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I'm wondering lately whether Spielberg's lost it. Or, at least, he's out adrift.

While some people weren't crazy about his Zeroes films, for me, he was the most exciting mainstream director working for the first half of the decade, consistently showing that he's better at shooting and cutting than anybody.

He made six movies by '05 -- but he's only released one since...

I got the feeling watching Munich that he had kind of reached the end of a certain run. Each of the decade's previous films seemed to aesthetically top what came before (give or take The Terminal), but with Munich, I felt like he was straining.

Then, there was Crystal Skull, which, even though it had its supporters, was a mess. Next up is the mo-cap Tin Tin -- a process he avoided and allowed other filmmakers exploit before him. Then, Harvey was a WTF that fell apart. Now what?

Just seems like he's accomplished everything he possibly could and is lost now. There's no fire, no consistent idea of what he wants to be doing or where he wants to take things.

Crystal Skull had supporters?? WHY?

I thought Crystal Skull was fun, but know better than to argue about that one.

I have gotten the feeling with most of Spielberg's recent movies that he's reached a level where nobody is able to say to him, "Look, your movie is just too damn long. Make it tighter." A sprawling feeling has been my single biggest issue with so many of them.

I'm curious what is next in his career. But he's bounced back before. Frankly, I think he's too used to wearing 20 different hats. Directing, producing, running a company, consulting on theme parks, Olympics, politics, etc. AND he needs to work with different people. Not Hanks, not Cruise, not Ford, not Lucas, not Janusz, not Kahn.

I oddly am a fan of The Terminal...except for like the last 30 minutes or the romance part. But the beginning is amazing, some of Hanks' physical comedy and I love the score. I think he should to that. Go small. Less effects. Less stars. Small. My favorite film of his this last decade was Catch Me if You Can. There's some great scenes in there, great score, some nice performances. Yes, also a bit long, but I think he should do more on that route.

and I also thought Crystal Skull was fun. But silly fun like The Mummy, and it had a horrible denouement and lacked a good villain.

i didnt hate crystal skull either. it was no dumber than GI Joe, Transformers, or any other popcorn film.

It suffers from being the worst of a really good series.

i bought the dvd of it for 2 dollars at a blockbuster video going out of business.

I thought he did some nice stuff in Minority Report, probably his best recent movie. Crystal Skull was sub-saturday morning cartoon crap. War of the worlds has been on tv, and while it's an entertaining movie, seeing it repeatedly really exposes Spielberg's chronic indifference to any kind of reasonable physical continuity. I'm not one of those dweebs counting bullet holes in cars or something, but it's really striking how someone constantly lauded for "editing in his head" or something produces such spatial gibberish.

I've also been disappointed by the long Spielberg break; part of what made him so exciting this decade was that crazy work ethic. Even his gaps in the nineties -- almost four years between Jurassic/Schindler's and Lost World/Amistad, and then another three years between Saving Private Ryan and A.I. -- felt like he was building up to something ambitious and interesting. Waiting almost three years for a Spielberg film, then having it be Indiana Jones, and then at least another three years or so before another turns up (right? I guess he could get something for late 2010 if he hurried up) is a little deflating for someone who thrilled to his three sci-fi movies and his three more human movies earlier in the decade. Crystal Skull was a disappointment, and I didn't even hate it. But what excited me about the movie at the outset was the prospect of aughts Spielberg, the guy who made A.I., Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can, War of the Worlds, and Munich returning to Indy. I figured at least it would be technically stunning -- and it certainly has some nice work in it, but for when it turns up in his filmography, it's awfully slapdash. And to follow that with a mo-cap action-adventure seems kinda ho-hum. At least, I was hoping he would get something with less post-production out ahead of Tintin, so it's not just three-year gaps between big adventure movies only.

"Adrift" seems about right. Harvey, Interstellar, Lincoln, Old Boy, the Chicago 7 movie all sort of drifted past him. I'd like to see him do Lincoln and Interstellar; the others don't really seem right (not least because they've been covered by other movies). But really I'd like to see him go and knock out two disparate movies the way he did with Minority/Catch Me or Worlds/Munich.

