I’ve been saying all along that the only thing I really wanted from this movie was to see some old friends and find out what they’ve been up to for the last 20 years. It’s not that I had low expectations, exactly; I like to think that I had realistic expectations. I wasn’t looking for a transcendent experience, or a return to the happy days of childhood, as I was with the Star Wars prequels. I knew going into Crystal Skull that it wasn’t going to be the second coming of Raiders or even of Temple or Last Crusade; basically, I just hoped the flick wouldn’t be an embarrassing disaster.

After seeing it twice, I am happy to say that it was not a disaster. What it was, exactly, I’m still trying to figure out, so forgive me if the following is something of a ramble.

There are spoilers below the fold, so be careful if you somehow still don’t what this movie is about…

As I’m sure everyone knows by now, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull* is set in 1957, 19 years after we last encountered Our Hero, both in movie-time and in real life. The movie begins with a team of Soviet agents infiltrating a top-secret US military base somewhere in the Nevada desert. With them is a familiar archaeologist/adventurer, kidnapped from a dig in Mexico, along with his sidekick Mac. The Rooskies want Indy to help them locate a box inside a vast warehouse… a warehouse that will be instantly familiar to any fanboy worth his membership card… but no, they’re not after that box. The one they’re interested in contains something that Indy examined ten years earlier, in New Mexico. That’s right, kids, Indiana Jones was at Roswell. Looks like Uncle George managed to make a version of that long-derided Saucer Men from Mars script after all… more on that later, though. The warehouse scene plays out at a fast clip, with betrayal, turnabout, and some classic Indy-movie action that escalates to a thrilling (and funny) escape by rocket-sled before finally ending in the most ridiculous stunt ever seen in this series, a gag involving an atomic bomb and a refrigerator.

If I may interrupt the narrative for a second, I’ve got to admit that I didn’t know what to think of Crystal Skull at this point. It was pure joy to see Indy again, and Harrison Ford was playing him with exactly the right touch: his 2008 take on the role isn’t quite an old fart yet, but he’s on the cusp. He moves more slowly and cautiously, but he’s still believably tough, more self-assured than the younger man we remember and definitely more curmudgeonly, just as a world-weary guy who’s seen it all ought to be. In addition, the warehouse scene was everything I was hoping for, an excellent beginning to what promised to be a satisfying adventure… but that damn A-bomb gag was so over the top, so… lame… well, the movie could have gone either way at this point and I started steeling myself for a big disappointment.

However, the film quickly recovered from The Bomb with a nice expository scene that fills us in on what Indy’s been up to over the last two decades and what’s going on in the world of 1957, and then we’re back in the familiar territory of Dr. Jones’ Archeology 101 class (I was amused to hear that he’s still assigning Michaelson after all this time — hopefully there have been a couple of newer editions since 1936!). And then something really interesting happens: Indy gets fired after he’s accused of being a communist! Ah, I thought, now this has potential for really shaking up the usual formula and leading somewhere good… unsure of what to do next and not happy with what he sees happening in America (i.e., the McCarthyist Red Scare), Indy prepares to leave the country for Europe. But then he’s approached by a young greaser who calls himself Mutt and says a mutual acquaintance, an old friend of Indy’s, needs help. Next thing you know, we’re off on another (very well done) action/chase sequence, and then the quest begins in earnest for the mysterious titular artifact. Indy will shortly come back into conflict with the Soviets, and to a reunion with an old flame and a revelation that will change his life forever.

