Don't read this journal if you want to avoid spoilers.



I went to the 11:00 pm feature, hoping it would be less crowded. The theater was, unfortunately, packed with high-schoolers. However, they were relatively well-behaved high-schoolers, so don't think that their presence impacted my review.

The movie opens with a prairie dog. Yeah - a CG prairie dog. George Lucas has a hard-on for CGI. It's not like real prairie dogs are hard to find, so he must have had some reason for doing this. All in all, we see the CG prairie dog three times in the opening sequence, so it must have some significance.

There's this abandoned warehouse and some Russians - and out of the car trunk tumbles our hero, Indy, looking gray and feeble and a little bit flabby. Boner killer. The worst part isn't his appearance - his lines seem forced and fake, like he's reading a cue card. None of the spontaneous bite is left. Disappointing, but I can live with it.

He's got the typical adventuring sidekick, a British dude with a god-awfully annoying accent. Within a minute he's revealed to be an impostor, and Indy gives his usual "But...we were friends" speech. Since, in the grand tradition of IJ movies, we've never seen this dude before, we don't care and can get on with oohing and ahhing over Cate Blanchett's anemically evil character, Doctor something or other, who has magical powers and looks like the love-child of the Nazi chick from Last Crusade and the Nazi guy with little round classes from Raiders.

Indy pulls some stunts, but not the ones I expected (his were much lamer - I imagined him taunting the Reds to shoot him, and the magnet pulling the bullets back in mid-air so the baddies get shot instead...would have been cooler), and escapes. The next few minutes were a blur. He ends up in a bomb-testing town, complete with plastic figurines, electricity and running water...? Would they really fill a town with that stuff if they were just going to bomb it?...anyway, he manages to survive an atomic bomb by hiding in a refrigerator and being thrown hundreds and hundreds of feet. He walks away with nary a scratch. Most Indy escape scenes seem unlikely, but that was just plain implausible.

There's about five minutes of "political intrigue" and we see a neat little role filled by that dude that plays Mr. Meade in Ugly Betty. There are some quips about McCarthyism and seeing commies in our soup, Indy gets fired from his job at the college and is chased by Reds, who, despite managing to find him in a random eatery chatting with Shia LeBeouf (a puffy-haired greaser with a switchblade - it's painfully and cutely obvious that his hair is curly), don't seem to have his home address. After a few minutes of filler dialogue, the mismatched duo head off in a plane to...where was it again? I wasn't paying attention, I was too busy groaning because they basically re-use footage from the Temple of Doom in this part. Oh yeah - Peru.

There's some Beautiful Mind shit in a Peruvian cell (larger than a my apartment - Doc Ox must have paid a premium or something), and, as usual, the mysterious letter-writing historian only left vague clues for Indy to somehow decipher. He was too addled to leave straightforward instructions, but could draw a map from memory on the floor of his cell. Whatever, this is Lucas.

Next, a freaky scene in a graveyard. What Indiana Jones movie would be complete without shrieking natives in funky masks jumping out of stuff? (Bonus - this happens twice in this movie!) Jones dispatches them with ease. Poor Shia LeBeouf - always forced to play the quaking coward. He does some great acting here with his shaking comb and funny (and probably ad-libbed) lines - "Oh, it's just a...thing." There's a serious lack of horrible traps in this movie, but they make up for it with an abundance of skeletons.

The crystal skull is pretty cool, I admit. Is it bad that I figured out what was going on the moment they showed the elongated head? Anyway, it's neat and pretty. Unfortunately my knowledge of history got in the way of my suspension of disbelief. The actual crystal skulls found on Earth have been dated to the 19th century.

Captured! At the Red camp Indy meets up with old flame Marion Ravenwood, who has aged gracefully, but still cannot act her way out of a bag of killer fire ants. Karen Allen looks bewildered to be in the film, like she's not entirely sure where she is, and her lines seem curiously unnatural. Some Clockwork Orange contraption is hooked up to the Skull and Indy is shown the secrets of the universe, wooo! Turns out the skulls are alien skulls, which is what I guessed, and an old man does some crazy stuff, and they all manage escape in a totally ungraceful way.

Indiana shows some shockingly amateur behavior, and gets himself and Marion trapped in a sand pit. He yells at the crazy Ox to go "get help." Uh, where exactly is he supposed to go? He's crazy. Plus, Shia's character ("Mutt") is already going to find a rope. In a jungle literally chock-full of vines, the only rope-like thing he can find is a snake, and there are some fratboy chuckles as poor Indy has to overcome his fear of snakes. At least they didn't say "snakes...why'd it have to be snakes" or this review would be in the form of an angry letter.

Predictably, crazy Ox is crazy, and brings the communists to "help." Shocker. What did you expect, Indy, the freakin' Red Cross? You're in Peru.