Crystal Skull hate: lamer than diabetes.

Out of the other three Indy movies, Crystal Skull comes in sixth.

Spielberg is an eternal American filmmaker and he's already paid his dues. I expect he'll surprise many in the future.

torpid, where do you find there to be spatial gibberish in War of the Worlds? One thing I love about that movie is that it's always totally clear where everything is in relation to each other.

THE RUNAWAYS teaser is up. Oh, my GOD. Poland, link that thing. MOVIE OF THE YEAR 2010. Must-see event of the year.

Re: Spielberg? I don't know, Minority Report and Munich would both make my TOP TEN for the decade... loved War of the Worlds.

Never count him out; I remember not being especially enthused by his late '80s-early '90s run (Empire, Always, Crusade, Hook) and might've idiotically undersold him then too... then look how he bounced back in the '90s.

Of course, I have NO idea what Tintin is, and Lincoln sounds Amistad-level dry... but he's still got maybe decades worth of good movies in him... he'll hit a Ridley or Altman-worthy second (or third?) wind soon enough.

Perm, so glad you asked! In the first act, when the alien is coming out of the ground, there are various shots of Cruise and others scrambling for cover as the ground shakes and splits open. These shots are intercut with shots of Cruise in tightly packed crowds circled around the opening ground. Maybe I'm missing something, but I see no physical relationship between these shots.

When they are on the Hudson ferry and the alien comes up out of the water and tips the boat over, we see some people thrown into the water from the back edge of the boat. The next shot has the family in the water. No shot has established them at the back edge of the boat, much less altogether there. Then, the family is apparently able to swim across the Hudson while everybody else lingers in the water around the boat getting picked off by the alien.

As the sun is coming up the family joins up with a large crown streaming over farmland. Now, this isn't a physical problem, but at this point it should be clear that the aliens are looking for large groups of people. It seems a little dumb to join up with a large crowd in daylight. Anyway, it develops that this crowd is quickly moving in the direction of a battle between the armed forces and the aliens! This isn't a continuity problem per se, but it makes no sense. Maybe you can fudge this and say that in some shots people are fleeing the battle, but the only way the family gets there is by following this crowd towards the battle.

After Cruise lets his son run off to the battle, a synchronized bunch of flaming humvees roll over the ridge away from the battle. It doesn't make much sense that 4-5 trucks would be rolling away from the battle, equally spaced and on fire.

I can't make heads or tails of the Tim Robbins basement. It's size and layout is totally unclear to me. By the time the aliens are strangely moving through it in numbers, the basement appears to be at minimum several thousand square feet, which doesn't fit at all with the house we saw from the outside.

That's my view. Maybe I'm way off base, but my impression is that whatever Spielberg's other abilities, his tendency for spatial discontinuity is well above average.

Perm, so glad you asked! In the first act, when the alien is coming out of the ground, there are various shots of Cruise and others scrambling for cover as the ground shakes and splits open. These shots are intercut with shots of Cruise in tightly packed crowds circled around the opening ground. Maybe I'm missing something, but I see no physical relationship between these shots.

When they are on the Hudson ferry and the alien comes up out of the water and tips the boat over, we see some people thrown into the water from the back edge of the boat. The next shot has the family in the water. No shot has established them at the back edge of the boat, much less altogether there. Then, the family is apparently able to swim across the Hudson while everybody else lingers in the water around the boat getting picked off by the alien.

As the sun is coming up the family joins up with a large crown streaming over farmland. Now, this isn't a physical problem, but at this point it should be clear that the aliens are looking for large groups of people. It seems a little dumb to join up with a large crowd in daylight. Anyway, it develops that this crowd is quickly moving in the direction of a battle between the armed forces and the aliens! This isn't a continuity problem per se, but it makes no sense. Maybe you can fudge this and say that in some shots people are fleeing the battle, but the only way the family gets there is by following this crowd towards the battle.

After Cruise lets his son run off to the battle, a synchronized bunch of flaming humvees roll over the ridge away from the battle. It doesn't make much sense that 4-5 trucks would be rolling away from the battle, equally spaced and on fire.

