You Still Can't Go Home Again--Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

      I can't pretend that I approached the new Indiana Jones movie with anything like high hopes. George Lucas's repeated, failed attempts to recapture the lightning of Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark in a bottle, coupled with Steven Spielberg's frustrating "more is more" approach to filmmaking, left me walking into the theater with nothing more than the fervent wish, "Please, please don't let this suck."
      It does not suck. But neither are you likely to leave the theater with that same feeling I had as a teenager, walking out of Raiders for the first time, thinking, "Man, I have got to see that again!" It might be wrong to let nostalgia for my early movie-going years--a time when Star Wars IV and V, Raiders, Blade Runner and Terminator burst upon my nascent cinematic sensibilities in rapid succession--color my evaluation of the new Indiana Jones, but let's face it, nostalgia is exactly what this franchise is all about. Raiders embodied Lucas's and Spielberg's nostalgia for the Saturday matinées, the serials that left the swashbuckling hero in an impossible situation each week, only to show his improbable escape into yet more trouble the next. In the 80's those kind of movies didn't exist anymore--couldn't exist anymore--except in their memories, so they re-imagined them for another generation. In much the same way, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull embodies our nostalgia for Raiders. Movies like Raiders don't exist anymore either, except as parodies of themselves (where Raiders winked, today's actioners leer), but Spielberg and Lucas are savvy enough to know that those of us who remember Raiders with the same fondness they remember the old serials are willing to give Indy a special pass.
      Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has a plot of sorts, much in the same way that porn movies do, as a vehicle to move from one action setpiece to the next. Evil Commies have replaced the evil Nazis of the previous movies (affording Ford the chance to growl, "Russians," in exactly the same disgusted tone he once growled, "Nazis"), led by the sinister, sword-wielding Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), who sports the wickedest Prince Valiant hairdo ever seen outside the funny papers. Spalko wants Indy to lead her to the MacGuffin, which this time around is a mystical crystal skull that she and the Russkies will somehow turn into the ultimate weapon in a new kind of "psychic warfare." Along the way Indy hooks up with Mutt (Shia Lebeouf), a motorcycle-riding, switchblade-wielding greaser who's looking for his missing mentor, Professor "Ox" Oxley (John Hurt), who disappeared while searching for the skull and the legendary city of gold, El Dorado. And, oh yeah, Mutt's mom turns out to be Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), Indy's spunky love interest from Raiders. And I haven't even mentioned George "Mac" McHale (Ray Winstone), who we're told is a great spy buddy of Indy's from their war days, and who may or may not be working with the Russians or the CIA, or both, or neither.
      None of this matters, of course, any more than the arrival of the pizza boy in the aforementioned porno matters; we're mentally fast-fowarding to the sex scenes action scenes. Action is something that Spielberg knows well how to orchestrate, and action is what he gives us; we get a rocket sled, a digital counter ticking down from ten, a motorcycle chase through an Ivy League campus, a swordfight across the gap between two speeding jeeps, poison darts, angry natives, voracious man-eating ants, monkeys, shout-outs to Tarzan and Marlon Brando, inter-dimensional beings, and not one, but three rides over a waterfall in an amphibious vehicle. Oh, and a thermonuclear blast. This is a partial list.
      All of this rolls along pleasantly enough--Spielberg is too skilled a craftsman ever to let the patched-together story collapse completely under the weight of all the CGI gee-whizzery. There are even a few real-live stunts with real-live stuntpeople, perhaps for old times' sake. But there's no magic here. The chemistry of Marion and Indy's love/hate relationship has been lost, replaced with loud, unfunny bickering that's so annoying, even one of their Russian captors begs them, "For God's sake, please shut the hell up!" The constant nods to icons of the franchise--the hat, the whip, the fear of snakes--simply remind us how much we prefer the original to what we're watching now. Winstone and Hurt are given almost nothing to do, and everyone else seems to be very professionally going through the motions, killing some time until they're told to go stand in front of the green screen again. I don't really blame Lucas and Spielberg for being unable to recreate the magic of Raiders in the face of so much audience nostalgia; it's an impossible task. I just wish they'd stop trying.