Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
DIRECTOR: Steven Spielberg
CAST: Harrison Ford, Kate Capshaw, Ke Huy Quan, Amrish Puri, Roshan Seth, Philip Stone
REVIEW:
Just as the near-perfect action-adventure of 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark virtually guaranteed that more installments in what became the Indiana Jones series would follow, it was also perhaps inevitable that they would fall short of its high water mark. Temple of Doom is by no means a bad movie, and parts of it are as wildly entertaining as the best Raiders had to offer, but it lacks the perfect pacing and tonal balance of the first installment, and suffers by comparison. Continue reading
Nate & Hayes (1983)
DIRECTOR: Ferdinand Fairfax
CAST: Tommy Lee Jones, Michael O’Keefe, Jenny Seagrove, Max Phipps
REVIEW:
Before the immensely lucrative Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, pirate movies were considered non-starters at the box office. 1983’s Nate & Hayes was a rare attempt at shoving one out into theaters, but sank like a stone to general critical scorn and a lackluster financial performance. While the fairly obscure film has a small but loyal cult following that regards it as an underrated swashbuckler from the days long before Captain Jack Sparrow, it’s actually exactly what the critics at the time regarded it as….a sloppy, slapdash rather feeble effort that tries and fails to muster up some good old-fashioned swashbuckling derring-do. Continue reading
Star Wars Episode VI: The Return of the Jedi (1983)
DIRECTOR: Richard Marquand
CAST: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams, Ian McDiarmid, Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, Peter Mayhew, Frank Oz (voice), Alec Guinness, David Prowse, James Earl Jones (voice)
REVIEW:
After 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back, The Return of the Jedi feels like a disappointing downgrade. The film does the job of bringing the original trilogy, the galactic civil war, and the stories of its heroes to a conclusion and give the Rebel Alliance a grand victory, but it accomplishes this in an underwhelming manner. Little of the comparative levels of darkness and thematic depth established by Empire Strikes Back is carried over here. To be sure, there are good things to be found, but it involves sifting through a mixed bag of overly kiddie-friendly goofiness that unfortunately would in hindsight be a harbinger of what was in store for the long-gestating prequels.
Continue readingStar Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
DIRECTOR: Nicholas Meyer
CAST:
William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, Walter Koenig, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, Ricardo Montalban, Kirstie Alley, Bibi Besch, Merritt Buttrick, Paul Winfield
REVIEW:
WARNING: This review discusses details of the film’s plot.
After the sluggish and pretentious special effects/philosophical showcase of the highly-anticipated but disappointingly-received Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the powers-that-be returned Star Trek to the roots that had made the original television series so popular: a focus on the characters, and ship-to-ship duels that harkened back to what creator Gene Rodenberry himself had likened to “Horatio Hornblower in space”. The result has various dated elements, but remains worthy of its place as one of the better feature films featuring the original Enterprise cast.
Continue readingInside The Third Reich (1982)
DIRECTOR: Marvin J. Chomsky
CAST:
Rutger Hauer, Blythe Danner, Sir Derek Jacobi, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ian Holm, Maria Schell, Trevor Howard, Elke Sommer, Stephen Collins, Renée Soutendijk, Randy Quaid, Robert Vaughn, Michael Gough, Maurice Roëves, Derek Newark, David Shawyer, George Murcell, Viveca Lindfors, Zoë Wanamaker
REVIEW:
Inside The Third Reich, a lengthy, critically acclaimed TV miniseries from two-time Emmy winner Marvin J. Chomsky, is a film adaptation of the same-named memoirs by Albert Speer, a bright, cultured German architect who became Adolf Hitler’s personal designer and later Minister of Armaments and War Production, ultimately spending twenty years in Spandau Prison for his use of slave labor to keep the German war effort going, during which time he ostensibly reflected on his errors in judgment and began to write his memoirs. Although forbidden to do so in prison, Speer smuggled them out through a sympathetic guard and formed them into an autobiography upon his release. As one of the few surviving individuals to have had such intimate contact with Hitler, Speer lived well off of book sales until his death shortly before its film adaptation. While many believe Speer to have downplayed his own role in the Third Reich, and criticize the miniseries for not questioning his account, its historical value is undeniable. Inside The Third Reich was filmed on a low budget over a few months of winter in Munich, which is made apparent by the presence of snow in nearly every outdoors scene throughout the miniseries. While the vast scope and detail of Speer’s writings require numerous events to be skipped over, it serves to give the viewer the basics of the workings of the Third Reich. Continue reading
Das Boot (1981)
DIRECTOR: Wolfgang Petersen
CAST: Jurgen Prochnow, Herbert Groenemeyer, Hubertus Bengsch, Martin Semmelrogge, Klaus Wennermann, Bernd Tauber, Erwin Leder
REVIEW:
Hailed as possibly the best submarine film ever made, and one of the most honest and unromanticized portrayals of war, Wolfgang Petersen’s simply-titled magnum opus Das Boot (“The Boat” in English) features only adequate special effects and few and far between action sequences, but overcomes any limitations with uniformly authentic performances, Petersen’s direction, and the haunting, sometimes stirring but more often melancholy score by Klaus Doldinger.
