We Got Fun and Games

Please allow me to preface the following by letting you know I am not a movie critic nor have I ever claimed to be. I don't even have good taste, apparently. Case in point: I love Jar Jar Binks. I think he absolutely saved what would have been a terribly boring movie and I wish he was in New Hope as well, so that wouldn't be the only movie I've watched more than ten times and only stayed awake through once.

That said, I'll review Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Let's start this review with the start of the movie: the gopher, or prairie dog, or whatever varmint it was. I still don't know why it was there unless it wanted me to get my "wait, what the fuck?" face on early in the movie so I could just hold it there for later.

A lot has been made about the crazy stuff that happens in this movie, and I want to just touch on that briefly before this moves further. If you have a problem with the level of "realism" in the movie, go find a shot gun and shoot yourself in the face. Or just watch the other three movies and realize what a complete douche you are. See? He's survived much crazier things than atomic bombs with much less than a refrigerator. Now go get the shotgun and have at it.

Now we move on to what IS new in this installment, Shia LeBeouf as Mutt, Indy's son. If that's a spoiler for you, then I'm sorry, I'm working on a cure for stupid, I'm just not done yet and you're gonna have to wait longer. Until then continue to try to bite your own ear. Anyway, the name Shia LeBeouf is a bit hard to spell, so I propose an alternative: Terrible Casting Call. Better yet, let's just stop calling him altogether.

George Lucas, however, seems to think he's the next Harrison Ford. After casting him in Transformers last summer, he put him back in action again this year. Last year, though, he was supposed to be an awkward kid and sometimes bumbling idiot, something he slides quite naturally into. This time he was supposed to be a greaser with a good brain in his head, something he does about as well as an elephant trying to play a mouse. But chew on this a second, people: Lucas repeatedly casts him, makes him Indy's son, AND gives him a character eerily similar to Harrison Ford's in the movie Lucas used to give him a career, American Graffiti. Coincidence that he tried to give him Indy's hat at the end of the movie? I think not. I'd like to think Ford ad-libbed taking it back.

The larger problem with the casting call here, though, is that I racked my brain throughout the movie to think of who'd play a more convincing greaser and came up empty. For reasons definitely worthy of their own blog entry, there is absolutely NO ONE who could have filled that role properly, at least not in the right age range. Young men these days are a bunch of womanized pansies and Hollywood is on the forefront of the movement. If you shave anything but your face, you pee sitting down in the ladies room, end of story, you can put your balls outside by the curb for the neighbor kids to play with.

On the other hand, and I'm injecting this in here because I actually really liked the movie as a summer blockbuster even if not an Indiana Jones movie, I really like how they portrayed the Russians. The Nazi's in the first three movies were caricaturized versions of what we imagined Nazi's might be in our worst nightmare's and I'm glad they stuck with this for the Russians. The Russians are caricatures straight out of Cold War propaganda and kudos to Lucas for not going PC.

So let's cut to the chase here, though, because there's one part of this movie that everyone has issues, save for my dad who would have been more than happy if "Rosebud" meant a flying saucer navigated by an army of T-Rexes. Aliens. Let me show both side of the saucer here.

Coming at it from an Indiana Jones perspective, there are two reasons we should have no problem at all with aliens in the movie. First, they were worshiped by a group of ancient people and what we see is a place where ancient ceremonies took place. In this way, its nearly identical to Temple of Doom, where ancient ceremonies were once again revived by the return of ancient stones (just sub in crystal skulls for those weird easter egg rocks). Second, the Indy movies have ALWAYS dealt with religion, in Raiders and Crusade it was Judeo-Christianity, in Temple it was some weird tribal cult, but it was always religion. Many people have called belief in aliens the new religion, and I'd credit George Carlin as getting there first. They're largely invisible, enormously powerful creatures that come out of the sky and can both help and harm us in countless and unstoppable ways. They are gods for some of us. So why NOT have aliens in an Indiana Jones movie?

I'll tell you why. Aliens are modern. Scratch that, they're beyond modern, to a time point in our technological progression we may never reach. Indiana Jones has always been historic. It was set in the past and the characters delved deeper into the past, beyond the pasts of our grandfathers and great great grandfathers. Yes, the culture that worshiped the aliens was ancient but the beings were not. The Templar Knight in Crusade was ancient. The ghoulish witch doctor in Temple was current, but had the appearance of something transported from the past, not the future. Or some other dimension. God that was terrible. Anyway, the problem here is that they did a very good job of setting the time period and then completely destroyed it with a flying saucer. Yes I can hypothetically come up with a multitude of reasons why it should have been OK, but it wasn't.

So, in summary, I thought this was a tremendous summer blockbuster popcorn movie, as were all the previous Indiana Jones movies. But it wasn't Indy. And Frenchy LeBeauf needs to disappear.