With the exception of the A-bomb gag, I basically loved the first two-thirds of this movie. As I already mentioned, Harrison Ford is great as an older Indy, and he has fine chemistry with Shia LaBeouf, who plays Mutt (a character and an actor I didn’t expect to like, but in the final analysis, I really do); I enjoyed all of their scenes together, and the motorcycle chase sequence through the streets of Indy’s college town (New Haven, CT, in the real world, but never specified on film) is as good as any similar sequence in the original three movies. I sat in my theater seat with a big, silly grin on my face for a good-sized chunk of Crystal Skull‘s runtime. But then something happens in the movie’s final act… it’s like it just runs out of propulsive steam. The pistons keep churning, but the pressure is dropping and the train is slowing. And ironically enough, this effect seems to begin right around the moment we Indy fans were eagerly awaiting: the reintroduction of Marion Ravenwood. It’s not Marion’s fault — it was good to see her again, and I like the interplay between her and Indy, what there is of it — and it’s certainly not the fault of actress Karen Allen, who is aging very nicely and still warms my heart with her infectious smile. But I quickly found myself frustrated at how little she really has to do, aside from a couple of key moments. By the time the core group of good guys reaches the lost city in the jungle towards the end of the film, she’s basically just standing around in the background, watching. (One of the movie’s big problems is that we have too many characters. I’ll get to that, too.)

Worse than the movie’s failure to capitalize on Marion, however, is its overall failure to generate any sense of awe when we finally reach the Temple of Akator, the “kingdom of the crystal skull.” Remember when the Ark was finally opened in Raiders, how there was that moment when the audience held its collective breath waiting to see what was going to happen? That same effect happened to one degree or another in each of the other films, too; when Indy triggers the power of the Sankara Stones or when he stands face to face with the ancient-but-still-living Grail Knight, we felt like the filmmakers were really showing us something magical. Sadly, that sense is all but missing in Crystal Skull. Here, the final moments of the movie are rushed and perfunctory, something like, “oh here we are at the lost city, okay we’ve found our way inside, and oh look! Aliens!” Some critics of the film are blaming this problem on the fact that our “treasure” this time around turns out to be extra-terrestrial, rather than something of a more traditionally spiritual nature, but I don’t think that’s the issue. Granted, I’ve long been skeptical of the “Indy meets The X-Files” concept — I’m on record here at Simple Tricks as once thinking that it would be ludicrous to introduce aliens into the Indy-verse — but in the end, I was okay with the more science-fictional approach. I now see what George Lucas was trying to do artistically in this film, and I actually kind of approve. Crystal Skull is set in the ’50s and so it mirrors the B-movie obsessions of that time, which were of course atom bombs and flying saucers, just as the earlier Indy movies mirrored the cliffhanging serials that were popular in the ’30s. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, that seems entirely appropriate to me. And really, it even makes a certain amount of sense that Indy would have been involved in Roswell; he’s known to the US government as an expert on, for lack of a better term, “weird shit,” so why wouldn’t they have called him in for a consult on some very weird shit indeed? And why wouldn’t he then encounter something to do with that mysterious weird shit a decade later, since we’ve seen in the other movies that certain themes in his life tend to repeat themselves? No, I’ve got no problem with the aliens… except the way they’re presented ultimately turns out to be anti-climatic. Maybe it’s just that the Indiana Jones formula is getting well-worn now, or maybe it’s because we viewers are so used to aliens in our movies that they no longer hold much of a “wow” factor, or maybe the filmmakers thought for some reason that they didn’t have to work very hard at generating that sense of wonder, because, you know, they’re aliens. Of course they’re going to fill you with awe. Except… they didn’t. And that’s too bad, because most of the journey there really was working so well.

I had other issues with the movie, too. I thought the primary antagonist, Comrade Dr. Irina Spalko, was badly underwritten. Cate Blanchett was obviously having fun with the character, but Irina never really rises above the level of Natasha in the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. Also, it’s established in the opening warehouse scene that she has (or at least believes herself to have) psychic abilities — again, this is in keeping with the 1950s milieu, when both the KGB and the CIA really were exploring ESP and its potential military use at the time — but nothing is done with this plot element. Similarly, the thing about Indy being accused of being a communist goes nowhere; at the end of the movie, he suddenly and quite mysteriously has been named assistant dean of the college, with no mention of how that happened. (Better to either drop that element altogether, or make it clear that Indy’s not going back to Marshall College at the end, that the firing was a permanent thing and he and Marion are off to build a new life somewhere else.)

