Review of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) by Russell G — 02 Aug 2014

At first, I thought another Indiana Jones movie sounded great!....Wait, what if it sucks? Going back and adding another movie to the legendary series comes with the highest of expectations. Simply making a movie with the same-old characters may pack the box offices, but makes people furious if it taints them.

This movie is tragic in so many ways. The digitized sets look terrible and seem completely out of character for these movies. Indiana Jones never was realistic, but at least the laws of physics still applied.

Many of the action sequences are a joke. At one, point Indy survives an atomic blast by hiding in a refrigerator. If that sounds bad, how about some sword fighting while simultaneously swinging on jungle vines amongst angry moneys like Tarzan? It gets worse the same sword fight continues while opposing foes balance on the structural framework of two safari jeeps moving at 50 miles per hour.

This is unacceptable garbage for any movie, much less Indiana Jones! Brining Shia LaBeouf on board as a son, rather than a sidekick is another painful flaw. His acting is not the problem; it is just a horrible character.

The dialogue between is LaBeouf and Ford is a woefully bad. The overall plot is questionable, and the extraterrestrial ending is unbelievably terrible. Here once again, it defies the established level of reality for the series.

It is hard to know who to be disappointed with more. George Lucas is defiling one of his greatest creations. Yes, it is a significantly worse let down than the new Star Wars trilogy. How could Spielberg with all of his integrity let this happen? Why did Harrison Ford agree to do this after reading the script? I tried making excuses for it at first, and tried to like it because I love the other three movies so much.

After a point, I realized this is just a bad movie. In fact, I hate this movie, and wish it did not exist. It is a disaster in every way, from the down to the details and execution. This failure is the sort of thing people will talk about for decades later.