Continue readingIndiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
DIRECTOR: Steven Spielberg
CAST:
Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey, John Rhys-Davies, Denholm Elliott, Wolf Kähler, Anthony Higgins, Alfred Molina
REVIEW:
As a child in the 1940s, George Lucas was enthralled by the serials depicting the hero ending every week in a cliffhanger, only to make a death-defying return the next week. In 1977, fresh off his first Star Wars film, Lucas vacationed in Hawaii, where he met up with Steven Spielberg, who had likewise suddenly made a name for himself with 1975’s Jaws, and the two budding visionaries decided they needed to work together. Their first joint project became Raiders of the Lost Ark, which introduced theatergoers to the character of Indiana Jones, soon to become an iconic figure in American film, and transformed the genre of action movies. Before Indiana Jones, James Bond was the reigning model for action heroes and the films that showcased them to follow. Indiana Jones was a new kind of hero who at the same time hearkened back to the stars of the serials Lucas used as his inspiration. Unlike the debonair James Bond, Indy was a rugged, rough-and-tumble everyman (albeit an exceptionally skilled and daring one) who gets battered and bruised, wears “lived-in” clothes, and doesn’t always operate smoothly. He’s not invincible, and his narrow escapes are partly due to skill, partly due to luck, mostly due to brazen derring-do. Rarely does a film have us asking “how’s he going to get out of this?” more times than Raiders of the Lost Ark. Continue reading
Nighthawks (1981)
DIRECTOR: Bruce Malmuth
CAST: Sylvester Stallone, Billy Dee Williams, Rutger Hauer, Nigel Davenport, Lindsay Wagner, Persis Khambatta
REVIEW:
Nighthawks aims to be an edgy urban crime thriller combining the gritty, street-level action of Baretta or The French Connection with the international intrigue of The Day of the Jackal (in fact, at one point it was originally planned as The French Connection III), but is actually a rather half-baked and shallowly-plotted cops and killers yarn that squanders the underdeveloped potential of its premise.
Continue readingStar Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
DIRECTOR: Irvin Kershner
CAST: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams, Peter Mayhew, Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, Alec Guinness, Frank Oz (voice), David Prowse, James Earl Jones (voice)
REVIEW:
While 1977’s Star Wars (later rebranded as Star Wars Episode VI: A New Hope) was a surprise box office phenomenon, by the time the sequel rolled around three years later, Star Wars now already had a passionate fanbase waiting eagerly for any news of the next installment. The Empire Strikes Back was worth the wait, not only advancing the stories of the three principal characters and sending them on new adventures, but going into deeper, darker themes and interjecting one of the greatest shocking surprise twists in all of movie history. Empire defies the “middle chapter” curse. In fact, of the original trilogy, this is easily the strongest, most accomplished, and most mature motion picture.
Continue readingAlien (1979)
DIRECTOR: Ridley Scott
CAST:
Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm, Veronica Cartwright, Yaphet Kotto, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt
REVIEW:
In some ways, Alien could be seen as moving the Halloween-style slasher horror movie into outer space, but its achievement was more than that. While the best-known sci-fi at the time was the fairly lightweight Star Wars and Star Trek, with Alien Ridley Scott looked through the glass darkly. The movie is a dark experience, a slow-moving thriller that gradually and inexorably builds up the suspense until certain scenes and the climax in particular ascend to nerve-wracking tension. It’s the kind of movie that’s dark and harrowing to the extent that it’s questionable to call it conventionally “enjoyable”, but it is undeniably skillful filmmaking that shows a keen understanding of building suspense. Continue reading