Tag: Karen Allen

  • Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023, James Mangold)

    Dial of Destiny opens with a very long prologue flashback to 1945, setting up Harrison Ford (a CGI-de-aged Ford) having Toby Jones as a best buddy in the forties during the war and running afoul of Nazi scientist Mads Mikkelsen. The flashback’s technically successful; de-aged Ford looks pretty good (the eyes are off, and the…

  • Starman (1984, John Carpenter)

    Starman’s first forty or so minutes speed by–director Carpenter gets as much information across as quickly as he can to discourage the viewer from paying too much attention. There aren’t exactly plot holes, but there’s a lot of silliness in the script. For example, Charles Martin Smith–who’s perfectly good in the film–has an entirely pointless…

  • Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008, Steven Spielberg)

    The biggest development, in terms of script, in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull might actually be George Lucas’s fingerprints. Between Last Crusade and this sequel, Lucas created the “Young Indiana Jones Chronicles” television series and introduced the idea of canon to the series. As an example, in Crystal Skull, Harrison Ford…

  • Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, Steven Spielberg)

    Don Siegel had an anecdote about the length of titles. He showed them to his boss, who kept asking for them to be longer, then showed them to the boss again, telling him each time he’d made the changes. In fact, he had not–his boss was simply familiar with the titles and couldn’t gauge the…

  • Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, Steven Spielberg)

    Rip-roaring, serial-inspired adventure set in the 1930s has archaeologist/adventurer/heartthrob Harrison Ford traveling the globe to keep the Nazis from getting their hands on the Lost Ark of the Covenant. Exciting, well-written (by Lawrence Kasdan), and beautifully directed by Spielberg. John Williams’s score is so important it could be top-billed. Sometimes moves a little too fast…