Tell us how you really feel.

Wait -- stupider than the first really bad (episode whatever) Star Wars?

You cannot be serious.

I would rank it better than the second one but nowhere near as good as the first and third movies. Lucas and Spielberg have lost it on these kinds of movies. Lets see how many stereotypes and how much bad dialogue we can stick into a movie...

I realize you're young, but just from the period of time when you've been alive you should try on "Wing Commander" (1999) and Lost In Space (1998).

Good stupid, or just stupid? I'm actually considering driving four hours to another country just so I can see it in a theater.

(For the rest of you, see if you can guess where I am.)

When the movie was over and we were walking down the stairs towards the exit, my friend asked what I thought of the film. I said: "Fun, but I need to pick my disbelief up from where it was suspended."

I don't regret seeing it but I won't be buying the DVD. But The Village already has my slot for the stupidest movie I've ever seen.

Isn't there a kind of absolute stupid that can only matched and not surpassed? For example, the 4th Star Wars movie with Jar-Jar Binks.

Mr Klein (clucks tongue)

I thought Crystal Skull was better than Temple of Doom. And if you think it was the stupidest movie you've ever seen, I envy you.

I envy you because you have not lost hours of your life to far more stupid movies. Solar Crisis, Battlefield Earth, Wing Commander...

He survives a nuclear blast in a fridge. Obvs.

Pathetically, I was won over by the inclusion of an older-and-still-attractive female character. Nice touch.

You obviously never saw Hook.

Ezra has no sense of nostalgia (see his Superman Returns review) so I wouldn't take his word for it. I didn't think it was any "stupider" than the other ones -- they're meant to be over the top -- but it was not as much fun.

It didn't have the cringe-inducing moments of Temple Of Doom, but my main problem was that all the computer effects made it seemed more like a sequel to The Mummy.

Much of the charm of the earlier films was the primitive nature of the traps -- the giant rolling rock, unstable rope bridge, etc. They had a more authentic feel. Plus, the fact that they were physically there made it more exciting. And even today, I still find the melting faces disturbing to watch.

In this one, all the computer effects dulled the experience. Instead of barely escaping danger, it was more like he was magically protected from it all (quite literally, in one scene).

I meat "cringe-inducing" in a bad way (i.e. bad dialogue)

It's pretty stupid. Although I'd have to agree that LOST IN SPACE is stupider. I didn't like it when I saw it, but I have grown to hate it since. Maybe it's that I have friends who have said (I shit you not) "Harrison Ford is back in a big way in this film" that makes me want to kill!kill!kill!

We got in for $5 each, and I had a good time by totally ignoring the plot and enjoying the action. Although I almost got up and left at the start of the movie after the metal in gunpowder thing.

"That was the stupidest movie I've ever seen."

stupider then cabin boy?

stupider then great balls of fire?

Apparently Ezra never saw Van Helsing. Frankenstein had one of those spark globes in his head. Hugh Jackman had an arrow-based machine gun which literally fired thousands and thousands of arrows and no one even thought to explain where they came from.

And Dracula laid eggs, Alien style.

Beats a nuclear fridge even.

Come to think of it, Mannequin II: On the Move had blatant continuity problems as well.

Ah... but you paid $10.50 (or whatevs) to see it. You've already voted your approval to the studio.

Papajijo wrote: "Ezra has no sense of nostalgia..."

Dude, he's like nineteen. He gets nostalgic about the late 90's.

But I do have to say for a young man he's doing very well for himself.

;) t-i-c TWAJS and yes jk

*ahem*

Ishtar

Hook

Ecks vs. Sever

Final Fantasy (the games are phenomenal, but the movie was frankly horrible)

for that matter, Super Mario Brothers, Double Dragon, Street Fighter, or anything else based on a video game

Computers have really screwed up action films. I mean Yoda looked more like a muppet in the new Star Wars than he did in the orginal, when he was in fact a muppet.

Could you imagine how much Jaws would've sucked if you could have actually seen the shark throughout most of the movie?

When you go back and watch a pre-computer movie like Mad Max and see actual cars crashing and dudes getting run over by motorcycles you realize what you are missing in film today.

I've been suppressing this rant for a while, but apparently I've decided that now's the time:

For God's sake, what were people expecting? Did everybody mistakenly think that "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" was going to be a deep philosophical meditation on man's place in a universe ruled by an absent God? Did you think Darren Aronofsky was directing this one?

