Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

The key question going into Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was whether 65-year-old Harrison Ford could go from this to this. (It turns out that Ford is fine; as an action star, there may be a lot of years on his tires, but the mileage is still good.)

No, the old fogeys embarrassing themselves are George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. When you're sitting through the damn near three hours of hyperkinetic boredom of, say, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, you think, man, they don't make 'em like Raiders of the Lost Ark anymore, but unfortunately in the 18 years since The Last Crusade, producer Lucas and director Spielberg forgot how they made them too. Crystal Skull combines the worst traits of both moviemakers, in the process undermining the foundation of the Indiana Jones character.

Lucas himself pinpoints exactly what's wrong with Crystal Skull in this joint interview with Spielberg for Entertainment Weekly. Indiana Jones always has to track down some magical object, the MacGuffin. By definition, it doesn't really matter what the MacGuffin is, just as long as it propels the story forward. This is why Temple of Doom is the weakest in the series; the movie grinds to a halt to explain why those stupid Sankara stones are such a big deal. In contrast, the two best Indiana Jones movies, Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, don't bog down in talky exposition; the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail are universally recognized mythic artifacts, giving the movie space to develop Indy's relationship with Marion Ravenwood and Professor Henry Jones, Sr. As Lucas says in the interview, The Last Crusade finally came together after they just decided to go with a generic quest item and write the story around the father/son relationship: "The story shifted from being about the MacGuffin." (Emphasis Lucas'.)

But the MacGuffin is exactly what takes over Crystal Skull. After the standard opening chase scene, much of the next two acts is spent explaining just what the hell this skull is, why it's magnetized, crystalized, kept secret by the government, buried in some catacombs, and why it looks like the missing link to Sam Cassell's ancestors. Basically, the film downshifts into exposition overload; instead of the swift thrills of the rolling boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Skull feels more like you're watching the Black Pearl being hijacked by Davy Jones and why are Jack Sparrow and Orlando Bloom fighting and who the hell are these crusty sea-zombies and wait why does Geoffrey Rush show up at the end?

In short, Spielberg Pirates the movie by getting tangled up in plot and losing track of the characters. We come back for sequels for the same reason we see old friends. Overstuffing the plot is like taking a vacation where all you do is sightsee — after a while, you just want to slow down and hang out with your buddies for a while. From the '90s on, almost every non-comic book blockbuster has tried to mimic Spielberg and Lucas's adventure franchises, but they always end up puffing up the CGI and the nonsense plot because their characters weren't very good. Pirates of the Caribbean almost pulled it off — Johnny Depp's uber-swishy Jack Sparrow could climb into the pantheon beside Harrison Ford's deadpan archeologist adventurer — but in those sequels the filmmakers didn't understand that the audience doesn't give a damn about whatever "myth" they're trying to make up. Unfortunately, Crystal Skull shows Spielberg and Lucas falling into that same trap.

According to the interviews, it sounds like Lucas is mostly responsible for this misstep in film's conception, and Spielberg compounds the crime in the execution. The crystal skull has some sort of alien connection (the movie opens in Area 51), which Spielberg can't help but run into the ground. Spielberg told James Lipton that he "believed in aliens," but it goes beyond simply believing that there's other life in the universe: Spielberg believes aliens are around us and contacting us all the time. This belief has enriched the spirituality of many of his films, but here, it just means 15 more minutes of CGI effects tacked on to the climax. This, after much of the first hour is Professor Jones explaining this whole skull/alien thing to his new sidekick like they're trying to crack the Da Vinci Code.

This is the kind of thing a hacky Spielberg wannabe like Stephen Sommers would do in The Mummy franchise. Adding to the disappointment, Spielberg sets the movie up to be more politically relevant than what he could achieve with the cartoony Nazis of the previous films, but fails to follow through. Here, the Soviets, led by Cate Blanchett (outfitted as if Stalin's S&M; call girl), blandly seek control of the world by trying to obtain some kind of superweapon.

