Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

While Munich may have been Steven Spielberg's most controversial film from a political perspective, but Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull kicked up a surprising amount of controversy among the fans of the series, with some hating the film so much they claimed it had, "raped their childhood." Does the film deserve such extreme hatred? I personally don't think so and I consider myself as big an Indiana Jones fan as anyone.

The film announces it's now jumped ahead time periods to 1957 with a fun blast of Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog" as we center on a group of hot rod driving teenagers coming across a military convoy. After a quick race between the hot rod and the lead Military vehicle, the convoy turns off to a secluded Military base in the middle of the Nevada desert. It turns out the convoy is a group of covert Soviet operatives led by Irinia Spalko (played by Cate Blanchett). Stashed into the trunk of one of the cars, she has Indiana Jones (played by Harrison Ford), along with his pal Mac (played by Ray Winstone). She needs Indy's help in locating a specific crate in a large warehouse on the base (that should look very familiar to fans of the series). The crate they are looking for contains very specific remains from a crash site in New Mexico in the late 1940s that Indy helped examine. Begrudgingly, Indy helps them find the crate but makes his escape to a nuclear bomb test site. After narrowly avoiding being vaporized, Indy is able to get back to civilization only to find himself accused of being a communist and finds his teaching job in peril. He is found by a young man, Mutt Williams (played by Shia Lebeouf), who says he was sent to find him by his mother and a Dr. Harold Oxley (played by John Hurt), a former colleague of Indiana's. In the letter Mutt gives to Indy, it includes a coded message from Oxley revealing the first clue to the recovery of a Crystal Skull located in the jungles of South America, the item that  the Soviets were looking for. This begins a new adventure for Indiana Jones and his new sidekick that will take him all the way to an ancient lost city and face to face with former flame Marion Ravenwood (played by Karen Allen).

A fourth Indiana Jones film had been rumored off an on starting in the early nineties but kept getting put off until a suitable script could be found. George Lucas came up with the idea of the object everyone is after being the mysterious Crystal Skulls. The thought process behind this was that much like the original three films were an homage to the 30's adventure serials, with the time jump to the 1950's, the new entry should reflect the B-movies of that era. Multiple screenplays were commissioned over the years with mixed success. David Koepp ultimately combined ideas from the various scripts by the likes of Jeph Stewart, Frank Darabont and Jeff Nathanson that worked the best to craft the final shooting script. The film kicks this off with an homage to George Lucas' love of street racing and hot rod cars in his youth, complete with the driver decked out in Lucas's trademark button down flannel shirt and a sequence that echoes the boy scouts opening of the previous film that was an homage to Spielberg's time in the Scouts. From there, the film builds a pretty straight-forward Indiana Jones film with the same big, ridiculous action sequences we've seen before, including a car chase in the warehouse with a fun Easter Egg for the fans, to a fun chase through the campus of Indy's college campus and all the other sorts of shenanigans I have always loved about these movies. The film does a decent job of recapturing the spirit of the original three films for the most part. There is something that is a bit off about this one and I think that really comes down the the distance between this film and the one prior. Spielberg had grown and matured as a filmmaker between the two films and his style had evolved with it. So, naturally this one was going to feel different no matter how hard they tried to recapture the spirit of the first three films. The biggest thing that developed between the previous film and this one was CGI, which this film uses far more of that it should have. It's not even great CGI at that, which makes it really distracting. 

I will admit that the movie has some flaws to it that perhaps caused some people to be disappointed, but I still don't see anything that merits the furor the film received over the past ten years. The performances are good, with Harrison Ford slipping back effortlessly into the role of Indiana Jones. Karen Allen is a joy to have back as my favorite of Indy's girls (even if the other two weren't a screeching nightmare and the other was, well, dead). Cate Blanchett made an intriguing and unique villain. There is still a lot to enjoy with the movie. I didn't even mind the inclusion of the Alien, er, Inter-dimensional beings plotline. Yes, the action sequences were over the top but then again they always were in this series! Why does Indy, Willie and Short Round jumping out of a plane in an inflating yellow dinghy get a pass but something just a ridiculous as surviving a nuclear explosion in a refrigerator get treated like it's the destruction of all that's holy? So much so that it coins a term that points to the moment when a film series gets too ridiculous for it's own good? Now, that's not to say there are not cringeworthy moments in the film and unfortunately they both center on Shia LaBeouf's Mutt Williams. Did we really need to see Mutt swinging through the jungle on vines like Tarzan? No, we did not. Nor did we need the sequence of him straddling between two racing jeeps while getting repeatedly hit in the crotch with local plant life. But, aside from that I don't see anything worthy of such intense hatred, surely nothing that that deserved the use of a phrase such as "raped my childhood." Good god, people, lighten up.  

I still remember when this film came out on Memorial Day weekend in 2008. I actually took that Friday off and went to go see it at the theater in Lakeville, MN on the MonsterScreen they have down there as it is one of the biggest screens in the state. I genuinely enjoyed the film. Yes, there were things I could nitpick over and what not. But at the same time, when they pulled Indy out of that trunk again at the beginning of the film and he put the fedora in again for the first time in 19 years as that familiar John Williams theme came up, I couldn't help but tear up a little. So, that has to mean something. Or maybe I just prefer to focus on the abundance of positives rather than focus on the few negatives.