INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL
(a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

CAPSULE: Indiana Jones is back and looking for the secrets
of a lost civilization in Central or South America (and
the script seems not sure what the difference is). This
film is a compendium of geographic misinformation as well
as solid collection of action sequences. Rather than
being an adventure centered on religious folklore, this
time Indy is involved with aliens and New Age ideas. As
expected the thrills just keep coming, but like its hero
the action is getting a little old and little stiff.
Steven Spielberg directs. Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4) or
6/10

Spoiler warning: This review has some spoilers of minor details
in the film.

The Lost Race story, popular in the late 1800s, is not dead. Nor
is Indiana Jones, popular in the 1980s. After nineteen years in
both real time and story time, Professor Jones (Harrison Ford, of
course) has been forced into a new adventure in the world of
1957. There is no way to make this a prequel the way TEMPLE OF
DOOM was. Harrison Ford is 65 years old and looks it. Indiana
Jones still does some marvelous physical feats, but you rarely
see Indy's face when he is doing them. His stunt double is
getting lots of work. Karen Allen is back as Marion Ravenwood
and is well preserved enough to still be attractive. But many of
Indiana's stunts have been handed off to new character Mutt
Williams (played by Shia LaBeouf). Mutt is adventuresome himself
and could himself almost be called a young Indiana Jones.

At the film begins Stalinist thugs have kidnapped Indiana in the
hopes of finding a valuable thingee that has something to do with
psychic power. The Nazis have been dispatched by history so
Stalin is the power behind the new villains. It seems that
Stalin is as superstitious as Hitler was, though come to think of
it, in the world of Indiana Jones, Hitler was right to believe in
the Ark and the Grail. The chase for the valuable thingee will
take Indiana and his party once more into tombs and temples with
booby traps. One major difference is that the three previous
films are based on folklore itself based (at least nominally) on,
respectively, Judaism, Hinduism, and Christianity. This time the
inspiration is not a major religion but simply New Age thinking
and conspiracy theories. Many touches have been put into the
film to remind one both of Spielberg's and of Lucas's early
films. To say more of what touches would be a spoiler.

Indiana's chief nemesis is Irina Spalko (played by Cate
Blanchett). Spalko carries a sword and apparently sports a
Louise Brooks wig. Indiana's chief partner, in addition to Mutt
Williams, is Mac McHale (Ray Winstone), a friend of dubious
value. Along the way they pick up Ox Oxlay (John Hurt), an
archeologist whose mind has been destroyed by contact with a
crystal skull. Rounding out the group is Marion Ravenwood of the
first film who returns here. There are four major surprises in
the script, two of which are that you guessed each of the other
two at least thirty minutes before the revelations.

Some nice moments enliven the film. There is a nice eerie moment
early in the film, which on retrospect could have been taken
intact from the 1954 Mickey Rooney comedy THE ATOMIC KID.
Perhaps a little out of place for the feel of the series are the
comic shots, highly digital, showing prairie dog reaction shots
to the action. One touch may or may not have been intentional.
In the film APOCALYPTO (2006) the wife of the main character is
shown to be in a very dangerous situation and needs her husband
to rescue her. INDIANA JONES puts people in the identical
situation and shows that it is not actually dangerous at all.
Since it is not dangerous, I can see no reason Spielberg to put
his characters in this non-dangerous situation except to poke fun
at APOCALYPTO.

In general one does not see an Indiana Jones movie for its
intelligent plot or for factual accuracy. This film has some
very serious geographical errors, but in addition we see just
taken for granted some things that are simply not true. 1)
Indiana Jones assumes that gunpowder is magnetic. Gunpowder
consists of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur. It is not
magnetic. Confusing things is that later in the film some
traditionally non-magnetic substances prove to be attracted to
the super-magnets in this film, but Indiana Jones does not know
that early in the film. 2) The super-magnets attract metal
buttons, swords, and anything else that should be magnetic but
apparently not Jeeps. Jeeps would have been made of magnetic
material in 1957 as now. 3) Later in the film, stone that is
being put in place by resting it on sand in a container and then
letting the sand run out. It would not lower the stone any lower
than the height where the sand is leaking out. We see such a
stone descend further. 4) I have no idea what is the tensile
strength of a large snake, but I seriously doubt it can be used
as suggested.

Well, what are the geographic errors? David Koepp (who wrote the
screenplay) really seems to have a deep confusion about the
differences between Peru and Mexico. Peru and Mexico are about
2600 miles apart. Much of the film takes place in Peru on the
Amazon and in the mountains. That was where the Inca
civilization was, but all of the architecture we see is in the
ornate Mayan style from thousands of miles to the north. The
Incas never used this style. The native language in Peru is
Quechua, which Indiana says he learned riding with Pancho Villa.
Villa rode a long way from where Quechua is spoken. The area
where Indiana goes is referred to as "Meso-America." The most
southern part of Mexico is considered to be part of Meso-America,
but Peru is much further south in South America. We see a 1957
map that lists Belize. There was no place with that name until
June 1973. [Thanks to my wife, Evelyn, for catching many of
these errors.] I will very likely get complaints that people do
not go to an Indiana Jones film to learn geography, but if
geographic errors bother me, I have to report them.

This is very much a turn-your-mind-off sort of film with some fun
action sequences. There is nothing wrong with that. But I would
have hoped turning off the mind should not have been so
necessary. I rate INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL
SKULL a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 6/10.

Film Credits: <http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0367882/>


Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Copyright 2008 Mark R. Leeper