To be honest, I really didn’t have a bad feeling. I was waiting for this movie with baited breath just like Iron Man and how I still am with Incredible Hulk and The Dark Knight (which is my most anticipated movie of the summer of course). I sat down with a couple of friends of mine with our popcorn and soda in hand and we kicked back and relaxed for two hours. When we left the movie theatre though, the consensus was the same; the movie was okay at best. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg basically just went wild trying to film “the good ol’ days”. Instead of making a movie that the fans wanted to see, they overdid everything about Indy to try and re-establish the character for a whole new audience and that was their first mistake. For Christ’s sake, they have Indy survive a nuclear explosion in the first 20 minutes of the movie. It all just seemed a little too easy for him and easy is definately not Indiana Jones. Next, they took elements from some of their best and most famous movies and tried to incorporate them into Indiana Jones. I am sorry, but Han Solo says “I’ve got a bad feeling about this…” not Indiana Jones.
The biggest mistake they made though was the entire sci-fi element they tried to incorporate. The plot of the movie had Indy trying to find the lost city of gold, El Dorado, and that a crystal skull was the key to it. Suppossedly, whoever returns the skull to El Dorado will gain immense power. Sounds a bit like Raiders of the Lost Ark, except now you are fighting Communist Russia instead of Nazi Germany because of the time period, but I can live with that. You watch the movie, only to find out, it is an alien skull from when aliens visited the earth 5,000 years ago and they were worshipped like gods. This is where my problems begin. I might have been able to believe that aliens had visited the earth. I might have been able to believe that aliens made the crystal skull and it had fancy powers. But to go and do an entire CG alien at the end to fry the bad guy (or girl in this case) was too much. One of the things that made Raiders of the Lost Ark so good was you never really saw inside the Ark. You saw what happened to those who did though and that was good enough. I mean they had an entire UFO rise up from the ground and blast off with Indiana watching. I began wondering when the hell the TIE Fighters were going to appear. This is not Close Encounters of the Third Kind and this is most definitely not Star Wars.
I did like a lot about the movie though. The action kept you going enough that the two hours flew by. The bad girl, played by Cate Blanchett, was brilliant and she was a throwback to the original Nazi band leader from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Also, nice touch in the warehouse to show the Ark, tying up the loose end of where all the stuff Indy collected actually went. Even the storyline of Shia LeBeouf being Indy’s son worked out well. I hated the fact that they did not give him an animal phobia though. Indy hates snakes. His dad hated rats. Shia should have hated monkeys. Watch the scene where he is swinging like Tarzan (which was a horrible idea by the way for SO many reasons, I mean is Shia going to remake Tarzan next?!). How much better would that scene have been if he was afraid of monkeys? Although they did hint at a phobia of scorpions, ants, and other creepy crawlies, we’ll see if the rumors are true of him taking up the Indiana Jones mantle first before we assume his phobias. Also, did he have a steel cup on because I had never seen someone get hit in the balls so much and barely even flinch. What was up with that? Working a snake into the movie with the quicksand trap was a good idea though, even if it looked ridiculously fake. Also, if this does finish the series, it was a nice way to wrap it up with him marrying Marion Ravenwood in the end. Puts a nice little package on everything and trust me, this should be the last one because if they make another with Shia, it’s a mistake. Overall, if you are not a diehard Indy fan, wait for the DVD to rent it because it was not worth $11 at the theatre to see a Raiders of the Lost Ark throwback. I give it 3 stars out of 5.
-Ray Carsillo
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