Entertaiment

I was prepared to be disappointed, going into Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.  I’d been hearing from people that it just wasn’t as good as the other films.  Oh well, thought I.  I’ve already seen Prince Caspian and there’s nothing else remotely interesting in the theaters.

In fact, we made sure our fourteen-year-old was prepared to see it, having family-room showings of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

That’s right, we completely skipped the repulsive second movie, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.  What was the point?

We all loved seeing Raiders again – this is where it all began, after all.  And we also agreed that Last Crusade was a better movie.  Having a family and a past made Indiana Jones a better character.

The script was better than Raiders‘, too.  Raiders ends with Indy and Marion tied up and hiding their faces from the actual climax.  Not as satisfying as the way Indy and his father are actively involved throughout the climax of Last Crusade.

But … Temple of Doom proved that Spielberg doesn’t understand his own formula.  I bet he still doesn’t know why it wasn’t as good – maybe he doesn’t even know how bad it was!  So I feared that, because of the lukewarm responses of my friends, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was as bad as its title.

Because that title does suck, doesn’t it?  Why did we need “kingdom” in the title?  I’m sure there was some kind of focus group.  But it’s a title that forces most of us to call it “the new Indiana Jones movie” because the title doesn’t mean anything to us.

It isn’t the title that caused the problems, though.

In fact, at first glance, I didn’t see any problems.  I had a great time in this movie.  I bought the whole thing from beginning to end.  If you had met me coming out of the theater and asked me how it was, I would have given you a thumbs-up and said, “It was great.”

But some of the people I was with were more skeptical.  One of them noticed that Karen Allen would be wet in one scene, and a moment later she was dry again, with her clothes nicely pressed.  Meanwhile, the male characters stayed mussed up and wet.

I suspect that was a deliberate choice by Spielberg, a reflection of the way they made grand adventure movies back in the good old days.  But we civilians don’t care about historical references like that.  Films have gotten better and smarter since then, and we expect the Indiana Jones movies to reflect the things we’ve learned since those “good old days.”  If we want history lessons, we can just get the original old movies on DVD.

However, I didn’t notice such problems.  That’s because I was more caught up in the story and the characters than some of my friends were.

It’s a law of audience-watching.  You know you have a boring or unbelievable or incoherent spot in a play or movie when the audience starts coughing or talking.

Not because boring, unbelievable, or unclear scenes cause you to cough or chat.  It’s because when you’re totally caught up in the story, you don’t notice that you need to cough, and you don’t think of making comments to the person next to you.  You just keep your eyes to the front, your jaw slack, and let the story take over your mind.

This movie has a terrific cast and they all do well.  It’s obvious that Shia LaBeouf is being groomed to take the Indiana Jones series into the next generation, and I think he’s a great choice.  He has the quality for it, the insouciance, the earnestness, the wit, the ability to seem dangerous.

And I loved the fact that this movie brings Karen Allen back to reprise her role as Marion Ravenwood, Indy’s love interest in Raiders.  She’s still a terrific actress for the role, and, more important, it ties up a loose end in the story.  Because, as my daughter pointed out after watching Raiders and Last Crusade, it was a real disappointment that the two of them hadn’t stayed together.

Raiders was a great love story; none of the other “love interest” (i.e., sex partner) characters came close to matching what we had in Raiders.  So resolving that loose end is one of the good things about Crystal Skull.

Do you want to know why I think some people are disappointed in this movie?

The two best movies, Raiders and Last Crusade, both deal with Judeo-Christian elements.  Remember when Sean Connery slaps Harrison Ford’s face for taking the name of Christ in vain?  There was an element of faith, an affirmation of the Western religious tradition.

It resonates in the minds and hearts of a lot of the public.  At the end of Raiders and again at the end of Last Crusade, the wrath of God is striking down the enemies of righteousness.  Made-up idolatrous gods just didn’t do it for us westerners in Temple of Doom.  And it was not satisfying to see the second movie show that the idol was just as powerful as the God of Moses and Christ.

Now we have something even more outrageous than idolatry – we have science fiction.  On one level, it’s perfectly all right – in fact, this movie makes a terrific sci-fi adventure story.

But on another level, I was offended when, just in passing, we see the Ark of the Covenant from the first movie turn up in this one.  It isn’t even important; it seems to have lost all its power during its years in storage.  It’s nothing.

Belief in the God of Abraham is part of what made western society what it is – and it’s one of the best parts.  It’s the moral brake and the source of meaning for our civilization.  It doesn’t always work, but when it doesn’t, we wish it had.

It’s disturbing to believers in that God to have extravagant sci-fi coexist with – indeed, trump – that religion.

Another problem, admittedly slight, is that, being set in the 1950s, the bad guys can’t be Nazis anymore.  In the 1950s, the group that was brutally enslaving people was the Communists.

Naturally, having Commies as bad guys was really disturbing to the politically correct liberals making the movie.  So they made a really big point of showing how the anti-Communists got Indiana Jones fired from his university job.

I’d like to know how many tenured professors were fired during that era?  Remember that the blacklist of Communists in Hollywood targeted people who actually had been Communists; their defense was not that they hadn’t been Communists, but that the government had no right to question them about it.

And this was an era when our own spy service was hopelessly incompetent because the Communists had deeply penetrated British and American spy operations everywhere.  Treason and espionage really happened – the anti-Communists didn’t make it up.

So for this movie to simultaneously exploit Russian Communists as villains and slander the anti-Communist efforts of the U.S. government – however inept they often were – is hypocritical in the extreme.

The Communists were around longer than the Nazis, and so they killed, tortured, imprisoned, enslaved, and oppressed many millions more than Hitler was ever able to get to.  They were a movement that promised equality and delivered unspeakable oppression by a hypocritical oligarchy.  They are excellent villains for the Indiana Jones movies.

But to paint the FBI as the moral equivalent of the Communists is a slander against the many law-abiding agents who devoted years of their lives to the service of our country, however corrupt their boss, J. Edgar Hoover, might have been.

Yet in spite of these flaws, I enjoyed the movie.  I enjoyed the good in the movie a lot more than I disliked the bad aspects.  I liked the chase/fight scenes.  I loved the trips into underground chambers.  I loved the way the ending unfolded.  I felt great during the last scene.  It was well worth the money, and, unlike Temple of Doom, I expect to watch Crystal Skull again – and enjoy it.

But Last Crusade is still the best of the Indiana Jones movies.

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