(courtesy IMP Awards)
While review aggregation sites like Rotten Tomatoes may give Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull a buoyantly healthy 77% rating, there seems to an anecdotal tendency to dismiss the film as the weakest of the four Indy films released before, of course, the just-released Dial of Destiny saw the light of cinematic day.
It not entirely clear why that is necessarily.
Sure, the fourth instalment in the wildly popular, directed once again by Steven Spielberg does have a wildly over the top ending which leaves the mortal bounds of earth for some altogether weirder interdimensional climes – still, you could argue that a cup that can age someone instantly and a 700-year-old Knights Templar are also severely straining the bounds of credibility but then that’s escapist storytelling at its most daringly imaginative – but it also features many of the touchstones we expect from the franchise which kicked off in 1981 with Raiders of the Lost Ark.
We have multiple car chases, one which whips across the university at which Indy sometimes teaches while another perilously but excitingly hugs the edge of a cliff down to a tumultuous river, a setting wih which our fedora-sporting hero is intimately familiar.
We have artefacts aplenty and history woven with myth which is breathlessly invoked by an archaeologist who seems well-versed in every ancient language, aware to a forensic degree of ancient cultures and able to swiftly segue from learned instruction to dueling with whip and fist.
No specialisation here, thank for you, for a man who gets the ladies, who is erudite and capable, who is driven by integrity, tenacity and an enduring fear of the snakes (which, in one scene in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull proves to potentially be a life-endangering liability).
The dialogue sparkles, the story moves along at gloriously fun, breakneck speed and we are given barely a second to narratively catch our breath which is, in the world of the retro 1950 serialised storytelling that marks the franchise like a pivotal clue on a map, exactly as it should be.
The Indiana Jones franchise is all about escaping into epically preposterously stories that remind us that life can be bigger and more amazing and more mysterious than the beige-heavy everyday, and there’s nothing about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that suggests the film, from a story by George Lucas and Jeff Nathanson with screenplay honours falling to David Koepp, has lost the plot when it comes to vibrantly appealing escapism.
After all, the central driver of the movie, is Indy doing his best, and Indy being Indy and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull being a happily old-fashioned story studded with heroes, unmistakable good vs. obvious evil and triumph of the former over the latter, to stop the Russians from getting a magnetic elongated crystal skull that has psychic properties so powerful it might allow the Russians to control all American citizens from afar through their minds.
Preposterously OTT? Of course but is that the point, bliss and wonder of the Indy films?
We want vaudevillian baddies like Soviet agent Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett managing to be both melodramatically big and nuanced small) and femme fatales who have energy, passion and can look after themselves thank you such as Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) and people who can’t be trusted/can be trusted/who really knows like George “Mac” McHale (Ray Winstone) who may or may not be on Indy’s side.
We want newcomers like Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf) who effectively hires Indy to go to Peru to find his mother, his surrogate archaeologist father Harold “Ox” Oxley (John Hurt) and by extension the skull of the title that has obsessed and beguiled Ox for years, and who, while he’s damn annoying pretty much all the time – if Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has an Achilles Heel, it’s the less than perfectly executed redemption arc of this character – reinvigorates proceedings because unlike Indy and Marion, he has been one of these skylarkingly serious adventures before.
But we have, and we want there to be visits to Area 51, the suggestion of aliens, of golden cities and of fantastic powers hidden within and we want it in all its extravagantly big and bombastic glory because we want to lose ourselves in storytelling that dares challenge the idea that life is all commuting and working and paying your bills until your eyes explode.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull well and truly delivers on the brief the franchise has had from the start and while yes, some of the stunts are hilariously improbable – a flying fridge anyone with one surprisingly unbattered but possibly irradiated hero inside? Yes, please! – they are right what the reality diversion doctor ordered.
The ending is often derided as a step too far on the fantastical storytelling road but the sheer extravagance of the ideas behind it simply point that this is the fourth film in a franchise that has to keep upping the stakes all the time.
And up them it does but always with an eagle eye on staying faithful to what makes Indy tick and why it is we love him and the grand adventures he takes us on – he is equal parts nerdy professor and brave adventurer, deeply reluctant snake handler, faithful friend and fallible lover and 100% gallant, sigh-inducing hero in the classic – but pushing into adventures ever grander, more exciting and insistently reality-defying.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, despite some minor missteps, absolutely delivers on the idea of storytelling that delivers characters we love, bad guys and gals we hate, mythology come to life in painted warriors and sunken temples and the idea that far beyond what we see and know is a world of thrills, spills and tantalising enigma, a place we are all happy to visit and which we can because Indy, god bless his whip-cracking bravado and exasperated sense of bravery, lives there and makes the impossible and the unlikely the perfect companions for a blissfully fun trip from the everday.