Indiana Jones and the kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Who will save us from Mayan apocalypse movies? In the countdown to 2012 when, according to the pre-Columbian Mesoamerican calendar, time will run out for the lot of us, filmmakers and conspiracy hacks are jumping on the mythological bandwagon. Even Steven Spielberg, it would seem, is not immune to the charms of Aztecs-ploitation.
Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, a gallimaufry of all kinds of cross-cultural riff-raff, works Conquistadors and pre-Mayan iconography into a film that’s already heaving under the weight of muddled allusions to the Cold War and – heaven help us – Roswell.
If you read that Harrison Ford pulled the plug on Spielberg’s plans to make Indiana Jones Vs The Little Green Men then, sad to relate, you read wrong.
This unnecessary stretch for the franchise sees Harrison Ford grab his bullwhip for a fair-to-decent Amazonian adventure. Along the way he picks up various allies, including a gibbering John Hurt, an untrustworthy Ray Winstone and Karen Allen, the nominally feisty damsel from Raiders Of The Lost Ark. But wait! Isn’t her son (Shia LaBeouf) just the right age to have been conceived during the first installment? Well, d’uh. Call that a plot twist?
In the red corner, we find evil Commies, headed up by Cate Blanchett. They, like so many cartoon villains before them, are seeking El Dorado, not for the gold but for the aliens with mind controlling powers who built it. There’s some talk of a weapon but I think I drifted off and started wondering about my laundry.
Poor old Spielberg. Always with the extra terrestrials.
This is not, as ShogunMaster crowed from the web pages of aintitcoolnews.com recently, “the Indiana movie that you were dreading.” Though it’s not nearly as good as the trilogy that went before, Crystal Skull is, undeniably, quite good fun. Spielberg takes great care to include all the Bits We Were Expecting. In lieu of snakes, we get flesh-eating red ants. Instead of the boulder sequence, we find Indy scrambling to escape a nuclear testing site.
Still, there’s nothing like the thrills and spills of old. The underground caverns are now negotiated using post-Da Vinci Code puzzles rather than brawn. Our hero is permitted a nice sit down as often as possible. If the other films were theme-park rides, this is merely a ghost train.
The biggest problems, however, are structural. Firstly, this is a transition film; a project that exists solely to allow Shia La Beouf (who is excellent throughout) to one day don that battered brown hat. It works on its own terms but only just. Secondly, Ruskies and aliens are a very poor substitute for Nazis. Like Superman, the most compelling aspect of Indiana Jones was as a Jewish revenge fantasy. Big headed space monsters simply can’t compete with the idea of an all powerful Hebrew God getting biblical on your ass.