Indiana Jones

Let’s start with Indiana Jones.

I love Indiana Jones, and the two good movies are among my all-time favorites.  Then there are the other two.  I have been arguing with my roommate over which is bad and which is worse.  She’s right about a lot of things, and claims to be right about everything. But but she is wrong about NASA, in general, and probably about Nuclear Power, and she is definitely wrong about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
It’s not very good, but she claims it is worse than Temple of Doom.  Empirically this can’t be the case, because Temple of Doom had:

• An opening that consisted of a musical number
• A hysterical female “romantic interest” who had no possible interest for any man, let alone a man as cool as Indiana Jones
• An insipid twelve-year-old sidekick

She argues that Temple of Doom at least didn’t have stupid aliens who looked a bit like the ones in Close Encounters.  Which is true, but bad elements that start at the beginning of a movie outweigh bad elements that only pop to ruin the ending of a movie that actually had already ground to a halt.  So she’s wrong.

It may not be fair to look at Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as a movie.  It really isn’t.  It’s more like a Spielberg/Lucas tribute show, where they recreate scenes movies past.  We get a lot of Close Encounters, a hint of 1941, a touch of ET, and monkeys that act like Ewoks.  There’s even a shot that looks a lot like the T-Rex plowing through the jungle in Jurassic Park.  Some scenes appear more because Spielberg wanted to shoot them than because they had anything to do with the story, including a completely gratuitous take on The Day After.

Indiana Jones has always  teetered on the line between adventure and slapstick.  And when that balance holds, you get great scenes, such as the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, or the mansion scene in The Last Crusade with Indy and his father tied in chairs, and his father dropping the lighter on the rug.  But if the balance slips, and anything goes, then nothing is funny and nothing is believable any more.  That balance fell apart from the first moment of Temple of Doom.  In Crystal Skull, the balance lasts up until Indy climbs into a refrigerator.