OK, surviving a nuclear explosion in a refrigerator is implausible. Let's review the oh-so-plausible Raiders of the Lost Ark (and this is just from the second half that I happened to watch a few days ago):
-Indy starts an unauthorized archaeological dig on a hilltop in the middle of a different, giant, NAZI-RUN dig. Nobody notices.
-The pit that he uncovers is filled, almost literally, with snakes, which have presumably been surviving over the last 3000 years by, I don't know, photosynthesis.
-The temple holding the Ark of the Covenant, the object of this immense archaeological dig which is being given the highest priority by Adolf Hitler himself (and of course, plenty of others over the last few millenia), turns out to have been a building that wasn't buried, had stones so loose that a single unaided man could easily wiggle them out, and was RIGHT NEXT TO THEIR AIRPORT.
-Indy and Marian destroy an entire Nazi airport. At no point does anybody in this airport radio for assistance, nor does anybody order the big guy that keeps punching Indy to stop fooling around and just shoot him.
-Indy then overtakes, on horseback, a motorized Nazi convoy, managing, on his own, to overpower them and steal the Ark of the Covenant. At no point does it occur to anyone in the convoy to simply pull over and have the platoon of armed Nazis simply machine gun him.
-A short while later, Indy hitchhikes, undetected, hundreds of miles, on a German WWII submarine, which weren't known, as I understand it, for privacy or unused space.
-All the Nazis are then destroyed in a sequence whose stop-motion animation, it seems to me, is just as jarring as any CGI in the latest movie (note the glitch where that one Nazi's glasses suddenly jump a few inches down his face).

Now, I love Raiders of the Lost Ark, and I presume most of you, and most of those calling IJ4 "stupid," also love Raiders of the Lost Ark. But if you're criticizing IJ4 on the grounds of plausibility, then I think you've simply forgotten what "Indiana Jones" means.

You've probably never seen "Eegah", then.

Stupider than mine? Serioulsy?!

WAHOOO! GIANT ROBOTS FTW!!

Wait a minute fellas, I liked Hook and Great Balls of Fire.

Now Bonfire of the Vanities and Moulin Rouge... those were bad movies.

I tried to see the new Indiana Jones and it was sold out so I saw Losing Sarah Marshall. I almost walked out of that.

Yeah, well, Harold & Kumar/Guantanamo Bay was epically stupid too, but it didn't stop me from laughing my ass off. So not all stupid equals bad.

That said, the Indiana Jones films have been big disappointments to me right from the first. Maybe it was all the hype before I saw #1, but I've never gotten what's so great about them.

But as you can see from my reaction to Messrs. Harold and Kumar, I do have a sense of humor/ability to laugh.

This week, Scotty McClellan is splitting my sides, in fact.

My criticisms with Indy 4 was that it's hit-or-miss ability to capture the energy of the previous movies, and three sequinces that just pushed my suspension of disbelief right off the edge into the laughable abyss. The refridgerator part, the vine swinging monkey part, and the duck down the giant tree, then down three waterfall part all needed to be cut completely.

Also, the story didn't really end up adding up to a whole lot either. All in all I had a lot of fun watching it, so I won't go as far as Ezra on this one. Sorry man, it wasn't anywhere nearly as bad as anything Uwe Boll has ever touched.

What did I expect?

I expected an Indiana Jones movie to be unrealistic, but to be more realistic than a Warner Bros Bugs Bunny / Wile E. Coyote cartoon.

I expected the magic / supernatural / alien stuff to be magic, but that all the humans not be ridiculously magic.

I expected that the producer and director of the movie at least spend 24 seconds thinking through "Is this good or is it really, really stupid to do this?"

But I suppose there's a philosophy out there that people who make movies which are both fantasy or sci fi or action but which expend an effort to hold my attention and to not swat me on the nose with a rolled up newspaper and say "Ha ha you were stupid you gave me money ha ha!"

Sorry -- I suppose that people who try to maintain some degree of consistency within a big budget action etc. movie are just some sort of repressive nerds and any real movie maker either insults the audience or sticks to making other types of films which are morally superior.

I guess I'm just irritated because I'm normally on the other side of this debate. I don't see many action movies (and usually don't like them when I do), ever since my sophomore year of college when my roommates forced me to sit through Armageddon and about a dozen other movies indistinguishable from Armageddon. I've never seen Temple of Doom and don't particularly plan to, and I went into this movie fully prepared to dislike it. But I didn't! Yes, it's cartoonish, but consistently so, and it sets itself up that way from the beginning (with the 50's "get that greaser" caricatures and so on). It violates the laws of physics, sure, but in a relatively consistent way. I mean, we all know that Indy and his team can't be killed, so I don't see why surviving a trip down a waterfall is more ridiculous than the traditional "enemies fire off 1000 rounds of ammunition, all of which miss" action movie motif. Or for that matter, how is it harder to survive a trip down a waterfall (people have gone over Niagara Falls without any protection, and survived) than to survive getting dragged down a dirt road behind a Nazi truck?

