What I've Watched: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

We all have heroes of one kind or another when growing up. A good deal of my own were pop culture based. And of course, we're talking late-70s, early-80s stuff here, so it's not like I had Michael Jordan or something profound here. And to add to that, most of them were based in TV and film, because that's what we did in the Campbell household when we weren't constantly racing off to sporting events (where the rest of our lives were spent those days). So my heroes had familiar names to many. Ferris Bueller. Ted Stryker. Ralph Hinkley. Dr. Peter Venkman. James Bond. David Addison. These are just a few. But they meant a lot at the time.

One of the other prominent ones was Indiana Jones. Good lord, my mother can watch Harrison Ford watch paint dry. She doesn't care. And when he puts on that damn hat and gives that crooked grin, she's lost for hours. So when a new Indiana Jones movie came out for the first time in who only knows when, it was a big deal. I missed it in the theaters because of travel and honest fear of what a present-day Hollywood would do to neuter one of my beloved heroes. I still remember being wholly satisfied with The Last Crusade movie because it was a fun father-son movie, it began and ended strong and to this day I still tell people whether they have chosen wisely or poorly. Great stuff, I tell ya.


Sadly they put a humongous postage stamp on this latest movie, and it shows at every turn. The characters are weak (waste of Cate Blanchett if I ever saw one, and don't get me started on the overall waste of human tissue that is Shia). The plot makes absolutely no sense. Russians want to harness the power of alien heads to plant thoughts in the minds of the world's population? What? And this all kicking around in some Amazonian jungle? What? And they found this city (hidden for hundreds of years, mind you) in about 15 seconds. Fine, I give up. Even the soundtrack wasn't strong. John Williams' iconic theme has a jazzy vibe to it and it lacks the strength it showed in all the previous films.

The witty slaptick humor and corny lines are gone. It's just a shame. Those movies are not supposed to be Bourne or Bond or anything resembling high-pack tension. What they are is a remarkably fun journey of an archaeologist and his comrades, who gets the girl and always looks good doing it. Having Karen Allen return as Marion, but she was not the feisty drunkard we loved in Raiders. Nods to Marcus Brody and Papa Indy were there, but Sallah was left behind. The oddest part (if you can rank them all ... and big spoiler alert to those who have not seen the movie yet) was showing the Ark of the Convenant in a brief wink at the beginning of the movie. Seriously? The Russians are passing up the mighty power of god (he can melt faces, after all) for some mind-numbing alien technology that no one knows even exists? Five minutes into the movie and they already lost me. What a bummer.

There is more I could say, but I'll just leave it to myself to be bummed that in bringing back a childhood hero, they left me eagerly finding the original films to cleanse my mind of what I had seen. I'll leave you with a scene that had all the makings of classic Indy, something that's never even remotely approached in the Crystal Skull.