Indiana Jones crap rumors squashed: How Paramount conned the movie press

There seems to have been a Mamet-esque con played on the moviegoing public and critical community: that the Indiana Jones film is terrible. This is in response to what Dave Poland at Movie City News Described as one idiot at Aint It Cools News: a Paramount movie executive—who had an incentive to downplay the movie—posted an extremely negative review of the movie on the website as the first review on record. This led to feature pieces in The New York Times, USA Today and even The Onion that the movie was going to suck. Over the past 54 hours or so, however, critics have been unraveling the fact that they've been had: the movie is pretty damn good by summer blockbuster standards. I usually hate the Indy movies and Spielberg in general, but I loved it. My fellow attendee, an absolute Indy die-hard who chose the University of Chicago in part because of the movies, loved it too. I was expecting Star Wars Episode II-level crappiness. This couldn't be further from the truth, and if you look at the actual negative review, it's a vague, largely inaccurate review that doesn't say all that much.

It seems we're dealing with some rather shady, Mel Gibson-esque marketing tactics here. The executives in charge of the film, including George Lucas himself, let out a false rumor that the movie was going to be terrible, thereby lowering expectations, and making the film's quality seem like a surprise rather than a given. Four the four days leading up to the release, you'll hear nothing but rebuttals to the early negative reviews. While's its certainly a weird strategy to say you're movie sucks, it's certainly not unprecedented-Mel Gibson, after all, promoted The Passion of the Christ as "Gibson's folly" before the zeitgeist hit. I know that summer blockbusters are rare and welcome, but I can't help feeling somewhat spited by this massive-scaled con game played by the studios.

(A great summary can be found on Jim Emerson's Scanners blog)