Space Invader: Mission: List-possible
Sometimes ranking things is stupid!
The Tip Sheet is spinning off. Introducing Space Invaders, a newsletter about movies and pop culture that invades this space on Saturday. Arrives irregularly during this pilot phase.
At some point, culture writing became all about listicles. You’ve seen them, you’ve read them, don’t pretend that you’re better than the rest of us!
Now there is a use for lists and rankings when it comes to movies, it’s a form of curation meant to help you sift through the pile and recommend titles for your enjoyment or edification. But sometimes, listicles really are just stupid click bait.
This recent release of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and the pending release of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One have prompted a reminder of the listicle’s failure because whether its on fansites, podcasts or Film Twitter, people have lately been indulging in the pointless ranking of the previous entries in those series. Plus, it’s an exercise that’s been done to death and serves no purpose but to give you something to click on and maybe fight about.
In the case of Indiana Jones there’s a second layer of uselessness because there’s only four entries (five with Dial of Destiny, which was only released Thursday). Ranking the Indiana Jones movies is a relatively simple calculation:
*The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is at the bottom because it came out nearly 20 years after the bulk of the series. It’s also set in the 1950s, has a MacGuffin that leads to space aliens (though the film is frightened to use the word “alien”), and features the miscasting of Shia LaBeouf as Indy’s illegitimate son. The story was also a pastiche of a dozen different screenplays that none of the principles – star Harrison Ford, director Steven Spielberg, and producer George Lucas – were ever really happy with.
*The Temple of Doom takes second from the bottom because its dark and disturbing in a way that the other movies are not (so much so that its existence helped prompt the creation of the PG-13 rating). There are also some problematic depictions of Indian and Chinese people, and the British red coats are the heroic cavalry that saves the day at the end. Also, Spielberg and Lucas were both at the time going through personal and professional tumult that couldn’t not be reflected in the finished product.
*What comes first or second? Whether it’s Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Last Crusade depends entirely, in my experience, on which one was the first Indiana Jones you saw in theatres. I elevate Raiders because there’s a precision to the action sequences in terms of the execution, editing and pacing that’s never been replicated by any other film in the series, but it’s a personal taste.
There, you’ve now just read every Indiana Jones listicle ever written so far!
Ranking the Mission: Impossible movies is a little bit trickier because there are, to date, six of them, and because five very different directors have been at the helm, there’s actually some significant differences in style and delivery that creates some intellectual friction in developing a ranking. So why is ranking the Mission: Impossible movies pointless?
Invariably, two entries in the Top 3 will belong to Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, or Mission: Impossible – Fallout. These are the three most recent M:I films and are the ultimate expression of the performing ethos for 21st century Tom Cruise: breaking the green (screen) wall and doing ludicrous stunts in the real world that strain the bounds of gravity and good sense. Rogue Nation also introduced Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa Faust, a British agent who, for the first time in the series, was a believable female counterpart to Cruise’s man of action, Ethan Hunt.
That leaves the first three films, which ignores the fascinating dimensions of those movies thanks to the drastically different styles of Brian De Palma, John Woo, and J.J. Abrams respectively. What they lack in death-defying feats by the star, they make up for in atmosphere and narrative function; they’re not movies built around *that* stunt. Still, those first three movies always end up middling around the bottom of every list. On the other hand:
*The original Mission: Impossible sees De Palma try and construct a psychosexual Hitchcockian thriller inside a big Tom Cruise summer blockbuster, and he succeeds for the most part. In the background, the movie’s trying to answer the question about what a spy movie is halfway between the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror, and it luxuriates in the paranoid conundrums around spy-life where you can’t trust your mentor, your love interest, your boss, or the rogue agents you assemble to heist intelligence from CIA headquarters.