(Spoiler alert to end of paragraph) To Spielberg's credit as a cinematic craftsman, the movie shows why Spielberg is still a master showman: He films a nuclear explosion from within a suburban-style test home in Area 51. The entire town melts in a gust of radiation: mannequins' faces burn off, clapboard houses become dust in a second. There's a lot of metaphorical value here, and Spielberg seems to be making the Obama diplomacy argument: The world can survive Nazis and terrorism, but even Indiana Jones can barely handle the nuclear option. After this brilliant set-up, Spielberg simply drops the whole angle in favor of a mystical alien skull myth that's too incredible even for an Indiana Jones movie.

This is the fatal miscalculation. Lucas again gets this right in the interview: "The supernatural part has to be real." In other words, for an Indiana Jones MacGuffin to work, the object of the quest must be supernatural, yes, but the artifact has to be a "real" myth that's so deeply ingrained in our culture that people instantly recognize its significance and already know its backstory. Here, the audience needs to be attuned to the magic powers of the … whatever Indy's chasing — not have Steven Spielberg's alien fetish sold to us. The movie has no room to breathe.

This isn't just essential for the plot; this oxymoron is the key to the Professor/Indiana Jones character. The depth, and the fun, of the character stems from his dual, paradoxical personality: He's a scientist whose inquiry leads him to the supernatural. After the exciting opening chase of every movie, we cut back to the boring old classroom, with Dr. Jones peering over his glasses while lecturing about ancient peoples. The Last Crusade punctuates the joke; Dr. Jones tells his students that "Archaeology is the search for fact, not truth. If it's truth you're looking for, Dr. Tyree's philosophy class is down the hall …. We do not follow maps to buried treasure, and X never, ever marks the spot …. We cannot afford to take myth at face value."

Which, of course, is exactly what Dr. Jones does when he morphs into Indiana. In the classroom, the Holy Grail is some artifact from ancient people who believed things you can't prove. These beliefs, these myths, have no value to the academic except in how they explain the behavior of the studied people — except when Dr. Jones leaves musty wooden halls of the university and finds out that the Holy Grail really does have healing powers. As Professor Jones teaches to his students, the search for facts is more limited than the search for truth, which can only be discovered … out there. In this way, Indiana Jones inverts the archetype: The library and its "facts" is the imaginary world; the realm of myth, born out of human nature, is what's truly real. If Professor Henry Jones, Jr. were to give a lecture on this "Indiana Jones" figure, he might say that the swashbuckler is the daydream of an academic, who yearns to cast off the shackles of rigorous scientific inquiry and experience life's deeper mysteries.

Ford's low-key performance is the best part of Crystal Skull, if only because he's the sole principle who's zeroed in on what makes the character work. Indy's ironic, aloof, endearingly arrogant professorial temperment has always underscored the punchlines, and Ford slips easily back into character after 20 years. Easily the most exciting part of the trailer isn't the promise of kick-ass special effects; it's Harrison Ford's deadpan "Indy" responses. "You're a teacher?!" "Part time," he smirks, as if he's being cagey about his employment situation with an IRS agent. "This isn't going to be easy." "Not as easy as it used to be," he agrees, as if he's directly responding to those Internet reports of wino-ness. The problem, of course, is that screenwriter David Koepp doesn't feed him enough lines, as if he spent all his creative energy cribbing old X-Files episodes to try to make this whole crystal skull thing work.

On the plus side, the movie livens up considerably with the appearance of Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood, the hard-drinking love interest from Raiders of the Lost Ark; she and Ford create the same sort detached, we're-arguing-in-front- of-the-bad-guys humor that made The Last Crusade work. Shia LeBeouf as Mutt Williams, the James Dean greaser, is nowhere near as embarrassing as the Long Duk Dong antics of Short Round, and he's actually in-tune to the understated banter of Indy. Spielberg sets up several clever jokes; for example, Dr. Jones and Mutt escape the Russians in a diner by creating an Outsiders-style Greaser/Soc's brawl. But still, the good parts are obscured by the interminable untangling of this crystal skull myth and the bloated CGI-laced finale. No, this one is not on Harrison Ford — his impresarios failed him. You get the sense that if Lucas had his way, he would have turned this into Indiana Jones Episode 4: The Phantom Skull with Harrison Ford measuring Shia LeBeouf's midi-chlorian levels.