Jeff_Jewell's Blog

Like a lot of people, I stood in line this past weekend to revisit a happy chapter of my youth in the form of movie hero Indiana Jones.  I was full of reservation, since I've been burned before (ahem, Star Wars), but I thought it would be fun to see the character on the big screen again, doing what he does best.  I wondered going in if Harrison Ford would seem too old to be playing the wisecracking adventurer, but to my surprise, he appeared more than game for both the smart remarks and the physical demands of the genre.  But...

What felt old to me was the genre itself.  I was only five when Raiders came out, but when I finally saw it on t.v. a couple years later, all I could talk about for days were the melting faces.  The movie was unlike anything I'd ever seen, and it remains one of my favorites.  But today, special effects like melting faces are available to anyone with a computer, and since the premiere, we've been treated to nearly 30 years of Indiana Jones knockoffs.  The original is still great, but adventure films like this are admittedly getting a little stale.  And you know what?  The new Indy chapter is no different.  It has the air of something we've seen before, many times, and it's kind of, a little, well, boring.

It's time for a change, right?  Right?  Something fresh?  So then why is almost every big movie coming out this summer a retread?  We've got another Batman, Sex and the City (based on a t.v. show, and already getting tepid reviews), another (another!) Hulk movie (wasn't the first one DOA?), another Narnia movie (so now we've got two boring installments, and another five to look forward to, if we keep shelling out money for this stuff), Iron Man (based on a comic book, and while it's not terrible, "not terrible" is not a good enough justification for a multi-million dollar budget), and, of course, Indiana Jones. With an abundance of original ideas presented on shows like Big Love, The Wire, Lost, and The Office, I think next summer I'll just stay home and watch t.v.