There's a moment in the first thirty minutes of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (hereafter Indy 4) that is so iconic, so breathtaking in its construction and implication within and without the text, that I was frankly glad to be alive at this point in our cinematic history. Well into its second century, the movies have become the wellspring of our past--enough that more than a few people, I'd wager, will debate whether or not mammoths had something to do with the construction of the pyramids and, more insidiously, whether, as U-571 asserts, the Americans had anything to do with the recovery of a working German Enigma machine. As early as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and before, films began to comment on how they'd become the opaque overlay to actual history--and perhaps, you know, history was the better for it: prettier, fancier, taller, with a better screenwriter and Edith Head at the threads. The question with currency, then, becomes what happens to our concept of history when the digital age renders any phantasm a compelling one. The image of which I speak (it's a minor, minor spoiler, so avert thy gaze if you're easily offended), of Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) silhouetted against a mushroom cloud, is something that people like Baudrillard would/should worry over for entire volumes of critical theory. As Indy is permanently, pregnantly implanted on the collective psyche of the blockbuster generation, I do wonder if I'll ever see a depiction of a nuclear blast again without looking at it through the prism of this avatar's eyes. It's like picturing Marty McFly jumping into the Holocaust, or Forrest Gump at Dealey Plaza--I won't be able to help myself.

For an hour at least, Indy 4 is genius. Exhilarating, imaginative, a comfortable marriage of George Lucas' stunted puerility and Spielberg's gifted puerility as the Paramount logo morphs into--spoiler--a groundhog hill run over by a 1957 roadster we follow as it cuts through a military procession that...well, that would be telling. The worst-kept secret was that the picture is somehow about "Saucer Men from Mars," and sure enough, the evil Reds, led by a Natasha-warbling Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), coerce our archaeologist into helping them locate certain artifacts unearthed at Roswell, NM. The implicit promise is that the film will deal with McCarthyism and the Red Scare in the United States, with Indy losing his job to the finger-pointers and forced to deal with Hoover's goons impugning his patriotism. Here's a chance to understand that which drove Cold War paranoia--to find Indy in the United States for his last adventure, adrift in the nuclear, post-war age and demonstrating that Raiders of the Lost Ark wasn't the fluke in the series for its smart, razor-sharp script and remarkable pop-insight into what it meant to be a Nazi appeaser in the form of Paul Freeman's French baddie Belloq. Raiders of the Lost Ark is a seminal picture for a lot of reasons--many of them having to do with its absolute understanding of how the West viewed this moment in history and how we view it still in all its glorious simplicity today. But what's astonishing about the first part of this third sequel, up to and including the introduction of young sidekick Mutt (Shia LaBeouf, who makes his entrance as the spitting image of Marlon Brando in The Wild One) and a motorcycle chase featuring a disappointingly obvious stunt double for Ford, is abandoned completely in its second half.

With the possibility that Indy 4 will address the big issues that it raises, it proves itself a sentimental old fool in retreating back into the utterly, dishearteningly familiar. I'm not asking for a master's course discourse in the prevailing sociology of the late 1950s, I'm asking for the pop treatment of a truly shameful era in American history in exactly the same way as Raiders tackled the wartime interzone (it's Casablanca but better, no?), or, hell, like Indy 4 itself does in that one mind-blowing tableau of Indy against the Apocalypse. But the second hour is yet another jungle adventure full of the same old waterfalls and riddles as Indy, reunited with Marion (Karen Allen, terrible), traipses around, dodges Commies, and opens heavy stone doors with the clever manipulation of levers and cracker-jack deciphering of hieroglyphs. Its resolution is near-identical to the first film's climax when it would have been more apt to emulate Raiders' epilogue. (Major spoiler, now.) Why not, for instance, have Spalko's fate be her carving the secrets to cold fusion and light-speed travel into the walls of the cell of her Peruvian madhouse oubliette as a sad-faced nun shuts her forever from the world? Wouldn't such be the better price paid for her Mephistophelean act of knowledge-brokering than a broken-banks' worth of special effects? The whole second half of the film feels simultaneously smug and timid: it rehashes most of the major sequences from the first three films, while the lone exception--a field of piranha-like ants--is resolved in a way that doesn't make a lick of sense.

The most disappointing misstep, though, isn't the script's second-half pandering, the desperation of Allen's overwrought perkiness, the not-mild suggestion that Mutt is to be Jones' heir-apparent in Lucas' inevitable spin-off sequels, nor the anticlimactic final third that doesn't know how to end itself, much less the quadrilogy. No, the most disappointing misstep is that it doesn't properly use John Williams' score to rousing effect. Though I'm not much a fan of Williams' later work, his stuff from the Raiders period is as much a part of my generation's core identity as any single character; when Indy 4 fails to even once introduce the obligatory trumpets where they would actually frenzy the desperate-to-be-frenzied, that's the cruellest blow of all. Consider that I wanted so much to be enthralled by this picture despite a gnawing realization that there was only ever one good film out of the first three (the second is uselessly ugly, the third sentimental bullshit) that I fought against its first half's light's long-gutter and eventual wink-out. Say it ain't so, Joe. Still, I'd go back to watch the hour set in the United States again in a heartbeat, maybe just to imagine a rest of the film after the midway that had the balls to be something great instead of a little love note to itself and the diehards.-Walter Chaw

© Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.

MOVIE MALL

Buy INDY 4 posters at Moviegoods (click on image)

INDY 4
Original Motion Picture Soundtrack CD
Buy at Amazon USA
Buy at Amazon Canada

Published: May 22, 2008