Indiana Jones And The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull

I saw the new Harrison Ford movie "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of The Crystal Skull" tonight. Maybe it was last night. Maybe I didn't see it at the theatre. Maybe I saw it on a rerun of the X-Files.

Compared to the earlier Indiana Jones movies, it doesn't. Compare. At all. It's no more than a 6 on the 10 scale.

The script is some standard silliness about a missing blah blah blah that has to be reunited with the other blah blah blahs before the blah blah blah can happen. God knows I'm tired of that plot. All of this is tied together with some semi-entertaining dialogue, but the storyline feels like it was written by a committee.

The great John Hurt is in there somewhere in a beard and wild hair, muttering cryptic couplets about...who knows? Who cares? Anyone could've played that part.

It even has a self-congratulatory ending, where Indiana Jones and his bride are applauded by the congregation after their church wedding. God knows I'm tired of movies where movie extras gather around and applaud the heroes. Somehow, it's supposed to make the audience feel like they should applaud the movie.

It's set in the 50's, and Spielberg and Lucas feel obligated to show the FBI being intrusive in the name of anti-communism. One character changes sides 3 times, not for any rational reason, but to keep the plot rolling. Something was going on about magnetism and magnetic fields, but I lost interest in following it. Swords, light fixtures, and gunpowder are attracted to this magnet, but gun barrels are not.

There were some cool scenes involving jeeps and amphibian watercraft going through mountain roads in Peru. The first 15 minutes worth of action in the "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" warehouse, which turns out to be the infamous "Area 51", those are a fun 15 minutes. The videogames should be excellent.

And eventually they put the missing blah blah blah into the blah blah blah where it's belonged ever since it was stolen by blah blah blah and this causes all of the blah blah blah to start happening and the villain who wants to experience blah blah blah gets her head blown up.

I promise, you've seen it all before. For those of you who aren't 46 years old, you have no idea how much fun the first Indiana Jones movie brought to the screen. We had never seen anything like it.

You've seen this one before. Lots of times.