Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

I really looked forward to seeing this film. I first saw Raiders of the Lost Ark and, like many filmgoers, I was swept away by the brilliance of its capture of the thrills of old-time movie serials and pumping them up into a Hollywood blockbuster. Over the next few years I saw the film four more times, and even regularly bought the Marvel comic book which chronicled the adventures of archaeology professor Indiana Jones.

The next two films weren't quite as magical and I saw them once and not again, so I hadn't seen an Indiana Jones film in any form for close to twenty years until yesterday, and I'm glad to report that the reunion was more than satisfactory. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, while having a title that is a few words more than necessary, is a lot of fun, and more than fits in the tetralogy that was created by George Lucas and directed by Steven Spielberg.

This one is set in 1957, and confronts head-on the fact that the actor who has inhabited Indy, Harrison Ford, is sixty-five years old. Jones and his sidekick, Mac (Ray Winstone) have been kidnapped by Russian agents who want him to help find the mummified remains of an alien from the Roswell, New Mexico incident in 1947. The head commie is smoothly played by Cate Blanchett, "Stalin's fair-haired girl," a scientist who is dabbling in parapsychological warfare. It seems that the aliens have a crystal skeleton, and the skull has all sorts of powers. As with the other Jones pictures, there's a little bit of fact mixed in with a whole lot of fantasy. There is a crystal skull in the British Museum, which Jones mentions, and they are Meso-American artifacts. As to their interstellar origins and powers, well, that is the stuff of cinema.

Jones escapes (when doesn't he?) and ends up teaming up with a kid, Mutt Williams (Shia LaBoeuf) who needs his help rescuing an old colleague who has found a crystal skull in the Amazon jungles. Jones ends up back in the clutches of Blanchett, and reunited with Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) his old flame from Raiders. There are lots of adventures to come, with perilous chases, man-eating ants, spooky Peruvian cemeteries, and spills down waterfalls. I loved it all. These pictures, after all, are essentially B-pictures on steroids, and have the goofy charm of their inspiration, whether it be serials, pulp novels, or 1950's comic books.

I especially liked how the zeitgeist of the fifties was captured. It's not so much the real fifties, but the fifties we know from pop culture. We get a fake town in the desert that is used to measure destruction from atomic tests, LaBoeuf riding on his motorcycle in a clear quote from The Wild One, and Blanchett in a very engaging performance as the villainous Soviet. It's a very cagey performance, avoiding the trap of falling into a Boris-and-Natasha "moose and squirrel" impression. I also thought Ford was having fun wearing Indy's fedora again, and thought he and LaBoeuf had terrific chemistry. I'd be fine with the both of them teaming up again for another adventure.

The ending of the picture, which some have found problems with, is a bit of a muddle. I won't give too much away, but it would seem to refer to the writing of Jacques Vallee, a ufologist who speculated that so-called alien sightings were of beings not from outer space, but from other dimensions. This all ties in together when you consider that Vallee was the basis for the character played by Francois Truffaut in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

There are some things that don't work. Winstone's role as Jones' sidekick has a subplot that stretches credulity and seems to have been added purely to move the plot. Also at times there are too many gags referring to the old films, such as a scene of about five minutes that is totally unnecessary except it works in Jones' fear of snakes. But those are minor quibbles. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was a great joy to watch. It's been over twenty-four hours since I've seen it and I'm still savoring some of the scenes.