Raiders of the Lost Ark famously began with a match cut, transitioning from the snow capped peak of the Paramount logo to a mountain rising up above the Peruvian Jungle. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom continued the tradition, but this time the mountain was engraved on a gong in the club where Kate Capshaw’s Willie Scott performs the film’s opening musical number. In Last Crusade, it’s a dry rock towering over the Utah desert. And in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the match cut introduces us to a prairie dog as it emerges from its mound.
So when Indiana Jones returned for a fifth outing, one made for Disney, not Paramount, the mountain match cut was, like director Steven Spielberg, unfortunately unable to return. But new director James Mangold found a new way in, cutting from the rectangular shape of the Lucasfilm logo to a bomb planted in the streets outside Nuremberg Castle.
It’s not quite as cool — cutting from a rectangle to a rectangular bomb is not nearly as specific as going from a mountain to a mountain — but it’s fun to see the tradition live on. Pulling that kind of cut off requires a level of planning and forethought by the director, and it immediately communicates that the movie will have no wasted frames, which may or may not end up being true. Even the studio logo has a part to play in the story.
It’s something I’ve rarely seen done in movies, and that’s understandable to an extent. If you’re making an indie film and don’t know which studio will end up buying it, you can’t very well incorporate the shape of their logo into your storyboards. Being able to begin with a match cut is basically only for studio films.
That said, more studio films should do it! Match cuts are cool, and I am their biggest fan. My biggest frustration with Immortality, last year’s game where making match cuts was the main mechanic, was that it wasn’t match cut-y enough. I can’t get enough of these things. But if Immortality taught me anything about match cuts, it’s that incorporating them into a transition doesn’t mean completely reshaping the story in its image. The first and third Indiana Jones movies start in places where it makes sense for a mountain to be; the second just puts a mountain on a gong and starts in a club.
A Warner Bros. movie about knights could match cut from the logo shield to an actual shield, but a movie about average kids could also match cut to a virtual knight’s shield on a video game they’re playing. A Disney movie about a princess could cut from the castle to her castle, and a movie about slacker teenagers could cut to a plaster castle at the mini golf course where they work.
As an audience member, I would really appreciate it. Show us that you’re actually thinking about how we’ll see the movie. The logos can be their own, isolated thing, but they don’t have to be. Bring me that mountain.