Indiana Jones and the Cash Cow

Anybody get a chance to watch the Indiana Jones movies over Christmas?  All four were on and I purposefully missed the first three so I could sit down and watch part four again.  From the minute I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull I hated it, in fact it made me angry.  I went to see it twice in cinema, as I couldn't believe that a series of films beloved across the globe, and my personal favourite franchise, could have been so poorly concluded with the nonsense that was Crystal Skull.  On second viewing it didn’t get any better!  But, and I know there are more out there that did this, when it came out on DVD I bought it.  I have even toyed with getting it on Bluray even though none of the others are yet available.  I put in on my shelf next to my trilogy box set (one of my friends believes this to be the ultimate act of betrayal - didn’t apostles deny Jesus three times, why cant we Indiana Jones devotees deny Crystal Skull???)  Well, I'll tell you why, because it isn’t all that bad.  This viewpoint is based entirely on getting a chance to watch it again with a group of housemates on TV last night, BBC 1 to be exact.  One of the lads thought it to be the best of the four.  One of the girls thought it was great fun.  My own girlfriend didn’t see what all the fuss was about, it was Indiana Jones doing exactly what Indy does best, jump off things, fight with people and make funny faces.  It was this that made me think again, as she had a very valid point.  The first three films, Raider, Temple of Doom and Last Crusade are some of the best adventure movies ever made, full of fun and quite a lot of moments where you have to laugh out loud.  I looked at Crystal Skull again.  Okay, the bike/car chase through the college, the discovery of Orellana's grave, the Marion Ravenwood/Mary Williams revelation and the Mayan temple are all classic Indiana Jones moments, compare them to the barroom fight in Raiders, the rope bridge moment in Temple of Doom and the shared love interest of Indy and Henry snr in Last Crusade and these Crystal Skull moments really do deserve to stand shoulder to shoulder with the best of Indy's adventures.  But something is still wrong!

Now, can we blame the "Inter-dimensional beings" completely for the failings and fan boy ire?  I don’t think so.  Certainly, the greatest problem with Crystal Skull lies in the alien presence.  You see, Indy always chased things that were believable, things that were rooted in fact.  The Arc of the Covenant and the Holy Grail are both things mentioned in the Bible.  The Sankara stones are also true religious items and the fact that these three mcguffins were all real grounded the Indiana Jones adventures just enough to make them believable and exciting as viewers had a frame of reference or an identifier.  As for the Crystal Skull, George Lucas bought into something that has no real cultural significance at all, UFO's.  The Crystal Skull of the film is the most unexciting thing Indy has ever chased after so why did he use it?  This is where I think George was trying to be very clever.  It really could have worked out but unfortunately it also proves that George really is in it only for the money.  You see, with Harrison Ford now being in his late 60's, Crystal Skull couldn't be set in the 1930's or the 1940's.  To adequately explain his age, the new Indy film had to be set in the 1950's and the late 1950's at that.  Using the same theory that made the first three such storming successes, George decided to use the dominant film type of the 1950's as the inspiration for the tone, style and story of the film, namely the B-movie.  Raiders, Temple of Doom and Last Crusade were all set in the 1930's and so George Lucas used the template of the serial action adventure film for all three and golly did he really get it right.  Unfortunately the same logic he used on Crystal Skull failed miserably as he took Indiana right out of the world that he had created for him and put him into this new, sci-fi universe that made Indiana look even older and more out of date than he was.

It was painful to watch Harrison Ford do Indy exactly like he used to, just this time surrounded by CGI nonsense.  Plus, there are about three characters too many in the film.  Ray Winstone's Mac is not necessary and Jim Broadbent is completely redundant also.  Mutt is also a character that should have been jettisoned in an early draft.  Marion Ravenwood proved to be a brilliant sidekick in Raiders and if they wanted her in Crystal Skull it should have been as a sidekick and not as a sideshow.  So what makes Indy 4 fun?  Nostalgia, pure nostalgia.  People, fans, wanted Indiana Jones back on the big screen and we flocked to see it, making it one of the biggest box office hits of the year and the biggest box office success Harrison Ford has had in nearly 15 years.  It seems that money drove this film, George Lucas must have seen the return of Rambo and Rocky and John McClane as a indicator that maybe, if Indiana Jones burst back on the scene that he would turn a healthy profit.  Of course this he did but at what cost?  Has the legacy of Indiana Jones been destroyed and tarnished?  No, it hasn’t, one bad film cannot ruin the memories of three excellent ones but it certainly re-ignited the great debate of when is enough, enough.  Did we need Die Hard 4 or Lethal Weapon 4 or Terminator 3?  No, of course not, but they were made and they all made money and that ultimately governs whether a film is good or not. 
There is not one single film fan who can say, on first seeing the silhouette of Indy against the military vehicle in the opening scenes, that they did not feel more than a little excited about a new Indiana Jones film.  Unfortunately that feeling did not remain at the end and that truly says whether the film was good or not.  In fact, this film has possibly introduced a new generation to the character of Indiana Jones, children the same age that I was when I first discovered Indiana in the mid 1980’s.  I really hope it has, that kids will go out and find the first three films as, for a swan song, Crystal Skull hits a bum note.  It wasn’t a shambles of a film, it was a missed opportunity, it was a needless film but it did bring a smile to my face.  Indy was back.  I just wish it had been for the right reasons!