Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
US 2008

Persepolis
France 2007

HAVING recently participated in the 2008 Edinburgh Marathon 21 years after my first and hitherto only one (in New York), I know what it is like to compete against my younger self. This is Harrison Ford’s challenge in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, donning fedora and bullwhip as the titular archaeologist and adventurer for the first time since 1989’s Last Crusade. I can tell him: “It’s not the years but the mileage.”Ford’s Indy does not have to look for ancient artefacts any more, he can count the grey hairs on his head and this is the first Indy film where he looks better after he has been roughed up in a fight than clean shaven in his civvies.

Director Steven Spielberg, executive producer George Lucas and star Ford have been trying to come up with a good script for years, although the previous three films have all been hidebound by the same formula. Archaeologist races against time to prevent bad guys from taking control of a religious objet d’art with supernatural powers. The template is essentially the same here. There are No Sankara stones or Holy Grail although the Ark of the Covenant has a cameo.)

Set in 1957, it replaces Nazis with Russians and features “Stalin’s favourite scientist” Dr Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) running around with Soviet goons on American soil at the supposed height of the Cold War. She is after the titular Crystal Skull for the purposes of mind control. Indy gets a young sidekick, Mutt Williams (Shia Labeouf), a biker in Marlon Brando Wild One leathers. He is also gets an older foil George McHale (Ray Winstone), with whom he worked in the Second World War.

Indy’s outfit is now anachronistic. It is surreal to see him running round a suburban kitchen trying to find protection from an atom bomb in a nuclear test facility. The screenwriters – Lucas, Jeff Nathanson and David Koepp– have eschewed the obvious launching point of Indy being brought out of retirement, to imagine that he has been globe-trotting and artefact-chasing ad infinitum. This does not give the film a bed of credibility against which the action can take place and the computer-generated enhancement of the action sequences does not help to suspend disbelief either. The Indy franchise needed a re-boot. What we get is a homage, with riffs and references to Raiders of the Lost Ark, as well as other movies in the Lucas-Spielberg back catalogue.

There are two enjoyable moments: the opening shot that spoofs Raiders and an inspired re-introduction of Indy’s fear of snakes. The rest of the film lacks exhilaration.

When Iranian expatriate Marjane Satrapi turned her life story into a series of graphic novels, now filmed as the mostly black-and-white animated feature Persepolis, she both gained and lost something. What she gained was comic exaggeration to make a point: an old lady treading grapes in the bath as she helps to produce illegal wine, praying for forgiveness all the while. What she lost is a sense of place, specifically how people lived.

Beginning in the late 1970s and climaxing in the early 1990s, Persepolis takes in both Iran’s Islamic revolution and the war with Iraq, with young Marjane initially thinking of herself as the next prophet, then finding a real hero. She idolises an uncle who carved swans out of bread whilst incarcerated.

The incident-packed film depicts Marjane’s flight to Austria, where she boards first with nuns then an eccentric old lady, who later accuses her of stealing a brooch. It covers her return to Iran, where life is no less easy; she learns that marital unhappiness is relative.

Marjane buys an illicit Iron Maiden tape and wears a jacket emblazoned with “Punk’s not Ded”. She learns some (occasionally tough) life lessons: her boyfriend cheats on her; it is not a good idea to get a man arrested just because he looks at you strangely. She also has a strong moral backbone. ‘”How can you believe in nothing when bombs are falling?” she asks a self-styled nihilist.

Marjane comes from an educated middle-class background but Persepolis infuriates because we have no sense of how her parents make their living or how they survived regime change. The film adopts Marjane’s present tense view throughout. Still, Persepolis is consistently entertaining and goes to places that family-friendly animated flicks fail to reach. The narrative arc has Marjane accepting her Iranian origins rather than trying to disguise them. You want Satrapi to show that Iran could not possibly be part of any sort of ‘axis of evil”, but her film has no such ambition, leaving the Western view intact.

Patrick Mulcahy