INDIANA JONES & THE CRYSTAL SKULL
ANOTHER NOSTALGIC ADVENTURE OF THE 65 YR OLD FEDORA.
by Vishal Verma

Rating:

What is it?
Its 19 years and Indy- our friendly neighborhood Dr. Jones is back in the era of Iron Man, Transformers, Spidey’s & Batman. He is back with his ‘purana’ weapons- the bullwhip, the fedora, ancient texts, hidden clues, obscure maps and cliffhanging moments with love from Russia.

So does "Crystal Skull", the fourth franchise by Spielberg and George Lucas fits the bill?

Well, as long as dear Indy dangles from cliffs, Indiana Jones will live. In this case, truly, nobody does it better.

So what’s new in the fourth franchise?
Let’s face it; nobody's going to an Indiana Jones movie looking for something new. The whole series has felt familiar from the start.

Its satisfying if not fully electrifying, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" offers fans all the familiar elements for a nostalgic Indy adventure though not intriguing as the ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, which is the best of the franchise.   

Indy ( Harrison Ford) who combined swagger with charm in the earlier franchise, however this time In “Crystal Skull,” he keeps his whip mostly furled, and his words don’t snap, either. But it works for the film. 

Nevertheless, the trip is a pleasant echo of past delights and the credit goes to the lively 65 yr old Ford shows that he can still carry a big film. And to Spielberg, whose sheer technical expertise guides the movie over the rough patches.

What is it all about?
Trying to regain the old rapture, the first three films were set in the nineteen-thirties and drew on Art Deco styling in clothes, cars, and aircraft. Spielberg has a taste for sleek modernism “Crystal Skull” is set in the nineteen-fifties, and it begins, in Nevada, with the same quintessence of period style. As kids hot-rod across military sites with Elvis on the radio, Spielberg catches the era’s uneasy mixture of blandness, latent revolt, the jukebox-and-pompadour youth culture side by side with nuclear fears.

Indy ( Ford- superb) and his sidekick Mac (Ray Winstone- Noteworthy) have barely escaped with nefarious Soviet agents on a remote airfield.

Now, Professor is in the eye of suspicion and on his way out of town, he meets young Mutt (Shia LaBeouf -Fine), makes his entrance wearing a black leather jacket and riding a motorcycle—like Marlon Brando in “The Wild One.” He’s a snarling kid with a thick, frequently combed wave of hair; he calls Indy “Teach,” and he needs a father—like James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause.” The K.G.B. agent Irina Spalko, played by Cate Blanchett, takes off from Lotte Lenya’s slit-eyed Commie menace in “From Russia with Love.” Blanchett wears a full-body flight suit in Soviet gray; she enunciates like crazy in Russian-accented English and tilts her cheekbones toward the camera. As is often the case with this actress, she delivers yet another praiseworthy performance.

Speilberg does not allow us to be distracted from any available pleasure by the plot—thickly woven gibberish about the lost Amazonian city of Akator (formerly known as El Dorado), a crystal skull that has been taken from a temple, and a brain-fried archeologist nicknamed Ox (John Hurt, who is no ox). Sure enough, after a while the movie settles happily into one of those long chases which Spielberg does better than anyone else. The good guys hurtle down a jungle road in an open truck, while Blanchett and her henchmen follow in another truck on a parallel road. The two sides shoot at each other, various people jump, or are flung back and forth, like volleyballs, between the vehicles, and LaBeouf, after a sword fight and a karate match with Blanchett, winds up straddling the trucks and receiving many blows to the crotch from passing branches, before grabbing onto a vine and swinging his way through the jungle. The sequence ends with Indy and friends going over a cliff in their truck. As they fall, they hit a tree sticking out from the cliff wall, which bends slowly downward, like a giant sapling, and deposits them gently in a river below, where the truck turns into a pontoon boat. In a sequence like that, with wild improbabilities linked by speed and rhythm, Spielberg re-creates the spirit of Buster Keaton’s most elaborately synchronized gags, but on a much grander scale.

And to their credit Lucas and Spielberg have boosted "Crystal Skull" with both the return of a beloved character -- Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" -- and the introduction of an heir apparent to the entire franchise: Shia LaBeouf as Mutt Williams.

What to look out for?   
By giving this film both a past and a future, and by keeping bloodlines running through the series, Lucas and Spielberg wisely recapture the spirit of the last Indy film, "Last Crusade," which was driven by the cranky-competitive father-son relationship of stars Harrison Ford and Sean Connery.

It has been 19 years since that film, of course. Now Ford is 65 years old and Connery is essentially retired.

What not?
The plot goes more and more childish after every franchise. Even after 19 years we are made to experience the same in the age of Iron Man, spideys, spider man, computer gadgets, sleek wheels and smart phones.             

Recommended: The quick answer is yes, and it's delivered almost immediately as our dear Indy emerges from the trunk of a car at a military warehouse in the middle of the desert.