Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Jar-Jar Binks

When I heard that George Lucas was making a new Indiana Jones film after nearly twenty years I was sufficiently jaded by the wreck he made out of the original Star Wars trilogy and the crime against film that were the prequels that I couldn't help but groan. Then I saw that Spielberg was going to direct, and I thought to myself that maybe, just maybe Lucas wouldn't sour another part of my childhood. I was so very wrong. Consider this your spoiler alert for the rest of this post/rant.

"Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" follows Lucas' recent re-imaginings in its theme that good guys should be honorable at all times, dialog isn't as important as special effects and childish plot devices, and anything mystical needs to be explained with pseudo-science that both takes the grandeur out of the story and is internally inconsistent.

The movie largely consists of vehicular chase scenes and Harrison Ford and company getting in fistfights. In fact, Lucas takes great pains to avoid the problem solving and deduction of the previous films, punctuating chase scenes and fights with "story hour with Indy" moments and having most problems solved by a raving madman who mumbles. So, not a lot of points for actual plot.

On top of the cinematographic lobotomy, Indiana Jones is hardly recognizable. I'm not talking about Harrison Ford's age, though most of his lines in the film allude to it. I'm talking about his personality, or lack thereof. Classic Indy fans will be disappointed that the wry wit is gone, replaced with alternately dry dialog and outbursts of curmudgeonly wrath. It's Indy as an old man having had everything unique beaten out of him by the intervening years, and it's not interesting. Additionally, he carries the trademark 1917 revolver and bull whip, but almost never uses either. He never fires the pistol, though he draws it a number of times, and if you've seen the previews you've seen all his whip work. He is essentially a non-lethal action hero, and while I can understand Lucas making this choice deliberately as a moral statement, it is a change from Indy's existing personality that isn't really explained, and will probably revive the "Han shot first" arguments from fans. While a move to a non-lethal stance could have been an opportunity to delve into character development it was instead glossed over, leaving fans wondering what happened to the "real" Indy.

Then we have the gratuitous special effects. I'm watching an Indiana Jones film and suddenly there's an army of CGI monkeys flying to the rescue while Indy's kid plays Tarzan? And what on earth was the point of the CGI groundhog? Did an ILM intern win a bet? I'm not even going to start with the flying refrigerator scene.

Finally, the midichlorians make a comeback here in the form of a race of inter-dimensional aliens who have been on earth for 5000 years collecting random trinkets. Let's ignore for a moment the following problems with the way this was presented in the films:

1. When the skeletons are all intact the alien can form a single living body and is insanely powerful, yet in the 1500s a small group of Spaniards took one of the skulls without getting blasted into another dimension.
2. Everybody in the film seems to know everything about the aliens immediately upon exposure.
3. If they're "archaeologists" then why do they just pile up thousands of years of historical treasures in a random room, then destroy them all as they leave?
4. Where do the natives guarding the temple eat/live? Do they just hang out in those tiny alcoves all day? They're clearly mortal, as Russian bullets take them out with trivial ease.
5. Why does the temple entrance look like it's straight out of one of the recent "Prince of Persia" titles?

So, assuming for a moment any of that made sense, we still run into one of Lucas' more obnoxious recent themes. The "force" is now just a symptom of a biological infection. The mysterious lost cultures in South America worshiped aliens. If that's where it stopped I might groan and deal, but by making the alien's presence on earth explicitly older than everything else Indy has ever dealt with, one has to wonder if the broader implication is that all of the mystical artifacts we've seen to date were in fact just tech indistinguishable from magic (with apologies to the late Arthur C. Clarke).

In conclusion, George Lucas has taken yet another of his classic franchises, stripped it of all that made it unique and engaging, and left audiences with a shell of a film that cheapens the brand. And in doing so made millions more dollars to pad his fortune. Sigh.