Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2* of 5 stars)
Let me start by admitting that I have a pretty bad habit of setting my expectations too high with certain movies. Especially those that I’ve been anticipating for a while. I tried pretty hard not to do that with this movie, and I think that I went into it with a pretty open mind. Nevertheless, I have some very mixed feelings about this movie.
*** WARNING!!! MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!!! ***
Overall it felt like a classic Indiana Jones movie. My wife and I just finished watching the original three movies this week, and it was nice to see that they preserved the classic feel of those movies. There was lots of action and adventure, as Indy and friends romp through jungles and ruins, as well as quite a few scenes that take place in the US. The traditional campy humor was present, as was the traditional ridiculously unrealistic escapes from near death experiences. Remember them riding the inflatable raft down from the airplane in Temple of Doom? There is a scene in this one that I’m sure the Mythbusters guys won’t waste their time on… This episode plays out like the original films, and for those of you that liked those, you will likely enjoy this movie as well.
So here is what I thought was wrong with the movie:
First off, WTF is up with the aliens? This is Indiana Jones, not the X-Files (That comes out in July) for cryin’ out loud! I was buying the concept at first. After all, every Indy movie has had some level of religious or paranormal oriented plot, but they just took it way too far. It was one thing to suggest that the ancient South American civilization was visited and influenced by aliens (AvP anyone?), and that the skull was related to those aliens. I could have handled that. But the scene with the alien skeletons merging into a living one and how it looms over the bad chick at the end made me wonder when Merrill from Signs was going to show up and hit it with a bat. Then it pretty much lost all credibility for me when the flying saucer comes crashing out of the ground and flies away… I must again offer up a serious Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!
My other complaints are minor in comparison:
- Shia LaBeouf’s character was a total Fonz wannabe. I was getting ready for him to do “the honk” during one of the scenes that he was in danger.
- They made it too obvious, and rushed the fact, that Shia’s character was Indy’s son.
- The Mac character’s “I’m good, now I’m bad, now I’m good again, just kidding I am actually bad” game was retarded.
- There was not a good enough “skin crawling” scene. The ants just didn’t cut it compared to the snakes, and bugs and rats from the first three movies. They did such a great job in the original films making the viewer thoroughly uncomfortable watching those scenes, and unless you have a major ant phobia I guess, I just didn’t sense the crowd writhing in their seats during this one.
- There wasn’t the classic romance and sexual tension that the originals had either. I’m willing to let this one slide, since Harrison Ford is pretty much a senior citizen and should probably have been using a walker to get around instead of swinging with his whip. It would have probably been creepy anyway…
- The Russians are not nearly as cool of bad guys as the Nazis were in the first and third movies, and they do a bad job justifying how a large group of KGB with thick Russian accents are somehow freely running around in the US during the height of the Cold War…
- Overall the movie just felt like a half-done patchwork of the first three movies.
So now that I’ve written this out, I’d have to say that I was officially disappointed. I’ll definitely see it again, and I’m sure that I’ll like it more the next time since I am more likely to appreciate it for what it is, rather than what it was not. With all of this said, it’s still a fun movie and worth seeing. It was just disappointing that after all of these years, they couldn’t have done a better job with this one, or I apparently didn’t do a good enough job psyching myself down for it…
