas, frankly, makes me mad – everytime he makes a film, he manages to erase and confuse what were once fond memories.

He did have about 4 or 5 good films in him (I didn’t like American Grafitti). But I wish that after the Last Crusade he’s been banned from ever making a film again, for he’s managed to sour me on my own childhood.