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Simone and I went to the Docks Drive-in last week. We got to see both Indiana Jones and Iron Man for $13 ea. The relatively low price and intimate setting was worth the lack of contrast in dark scenes (which is any scene in a cave… of which there were several… in both movies… )

Iron Man had probably the best special effects I’ve seen, but certainly not on purpose. The thunderstorm last night passed overhead just as Tony Stark was making the first Iron Man suit, and blowing stuff up. The biggest explosion at the end of the battle happened a split second after a lightning bolt struck just behind the screen. It couldn’t have been better if it were planned that way.

Other than that, Iron Man was a thoroughly average movie. There was nothing wrong with it, but only because it followed the template for making a comic book movie to the letter. What differentiated the movie from other comic book movies is the director, Jon Favereau, is a big fan of improvised dialogue, and Robert Downey Jr. is particularly talented when it comes to embracing a character and carrying it beyond the script.

Even still, I can’t see why this film got such critical acclaim. It’s good, but not great. It really doesn’t stand out from the crowd of comic book movies aside from the fact that it’s “not a bad movie”. Most films without anything beyond the standard template tend to suffer from the very constraints of the form and we get The Punisher or Daredevil (both of which have inexplicably spawned sequels).

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, on the other hand, was brilliant. Although they might have changed the title to “Henry Jones Jr. and the…”. He was called “Henry” just as much in the movie as he was called “Indy”. In any case, this is definitely a worthy successor to the series. There was a hiccup in pre-production over a script for the movie, but it has been worth the extra four-year wait to get the story/script just right. This is a phenomenal movie.

There’s a lot of suspension of disbelief required to enjoy the movie, even from the opening scenes. Anyone who doesn’t like the movie will have a lot of fodder to harp on; details like obvious stuntmen shots, likelihood that you’d survive a nuclear blast, etc. but it doesn’t take that much effort to force yourself into a place where you get carried along for the ride.

After reading the trivia page on IMDB, I’ve found that they’ve gone to great lengths to ensure that the filming style mimics the previous three, and the effort really shows. This isn’t the same Spielberg who made Minority Report and Munich. This is Jurassic-Park-and-earlier Spielberg. THIS is the moviemaking I miss in the summer.

Anyway, with no new release last weekend that I’m interested in seeing I’m now only two movies behind on my summer list, and I’m perfectly comfortable with the possibility of seeing neither Speed Racer nor Narnia until video release.