But the film, unlike most action films, doesn't violate the laws of logic or causality, and its characters all behave in understandable, self-consistent ways. The dialog is snappy, and the action sequences were choreographed in such a way that I always knew who was where, and what they were trying to accomplish (which is extraordinarily rare in an action movie, particularly a sci-fi film).

It's kind of pointless to discuss this, I know, because action is a lot like comedy: you're either on the same wavelength with the filmmaker, or you're not. And it's not like I don't see what people are talking about (the monkeys, in particular, were the only part of the film that even I couldn't accept). I just don't see any objections to this movie that couldn't be made with equal justice about Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I nominate "Twister" from 1996 as one of the worst movies ever (it's hard to choose just one). This was the execrable story of a bunch of losers who chase twisters around for I can't remember what reason. The not very special highlight would be seeing a cow fly through the air.

Manos, Hands of Fate.

You people don't know the repertoire. This calls for remedial MST3K.

"But if you're criticizing IJ4 on the grounds of plausibility, then I think you've simply forgotten what "Indiana Jones" means."

I think you've forgotten the difference between improbably and impossible. Because the previous indy films were pre-CGI, the stunts had to be things actual human beings could do. Sure, trying to do them in real life would get you killed or maimed 99.99999% of the time...but there was still that .00001% that aided the suspension of disbelief.

Too much of the stuff that happens in Crystal Skull is just impossible, not wildly improbable. You couldn't put a human being inside a refridgerator, launch it hundreds of feet through the air, have it smash to the ground with enough force to pulp anyone inside...and then have someone just pop out like he's stepping out of a roller coaster.

Mike

I like the belief suspended comment above.. classic.

It was fun.. was good to see ford again.. but lucas really needs to get a day job now and let someone handle these movies that doesnt just want to use every new cgi hes handed.

where the duck comes to rest before the ants.. the way it lands didnt even come close to looking real. The ants were too computerish to be frightening, and yes did look just like part of the mummy set escaped.

..and I dont remember Indy being so professorish, its like he went to harvard between temple of doom and this one.

oh well. was fun to see..

The silliness of the movie is well discussed here, and kudos to Ohioboy for pointing out its consistency and comparing it to Raiders.

Also discussed is the enjoyable fantasy, and the deep misfortune in the overuse of CGI.

So, with all this said, I can only add: let us not forget some scenes that were simply awesome -- e.g. the fire ants.

The film would have been SO much better without CGI -- which makes it all the more tragic, because this UFO story was the most fun Spielberg/Lucas had since kicking Nazi asses for stealing the most sacred object in Judaism.

Waterworld?
Plan 9 from Outer Space?

It has a long way to go to stand up to those classics.

Hey, being too young is no excuse for film nostalgia. I was too young to see the original Star Wars or Superman in the theater, but I still appreciate them.

You're all wrong. The Piano, with Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, New Age music, and a bunch of people rubbing themselves against trees, was the WORST. MOVIE. EVER.

I'm trying to figure out what it says about me that I've seen the lion's share of movies mentioned in this thread. Of the ones so far mentioned, I'd have to go with Battlefield Earth as the actual "Worst Movie". Seriously, it's worse than you have heard.

But to throw out a few stinkburgers that people have somehow forgotten, what about Hudson Hawk, North, Leonard Part 6, the American Godzilla featuring Matthew Broderick, and the complete oeuvre of Uwe Boll (I know someone already mentioned every movie based on a video game, but Boll is so bad he deserves mention twice).

Showgirls was the stupidest movie ever.

Followed by every Pauly Shore movie.

Starcrash.

When I saw it, I thought I had been suckered ... until the immortal line rang out: "Imperial Battleship, Stop the Flow of Time."

Biggest Deus Ex Machina Of All Time.

Dude - Freddy Got Fingered

Serx:

Saudi Arabia?

Battlefield Earth is so bad, I tell people they have to watch it just so they can say that they have watched the worst movie in the history of movies.

Shamefully, I too have seen msot of the movies mentioned here as being horrific.

However, I have to take extreme excpetion to criticisms of Leonard Part 6 and the films of Uwe Bolle.

These movies are undeniably terrible, but in a way that is absolutely hilarious and are thus well worth watching.

On the other hand, Battlefield Earth, Pearl Harbor, Star Wars I-III, and their numerous iterations should be shunned by all decent people.

As for George Lucas, I'm thinking he shouldn't be allowed to be involved in any movie that Lawrence Kasdan hasn't written the script for.

1998's The Avengers. The movie made me understand what it must be like to be the poor dumb bastard who walks by the monkey enclosure on the day the Plexiglas shield is being taken down for replacement and the monkeys are in a feisty mood. Only reason my (at-that-time) G/F and i stayed was because we were significantly under the influence, were the only ones in that screening and were giving that cinematic turd the MST3K treatment when we bothered to pay attention to it.

I agree. It sucked.