Indy 4: Eating Crow

Indy 4: Eating Crow

May 31

By the time I sat down in the theater to actually see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I wasn’t really expecting the worst, as I have for months. In fact, I hoped it would be pretty good, as some of the reviews had suggested.

See, try as I might, I can only hate George Lucas to a point…I still WANT to like his movies, and wish for the best every time I watch his movies, even ones I’ve seen a thousand times. And Spielberg…well, I just passionately love the guy. Even his mistakes are fascinating to me.

So maybe it was those softened feelings, and just plain wanting to love another Indy movie. Or maybe it was being in a movie theater at 9:15 in the morning on a Monday, when I’d usually be slaving away in the cube farm, plowing the fields of bullshit for nuggets of gold.

Whatever it was, I enjoyed the living HELL out of Indiana Jones 4, and I don’t care who knows it.

Am I tasting a bit of crow as I type this? Sure. I deserve it. I’ve complained for months about a new Indy flick, in the classical hyperannoying fanboy style. I’m sure the halls of Lucasfilm, and the halls of Blogdom, have echoed with the howling of my hysterical rants.

I was wrong. No, scratch that–I was right; making a fourth Indiana Jones movie was a spectacularly awful idea. Fortunately, they managed to make a good movie out of that bad idea.

Harrison Ford’s still too old to play Indy…but they roll with that, and surround him with characters who can constantly remind him of his age.

Aliens don’t really belong in an Indy flick…but then, in a world where arks and wooden cups are imbued with mystical powers, are aliens really that far-fetched?

Lucas still kinda sucks…but fortunately, there’s Spielberg to filter out his nonsense. Which means that essentially, I blame Lucas for everything I didn’t like about Indy 4, and Spielberg and Ford for everything I did like. I’m a geek! I’m not made of stone!

Let’s face it: The Indiana Jones movies are all classics, which we may debate; I know some don’t care for Temple of Doom and others found Last Crusade to be cloying. Regardless, as great as these movies are, none of them were built to hold up to repeated examination and analysis. Repeated VIEWINGS? Sure. Just like you’d ride a roller coaster all afternoon at Six Flags cause the lines are short. And they’re clever as hell–the action, the set-ups, the dialogue, all of it really sings.

But they’re still popcorn adventure movies. They were never MEANT to be held up as some kind of ideal standard of moviemaking. They were meant to be a good time…and Crystal Skull provides an exceptional time. The action is so well staged and inventive, it really stands up to Spielberg’s all-time classics, and that’s saying something. The motorcycle chase ALONE deserves status as one of Spielberg’s finest action sequences.

The dialogue is surprisingly sharp, as are the characterizations; watch the subtle shift in Indy from world-weary, laconic, rebel adventurer to uptight old man the second he learns Mutt is his son. He almost becomes Henry Jones Sr., and that’s a level of subtlety that I never expected to find.

What I expected, honestly, was Indy’s answer to the prequels–a movie that took everything good about the originals and discarded it in favor of bloated action, distracting CGI, and fart jokes.

Instead, I got another Indiana Jones movie. Color me shocked.