*Mission: Impossible 2 is peak John Woo, and I mean that as a compliment. Like De Palma, Woo sees the shades of Hitchcock in the Mission: Impossible DNA from the shell game between Hunt and nemesis Sean Ambrose over possession of a bioweapon, to questions of trust when you don’t know if the person you’re taking to is that person or someone else in rubber mask. There’s also a rather explicit To Catch a Thief homage in the first act as Hunt recruits, and romances, a master thief played by Thandiwe Newton. Woo also started the transformation of Hunt into a more action-oriented agent; the character never shot a gun and he barely raised his fists in the original.
*Watching Mission: Impossible III it’s clear that Abrams had just walked away from his spy series Alias, because there’s a lot of character building in this entry than in the previous two films, which makes sense when your experience involved working with a TV budget and experienced character/theatre actors like Victor Garber, Carl Lumbly and Ron Rifkin. That is how you get Philip Seymour Hoffman as the series’ most compelling villain, Owen Davian, a coldly calculating arms dealer who’s the antithesis of many Bond villains because he follows through on his threats. Putting the two Magnolia co-stars together forces Cruise to do something he’s rarely called up on to do in these movies: give a performance.
So which one’s better? I don’t think it matters. It’s busy work, and your ability to rank these films requires only that you watch this small collection of popular movies as opposed to exposing yourself to the wider world of cinema or the complete filmography of a specific actor or filmmaker.
Is it not better, or more interesting, to look at an actor and how they changed over a career in a whole variety of movies? Or perhaps look at where the Indiana Jones movies sit as an exemplar of the action/adventure genre when compared to other films across the 130-year history of cinema. That’s actually hard work, and not even Film Twitter gets excited when mentions of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or King Solomon’s Mines hits their feed.
One of the unanticipated side effects of the internet was that it made it easier to fight over stupid things. Which Indiana Jones is better, Raiders or Last Crusade? Does it matter? Does it matter that Crystal Skull isn’t as good as the other three movies? Not if you like it, and ultimately the merits (or demerits) of a film or any work of art stand on their own, both separate and apart from any other film or work of art. And should another Indiana Jones movie be made the debate will start all over again, the internet will demand that things be ranked, and the discourse should do only one thing with those less than discerning insights and relatively unremarkable click bait…
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is now in theatres everywhere, and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is in theatres everywhere on July 12.
The Bookshelf:
Past Lives
Galaxy Cinemas – Woodlawn:
Asteroid City
Carry On Jatta 3
Dora and the Lost City of Gold (Sat)
Elemental
The Flash
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
No Hard Feelings
Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken
SatyaPrem Ki Katha
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
Starting Thursday, Insidious: The Red Door; Joy Ride
Galaxy Cinemas – Clair:
Elemental
The Flash
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
No Hard Feelings
The Little Mermaid
Past Lives
Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Starting Thursday, Insidious: The Red Door
Mustang Drive-In:
The Little Mermaid
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 (Sat-Sun)
Princess Cinemas – Twin:
Asteroid City
BlackBerry
Past Lives
Princess Cinemas – Original:
Past Lives
Persian Lessons
Starting Friday, Blue Jean
Apollo Cinema:
BlackBerry (Sun, Tues)
Book Club: The Next Chapter (Sat, Mon)
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Sat, Sun, Thurs)
Tha Last Boy Scout (Sat, Wed)
The Outsiders - Director’s Cut (Wed)
Ratatouille (Sun-Mon)
SatyaPrem Ki Katha (Sat-Tues, Thurs)
Coming up on next week’s edition of End Credits, Peter Salmon co-hosts as we head out on the latest incomprehensible adventure from Wes Anderson. It’s the year 1955 and a group of junior scientists, their parents, government agents and military types plus some singing cowboys all take part in something otherworldly in Asteroid City. We will also wrap up our Indiana Jones rewatch with The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
And finally, feel free to reach out to me by email at adamadonaldson [at] gmail [dot] com, or find me on Facebook, Twitter, and, of course, GuelphPolitico.ca!