INDIANA JONES & THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL – steven spielberg – 3.8 / 10

Though it begins with a strange prologue where a bunch of kids in a Ford roadster race a group of GIs, once The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull gets going, it’s really really good for about fifteen minutes (maybe even twenty) and threatens to actually be about something. Of course, then the plot proper kicks in and everything goes downhill from there.

I had hoped, knowing a little about this film’s backstory and the idea that Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford had rejected George Lucas’s absurd notion that the fourth Indy film should be Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men From Mars, that everyone had come to their senses and realized that Indiana Jones hunting alien relics isn’t really the Indiana Jones people wanted to see. Even after the opening sequence that involves some artifacts from the Roswell crash in 1947, I held out hope, thinking that maybe this was a sop to Lucas and the rest of the film would be about something more Indy-esque.

But alas, it was not to be. No, Indiana Jones does indeed go after an alien relic in The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Not only that, he visits a whole alien city and sees a real life alien and its spaceship. And so the whole thing comes off, to my eyes at least, as a blatant cash grab by a bunch of people that really don’t have any need of that cash. Maybe they just like the attention.

And that’s really too bad because the first twenty minutes of the film show what might have been. In those twenty minutes, there’s a whole bunch of stuff about the Red Scare that swept America in the 50's and how a man like Indiana Jones could get caught up in that. There’s a terrific sequence set in a model town moments before it’s blown apart by a nuclear weapons test. And a wonderfully ominous shot of Indy standing in front of a mushroom cloud as the world as we knew it up until then suddenly changed.

That sequence and that shot are so portentous and so loaded with ideas that it takes a really dedicated hack to squander them. And sure enough, George Lucas is up to the task. Over the next bloated hour and a half, the film is overloaded with nonsense about crystal skulls that control minds, psychic Russians, capital-C crazy academics and flesh-eating ants. And the real flaw is that there is just so much talking about nothing that there’s no way for the film to develop any kind of propulsive energy or momentum. Even Spielberg, the master of the old-school chase sequence, can only do so much when between those chases are twenty minutes of people talking about nothing that ends up mattering in any way.

I can’t really say that I’m disappointed with this film because I didn’t expect all that much going in. But the first half hour so raised my hopes that the complete failure of the last two thirds of the film stings that much more. And as the final (completely ridiculous) scene played out, I started to understand those morons on the internet who yelp about George Lucas having raped their childhood because my hopes for this film had been similarly toyed with and then brutalized. Oh well, there’s always the Shia Lebeouf starring sequel to look forward to. (And anyone who doesn’t think we’ll be seeing that film in a few years is giving Lucas and Spielberg an awful lot of credit they have continually proved they do not warrant.)