Saturday, May 24, 2008

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull


2008 flick by Stephen Spielberg about...well...you know who it's about, and really you know what it's about too. In this latest installment we see Indy in the late 1950's. He's a little older and the enemy is the commies now and not the Nazis. I realize they made this decision to give them more believability with Harrison Ford's age, but the Nazi's were obsessed with archeology and finding/controlling all the major cultural and religious artifacts of history, plus they were evil as hell, so they were perfect as the nemeses of an adventurer archaeologist. The commies could have cared less about such things. Ok, enough of that, on to the movie. I'm not sure what to say about this one. It's pretty much like the others. Evil bad guys want artifact and get artifact, Indiana has to save so-and-so and also get the artifact back or save it or whatever and along the way he's bound to be involved with a girl and bound to be betrayed by someone. So, that's this one too, in a nutshell. But I can't decide if doing the new one just like the old one's makes it bad or good. I mean, it sort of made me leave the theatre thinking, so why did they even need to make another one? But then again, if they'd totally changed it, I'd probably have thought, why even call it Indiana Jones then? I mean, isn't that what pissed everyone off with the Episode I Star Wars, that it was sooooo different than the old ones? So I feel like I can't complain about it, but it also made me not love it either. You know how the plot's going to develop and you know when the one-liners are going to come and so it just lacks some of the freshness of the old one's when all that stuff was new. Plus, and here's my biggest and last complaint, when this one gets unbelievable it gets CRAZY unbelievable. I mean totally, 100%, even for an Indiana Jones movie unbelievable. For God's sake the man is tossed hundreds of feet into the air following a nuclear blast and lands on the rocky ground of the desert and survives simply b/c he got inside an empty fridge and held the door shut. Really? Seriously, Spielberg thought this would go over? These such moments are few and far between, but they were so bad that it made me not like the movie nearly as much as I would have otherwise.
So overall, don't expect suprises but do expect to be entertained and especially if you're a fan of the franchise. It's not as good as Raiders and not as bad as Temple of Doom and it's certainly worth a rental, though it may not be worth the $20 bucks you'll shill out to take a date.

S'good.

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