My Review of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull"

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a wacky if not a throwback to an older movie in the franchise. I can make some pretty good connections to this movie and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Of the three original movies of the franchise Temple of Doom was its wackiest. This movie kind of dives into that same wackiness.

It all starts off in the Nevada desert in the 1950s. It's been years since the last Indiana Jones movie. This is all perfect because this movie was released in 2008 which is 19 years after Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. As you can tell there was a lot of anticipation for this movie when it was first announced.

This movie plays upon that anticipation by playing out the first scene where Russian spies overtake a US military post. They bring out two hostages in the trunks of their cars and one of them is Indiana Jones. The reveal is nice and at the time the movie first came out, I can tell it would have got a lot of fan reaction.

We then realize Indiana is there to help these Russian spies to find a mysterious ancient artifact. Knowing Indiana he basically helps them out of his own curiosity of the old relic. We then get treated to a fun little escape scene with Indiana. It's done pretty well because you then start realizing he's not the same as he used to be.

In this movie Indiana is his same old pessimistic gruff self but he's also much older and screws up more often. He tries to do things that he used to be able to do but just falls short. Then again he used to screw up a lot in the old films as well. As a viewer we see him different because he's significantly older than before.

Indiana eventually gets back to his teaching duties and is summarily fired from his job because of his antics in Nevada. Things are looking down until a mysterious young man named Mutt comes seeking his help.

Mutt and Indiana's mutual friend Oxley had gone missing looking for an artifact. Even worse Mutt's mother is now missing as well as she went out looking for Oxley. Now it's up to Indiana and Mutt to help rescue Oxley and Mutt's mother before it's too late.

As usual the movie goes into some explanation as to how to find Oxley through a series of weird puzzles. It's standard fare for as Indiana Jones movies go. In some ways some of these puzzles now seem kind of cliché. We have repetitive solutions like the x marks the spot when Indiana looks at a higher vantage point. There are the booby trapped antiquated locations.

This time Mutt is the outsider looking into the dangers that Indiana puts himself into. He starts off as a tough greaser and then turns into a pile of cotton candy later on in the movie. It's a pretty interesting character development for him.

There are a lot of big character reveals in this movie that has a lot of throwbacks to older movies. I kind of don't like the fact that some of these characters' attitudes towards each other are so suddenly changed for no odd reason. There really is no progression to their changes, it just happens out of the blue during their conversations. It feels weird because there's no real leadup it just happens.

I also had an issue with the fact that a lot of these action sequences were a little too unrealistic. We have a lot of gun fights where bullets are flying everywhere and yet Indiana and his cohorts don't really get a scratch on them. An argument could be made that the old movies were just like this and I would tend to agree. I'm not sure why I focused on this while watching this movie than the previous movies.

This kind of leads me to go back to what I was talking about earlier. This movie is a family movie. The comparison to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom are pretty close because of the wackiness you see in this movie. We have some of the characters doing wild and crazy things that are even more extreme than the previous movies. It almost becomes a bit of a cartoon at times. I can see how these crazy antics would really appeal to kids.

Overall, I still had an okay time with this movie. The problem I had with this movie was that they exaggerated things when they didn't really need to. All the while it actually felt like a been there done that movie. The characters are as charming as ever but this was probably the weakest in the franchise. I will have to give this movie a 6.5 out of 10. It is still an enjoyable movie but I wouldn't put this movie on repeat.