As my friends in the back row will attest, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a movie best viewed high. Here's a film that will test survival skills. Not Indy's, yours.
The movie takes place in 1957 with Ford returning as The Man in the Hat. The old Nazi villains have given way to Cold War Russians, led by Cate Blanchett's Irina, a caricature searching for the title skull, an object which can literally blow your mind. Toss in a few stock characters — an Aussie, a young Marlon Brando from The Wild Ones, an old love interest, pictures of Sean Connery, flesh-eating ants, wild natives, and a few extra-terrestrials, and you have what Steven Spielberg and George Lucas now consider a quality summer film. Is it the age, or the mileage?
To talk of plot is to give the thing too much credit. There's really nothing here other than stunts and CGI effects strung together to form a story in only the weakest sense of the term. All the pieces are there, to be sure sure: trains, motorcycles, detonations, a love affair rekindled, a lost son reunited with a father, but we've been here before with all of this; most of it is unnecessary. I'm reminded of a line from another Spielberg movie — preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. The problem is these elements are nothing more than hollow building blocks given no life. The movie is stuffed to the brim with accents, explosions, books, dust, skeletons, rocks, water, ants, and one spinning UFO. To call it a "movie" would be a stretch. It's more like a Disneyland theme park ride.
Crystal Skull is terrible, and I say this as a huge Indiana Jones fan. Raiders of the Lost Ark is an all-time favorite movie. It set a standard and created a genre. The adventure was palpable. The characters, though exaggerated, were knowable and believable and thus likable. Indy wore down and by the end of the movie you felt his exhaustion. He didn't want to fight the bald, burly German mechanic around the plane because he was damn tired. The only thing that saved him was a timely propeller, not superhuman strength.
Article comments