Ok, I know the title is Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but really, they could have just called it Indiana Jones. This was a good movie and it was fun-and there were all kinds of tips of the hat to older Lucas projects.
In the original Raiders of The Lost Ark the opening credits featured a mountain with stars around it replacing the normal Paramount mountain in the corporate logo-that trick is repeated. Followed quickly by a group of 1950s teens very reminiscent of American Graffiti-which starred a very young Harrison Ford. Old Indiana Jones mentions in passing his time with Pancho Villa-which happened in The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones. That whole chase sequence in the jungle is taken straight out of the Disney Ride. And yes, that is the warehouse in Area 51 where the Ark is safely crated up.
In short, the few original bits in Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull slip from the mind amid all the deja vu. There were plenty of times when there were too many CGIs-as will all George Lucas works since oh, 1980 or so. The villains are Russians, not Nazis-but otherwise this is the same movie we have seen three times already. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Indiana Jones has always been more grave robber than archaeologist-but it still bugs me when he rips through long lost, historically significant finds and shrugs when they disintegrate in the open air. And the solution of the mystery of the Crystal Skull is much like the solution of Lost Ark-out of sight, out of mind.
In one of the more bizarre scenes, Indiana Jones survives a nuclear blast by hiding in a refrigerator. He then stands on a small ridge that appears to be a mile or less from Ground Zero as the mushroom cloud glows above him. I know that the 1950s were all about irradiated the Earth’s atmosphere-but I am not sure Indy would have shrugged off trans-lethal doses of radiation.
It’s good and fun and I laughed a few times-but it isn’t Raiders of The Lost Ark. There are no surprises, no shocks, no worries that anything even remotely bad will happen to our heroes. Hell, bad things barely happen to the bad guys-Cate Blanchett really should have said Moose and Squirrel at least once.
Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was good, but it could have been better.
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