Later, in the Russian paddy wagon, it's revealed that Mutt is Indy's son, in a totally predictable twist. There's a fun argument with Marion that sort of goes weird when they start hitting on each other. I know they have a love-hate relationship but Marion seems totally off her rocker, screaming at Indy one moment and gushing over his corny one-liner the next. The annoying English guy turns out to be a double agent, and is actually on Indy's side. Huh...seems awfully suspicious.

30 minutes of awesome action later, Dr. Whatever is trying to force the good guys off the road with her Communismobile when Mutt comes swinging in on vines with a small army of monkeys to stop her. Yes...you read that correctly. I guess the monkeys were capitalists, because they beat the crap out of Blanchett. Then they all crash into a giant mound of killer ants!

This scene is freaky! It made my skin crawl. Those ants ate some dudes alive. But they're scared of the skull, so Indy got to have a cringe-worthy fistfight with a baddie in a sort of clear area, surrounded by a roiling sea of red ants. I felt that this scene was the most recognizably "Indiana Jones" scene in the movie. It had everything - horrible insect rape, suspense, violence, a bad guy getting eaten alive, horrible insect rape and a plummet off a cliff into a raging river.

The good guys go down three waterfalls, completely unhurt. Indy keeps trying to get his mack on with Marion, but is thankfully unsuccessful. Coincidentally, the gang finds themselves literally right next to to entrance to the place they were trying to get to. What luck!

Sweet, finally, a temple where unexpected and cleverly engineered traps await the adventur---oh, wait, it's just a lame receding staircase, with a couple spikes at the bottom. Excuse me for not caring. Even when Ox drops the skull, Indiana doesn't seem to care - he's too busy making googly eyes at Marion. Hello, Indy?? You used to be a chronic bachelor who never let women get in the way of doing your job. /sigh

There is a cool scene with natives, who apparently have survived for thousands of years untouched, and sneak out of things in the walls and ceiling, forcing me to wonder how the heck they got up there in the first place. They chase Indy and the gang for about 2 seconds, and then back down at the sight of the skull. Let-down. Natives used to be an actual threat. Remember Kali-maaaaaaa guy? Let's get some of that.

Without breaking a sweat, Indiana & Co get into the super-secret entrance, which has potential to be a neat Fischer Price toy (knock the blocks, empty the sand!). Once again, Indiana Jones proves that all of life's problems can be solved by hitting things with rocks.

Like I suspected from the start, the skull belongs to a decapitated crystal alien, who, despite having come from another fucking dimension still has a relatively human skeleton. The only real change is his crystal ribcage (sequel?) which has holes in it - cool, from a design point of view.

Then the English dude, who by this point is really grinding my gears, reveals that he's a triple agent.

Doctor Whatserface arrives right on cue (with the help of beeping tracking devices - didn't anyone hear the beeping? or notice the giant pill-shaped things in their pockets?) with her sunshine band and puts the head back on the alien. (Indy makes a confusing comment about not being stupid enough to do this, which is odd, considering that's the entire reason they went to the kingdom in the first place.) Turns out, the skeletons are alive. Yeah, that's right.

The Doc wants to know everything - silly commie, everyone knows that if you know everything, your eyes will explode and you'll dematerialize. Indy and the others escape in time to see the aliens leave Earth in - yeah - their saucer-shaped space ship.

Stupidest lines in the whole film: "Are the aliens going to space?" "They exist in the space between spaces." ....What the? The space between spaces? Oh, that's right, I forgot M. Night Shyamalan worked on this movie. I guarantee you that's his line.

Then there's a faux-touchy feely moment while they're watching the Kingdom get flooded to pieces in the wake of the spaceship. At this point I'm kind of in shock, but I did hear an exchange like this:

Indiana: "Why don't you stick around, Junior?"
Mutt: "Why didn't you stick around, dad?"

And they all laugh.

Uh. Am I the only one that sensed a freakin' metric ton of bitterness in that last line?

The movie ends. I almost don't want to mention this because it's so nauseating, but Indy and Marion get married, in pastel suits. At least we didn't have to suffer through any vows - no, just the kiss, which was pretty painful. Indiana looks like he's getting slammed up against a brick wall and Marion looks like she's trying to eat a Twinkie that's really far away.

All in all, it was entertaining. The action sequences were good, in some places great, and the ants scene is worth seeing. I love Shia LeBeouf's adorableness, which helps this movie out. Harrison Ford is...passable, not the Indy of old but still recognizable. Great acting from John Hurt as crazy Ox (who gets magically uncrazy at the end). And there was good cinematography, and I felt the whole "feel" of the movie was pretty good, in keeping with the series.

But Nick and I both agreed that Lucas has lost his touch. The old series had charm in part because it didn't need fancy CGI. The alien thing was weird...not bad, but it didn't seem like an IJ movie. It was more in keeping with some kind of Independence Day-esque movie with Nicholas Cage playing a street-smart cop with an estranged son and he has 24 hours to find the secret that controls the tectonic plates around China.



Also, the license plate is due on Tuesday! I'm going down to the office for four days next week so I might not be able to get online for a while. Thanks everyone for your congratulations and support. I'm thrilled to be able to do this