I can't make heads or tails of the Tim Robbins basement. It's size and layout is totally unclear to me. By the time the aliens are strangely moving through it in numbers, the basement appears to be at minimum several thousand square feet, which doesn't fit at all with the house we saw from the outside.

That's my view. Maybe I'm way off base, but my impression is that whatever Spielberg's other abilities, his tendency for spatial discontinuity is well above average.

I didn't post that twice so I don't know why that happened. Sorry!

Thanks for the answer. I think though that a lot of what you have problems with is just pretty nitpicky stuff...it's one of those things where if you're not into the movie, they'll bug you. But things like the people walking toward the battle...as I recall they're all just walking along, and then they come upon a place where the military is and the battle starts. Then most people run away while a few run toward it.

The basement is s standing set and the geography of that is made clear, especially since Spielberg constantly used long takes and tracking shots specifically to show where everyone is in relation to each other. You see an alien, and the camera will track to show where Robbins is standing, then we'll see him look over to Tom...in one shot. Perfect geography.

And that alien rising from the ground...the best part about that scene is the wide shots showing the alien rising in the foreground while Tom Cruise and everyone scurries around at the viewer's level. That's great, and that's the kind of thing no one else does enough. Show the scale. I wish that Cloverfield had been shot that way and ditched the whole found footage angle.

I love the alien coming out of the ground, then just wasting people. I liked the more hilarious parts of the movie, they bring out Spielberg's great wit which he doesn't use as much as he should sometimes. The discontinuity stuff doesn't bother me much, I just think it's interesting that a supposed master like Spielberg is, in my view, rather sloppy with space. Not all the time, but particularly in action sequences (the t-rex scene in Jurassic park being the textbook case).

I think I fixate too much sometimes on the spatial relationships in scenes and how they're filmed. But I've seen the Rex scene in Jurassic Park perhaps dozens of times and never had a problem. (Wasn't it shot along a single axis, essentially running alongside the wall of the pen?)

What am I missing?

Yeah, there is nothing wrong with the T-Rex scene at all. What's he supposed to do, shoot everything in one wide shot so you can see where everything is in relation to everything else every second?

There's no finer shot-for-shot storytelling filmmaker.

All time great scene sure, BUT: the T-Rex enclosure is roughly level with the road when the scene starts. When the T-rex pushes the truck into the enclosure, there is now a wall the truck is falling down, at least a 50 foot drop. Where did this cliff come from?

Okay, shit like THAT I'll agree with. I think Speilberg doesn't care about that sort of thing a lot of times. Like in Raiders when they're having a truck chase in the desert, and suddenly there's a million foot cliff for him to push a car off. And the next shot, they're in the flat desert again.

Ah, I see. Maybe the drop in the t-rex pen is a storytelling problem, but not really the kind of thing I thought you meant, which has more to do with shot selection/camera placement and montage (in the Eisenstein sense of the word) and how they affect the viewer's sense of where objects are within the immediate vicinity of the scene. What it sounds like you're bothered by (and Perm's example too) is more about setting, perhaps.

Not surprised we're thinking of two different things, as Spielberg is great in the sense I described above. In the realm of big-time filmmakers only Cameron comes close to comparing.

I see that the Kevin Costner flick The New Daughter is opening tomorrow in 10 cities scattered across the country. Why even bother? And how do they go about selecting the cities? According to IMDB at least one of the theaters that will play it is of the budget cinema variety.

That's kind of sad. Kevin Costner has always been a courteous professional whenever I've dealt with him, and he's a fine actor (except when he's trying to do a New Orleans accent), so I take no pleasure in his recent career lull. Hope his Sundance movie fares better.

Stella: It's called an "uplift" release. Even a token theatrical run will get you more money from pay-cable and a higher minimum number of units that Blockbuster and Wal-Mart will accept.

I like Crystal Skull too. Feel free to call me lame.

And in a world where Michael Bay and J.J. Abrams are allowed to make action movies, I don't think there's much reason to worry about Spielberg's abilities in rendering cinematic space.

I like most of Crystal Skull.

But comparing Bay and Abrams makes the rest of that post moot.

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