Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) Review

When one looks at the storyboards for unused set pieces in Indy's earlier outings one finds ninja attacks and assorted outlandish exploits that seem to detract somewhat from the "intrepid archaeologist" vibe and take the series into a more "Looney Tunes" milieu. Thank Spielberg that audiences were spared the worst excesses of imaginative writers and an unfettered George Lucas. That is... until now.

When Harrison Ford expressed an interest in doing a fourth Indy outing, Lucas mooted the idea aliens on earth. At the risk of being seen as living jokes who throw aliens into everything they do, the rest of the Indy team spent the next decade or so "searching for the right script". When this phrase rears its ugly head, one reads "trying to resist the worst excesses of an unfettered Lucas". So the movie boy wonders took a break from Indy and undertook other projects. Lucas spent a great deal of time making movies about aliens in space. Spielberg opted for aliens coming to earth and catching a cold.

Jump to the present and by throwing in ancient Mayan civilizations to add some "realism" to the UFO backdrop, and once again we see that George Lucas, plus infinite resources, adds up to an irresistible recipe for an utter lack of taste and judgment. In Indy 4, Harrison Ford reprises the jacket if not the role and is reunited with Marion Ravenwood and the child he never knew he'd fathered, Shia Le Boeuf. Spouting lines presumably once written for Danny Glover about being "too old for this", Indy watches the slightly more sprightly Mutt jump from car to car wrestling arte\ifacts from the grubby clutches of those nasty nazis. We mean Russians.

Set, as this sequel is, during the cold war the movie makes cursory references to everything important about the period from a pop culture point of view. UFOs in Roswell? Check. McCarthyism and red suspicion? Check. Nuclear testing? Check. Pantomime baddies in the shape of Cold War obsessed Russians in a technology (or archaeology) race against America? Check.

The head bad guy, this time out, is conspicuous by his absence. Cate Blanchett plays a Cruella De Ville style Russian of unspecified military background who has inexplicable and largely irrelevant psychic abilities. Her image is that of a supermodel who has been assaulted by Vidal Sassoon and forced into a boiler suit. Her motive seems to be the quest for knowledge. Arguably a more noble raison d'etre than that of Indy and his grave robbing pals. She would be a passable henchman were she doing the bidding of a larger and more malevolent evil force, but this time the head baddy feels absent, leaving Cate to fend for herself.

Indy movies often spell out their moral He-man at the movie's close. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Ursa was undone by her greed while Henry Jones and son found that the real treasure to hold onto was family. This time out, the great treasure collected by the alien civilisation and admired by Indy is knowledge, not riches. Cate Blanchett's rather disappointing fate, on the other hand, is sealed by her insatiable thirst for knowledge. Whether our kids are being told to value or fear knowledge is completely muddled by the calamitous finale.

With Lara Croft, Sahara, Uncharted, National Treasure and countless other Indy-imitators having plundered the only artefacts that Lucas and co could have feasibly used as MacGuffins, the boys were left to build their sandcastle from El Dorado. Just like Uncharted did this year. Unfortunately, having done so one cannot help but notice that Indy 4's action set pieces are considerably less exciting than the aforementioned PS3 interactive movie spectacular. Even the "jeep race at the edge of a cliff" sequence look to be lifted, in content and colour scheme, directly from the game.

Mutt jumping from car to car is part Raiders truck chase, part Short Round split between runaway mine carts and all derivative. Very few of the stunts are anything but instantly forgettable. The Indy family running down a staircase before it recedes into a rock face is eerily reminiscent of Nicholas Cage taking his family out for a fun day with a metal detector in National Treasure 2 earlier this year. Double crossing bad-guy outdone by his/her own greed? Check. Inordinate number of bugs? Check.

All of these factors would add up to cozy nostalgia were it not for the qualities that this installment is critically lacking. Namely, taste and restraint. Previous outings knew just where to draw the line in order to update the adventure serial for the modern age. This time, presumably out of a fear of being outdone by Lara-come-lately, Spielberg has reneged on his promise to keep it real and give the actors something other than bluescreen to react to and has flooded the film with Lucas' patented over reliance on weightless CGI. Result? Looney tunes.

Indy catapulted for miles by a nuclear explosion while hiding in a fridge? Looney Tunes. Man carried into ant's nest by a team of resourceful ants? Looney Tunes. UFO hidden under El Dorado takes off and jumps dimensions? Not Looney Tunes. Not particularly Indy either. Shia Le Bouef swinging on vines like Tarzan before his new band of simian pals inexplicably jump into a moving jeep with him and attack everyone who speaks Russian? Looney Tunes. Since when did the Joneses learn to get the apes onside without offering so much as a banana? Since when did Indy's research field shift from archaeology to talking to the animals? Your guess is as good as ours.

Then there's the dialogue. The venerable John Hurt babbles incoherently long enough to convince us he's bonkers and can therefore speak alien. Then when the shiznay hits the fan and there's no-one left who could possibly understand alien motivations enough to offer exposition, he spontaneously sobers up and explains the plot holes until the end of the movie. "Welcome back", quips Indy. Why have two characters when you can write one to do a U-turn when it's convenient? That's economic writing. An actor of Hurt's calibre would presumably be insulted by being offered such "dialogue" were it not for the fact that the script came packaged in a large suitcase full of twenty-dollar bills. Possibly.

In short the movie is derivative in all the areas it should've originated (namely the set-pieces) is off the wall in areas where it could've afforded to surprise the viewer less (namely the MacGuffin) and was lacking in restraint in all the areas where it could've done with some. Team Lucas has learned enough times that revisiting old ground is a sure way to please none of the people none of the time, but as he has stated in interviews, what the people profess to hate, they pay very handsomely to watch. He proudly claims that The Phantom Menace was a bigger earner than the subsequent movies in the series and as long as the cash keeps flowing in there is no impetus to stop dropping cinematic turds from the great heights of his ivory death star.

From a critic's point of view the film's flaws are proudly displayed for all to see. From a viewer's point of view, however, the Indy movies were this reviewer's favourite trilogy growing up and any opportunity to see Harrison don the hat and jacket again is a joy. The movies are not great art and there is no particularly important legacy to sully with lacklustre installments. Most people would rather see Indy appear on that silver screen and hear John Williams bombastic score burst from living room surround-sound systems by any means necessary than not at all. This movie is pretty close to what we had all been waiting for and expecting. A joyful band of friends having the time of their lives making a movie that is fun, exhilarating, nostalgic and innocent. The in-jokes, the self-references - we could watch them all day with a smile on our faces because we are so fond of the team and the mythos that it doesn't take much to feel like we are catching up with beloved friends. Roll on dozens more Indy movies Lucasberg, we'll pay to see each and every one of them.

Watch this space for Munich 2: Passover This, in which a sensitive, soul-searching Jews turn from mild-mannered intellectuals to amateurish, ass-kicking revenge mongers who go on a killing spree among ET's distant relatives after a well-liked Rabbi faces the cold, blunt, mysteriously magnetic end of a dimension-jumping anal probe. Possibly.