A great many things go unexplained in this film, actually, or are murkily explained at best. At one point, Indy and Mutt fight off some warriors who are guarding a conquistador’s tomb; they are apparently meant to be an analog to the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword in Last Crusade, but we never find out anything about them, and we never see them again. They’re just cannon fodder for a fight scene. Similarly, the tribe that guards Akator remains utterly mysterious and may as well have not even been there. And why would the conquistadors have taken only one crystal skull from Akator when there are thirteen skeletons? Why are there skeletons there at all? The aliens apparently aren’t dead, or they can be resurrected, or something, so why would they just be sitting around like that? And what connection is there between the Roswell aliens and the ones at Akator? We’re meant to infer that there is a connection — Irina says there is — but no theories are offered.

And then there’s the character of Mac, Indy’s sidekick from the movie’s beginning, supposedly an old war-time buddy who changes loyalties several times throughout the film and finally loses his life through greed. To be blunt, this character is pointless. He adds nothing to the plot and is as poorly fleshed out as Irina. Really, he’s nothing more than an analog to Benny in Stephen Sommer’s version of The Mummy, and why do we need one of those in a film that’s already running long and weighed down with a large cast? (It occurs to me that The Mummy was in many ways a pastiche of Raiders, and now Crystal Skull is, in many ways, a pastiche of The Mummy. Hm. Coming full circle?) Cutting out Mac — or at least confining him to the opening warehouse scene, where he served a similar role to Satipo in Raiders (he was the guy who said “throw me the idol, I throw you the whip,” and then got impaled for his treachery) — would’ve opened up a lot more screentime for Marion.

All these negatives, aside, though, there are probably more things I liked in Crystal Skull than not. The movie contains a lot of treats for the true fans, including a glimpse of the Ark (good thing the lid didn’t get knocked off when the crate was broken open!) and visual nods to the other three movies, and even a reference to the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles TV series. (I guess this movie settles the question of whether YIJC is “canon.”) I really liked Indy reminiscing about his dad and poor old Marcus, and the looks Indy and Mutt exchange at one point during the motorcycle chase that mirror Indy and Henry at a similar moment in Last Crusade. I like Indy telling Mutt, “you don’t have to go getting sore all the time to prove how tough you are,” and “nice try, kid, but you’ve brought a knife to a gun fight,” and the general dynamic between the two of them. I like that Mutt isn’t the typical movie young person who is braver, more competent, and smarter than the older characters; he’s brave, yes, but also insecure and way out of his element, and he knows it. The running gag of his comb as a security blanket is good. I like the quicksand scene — everything about it, from Indy lecturing to Marion needing to tell him something before they die to Mutt using a big-ass snake as a rope to rescue them, and Indy refusing to grab it until Mutt and Marion agree to call it a rope. Similarly, the scene of Indy and Marion arguing in the truck until a Soviet guard is driven to distraction is pitch-perfect. I like that Marion gets to do some heroic driving for a change, and the giant ants are both nifty and icky, and very B-movie. And I like the final scene, which wasn’t quite the tearjerker it could — and maybe should — have been, but which was still satisfying for a long-time fan. Although would it have killed Lucas to give Sallah and Short Round cameos in that scene? Hell, Chewbacca made it into Revenge of the Sith! But maybe I ask too much…

In the end, I liked Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I liked it quite a bit. I didn’t love it, though. As I hoped, it was a nice visit with my old friends and that aspect of the film, at least, didn’t let me down. But it really could have been so much more. And sometimes that’s a worse disappointment than an outright misfire.

If you forced me to rank them, I’d probably place this movie as my least favorite of the Indy series — yes, I liked Temple of Doom more — but I’ll still be adding it to my DVD collection… for whatever that’s worth…

* You know, I’m generally not one to bitch about unwieldy movie titles — I’m even on record as liking the title Attack of the Clones, because I understand the cliffhanger serial tropes it derives from — but wouldn’t this one really have been better if they’d shortened it to just Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull? It’d certainly be easier to say, and it’d arguably be more in line with the other films in the series, as well as the tie-in novels, which almost all have the “Indiana Jones and the Two- or Three-word MacGuffin” construction.