- Responsible Application of Nostalgia
If we assume that the setting of this film will reflect the eleven year gap between it and Crystal Skull, that means Indiana Jones 5 will be taking place in 1968: the same year Steven Spielberg released his short film Amblin’. There’s a bizarre ouroboros quality to the notion that Spielberg is making an ‘80s nostalgia film that could also very well be a ‘60s nostalgia film. And nostalgia is all well and good – after all Raiders of the Lost Ark was born out of Lucas and Spielberg’s nostalgia for the old adventure serials of the 1930s – but it’s a quality that should be handled with care.
Go too far one way and you’ve just done a cover band version of something we’ve already seen, but go too far the other way and it becomes unidentifiable. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull weirdly has both of these problems. It simultaneously trades too heavily in nostalgia to while also feeling stylistically and aesthetically alien (pardon the pun). Indy and Marion’s lovers’ spat in the quicksand felt like bad fan fiction, while the flying saucer finale essentially ceased to be Indiana Jones.
If you want to see the Platonic ideal of this balance, look no further than Creed. Creed is an astounding feat of filmmaking because it takes the basic, familiar framework of Rocky, but makes every single structural callback ring with an entirely new meaning. Yeah, Adonis, like Rocky, is just some rookie fighter who gets a shot at the championship because of his name, but what that means to each character and how they are motivated by these similar situations are as different as night and day. Creed feels like a Rocky movie, but not like one we’ve ever seen before, and not only did it bring one of the most beloved characters in film history back in spectacular fashion, but it also managed to tell a brand new, deeply personal story in the process.
That’s a high target to shoot for, but that’s exactly where Spielberg needs to aim.
