Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the first movie of 2008 Constant Viewer intends to go back and see again. We are, just in case you haven’t noticed, in a period in the movies where the woolly mammoths of yesteryear are making one last charge before, well, you know about woolly mammoths, don’t you?. We saw it with Bruce Willis and (twice, no less) with Sylvester Stallone and we are seeing it now with Harrison Ford, reprising the role that really made him a major star (no, children, it wasn’t playing Han Solo that made Ford a star) for the first time in nearly two decades.
Stallone did a far better job than CV expected, mostly by not actually embarrassing himself in Rocky Balboa, while Willis delivered one of the best action pictures of his career in Live Free or Die Hard. With a George Lucas story and Steven Spielberg behind the camera, so, amazingly, does Ford. This is one of the few movies in quite a while CV just plain had fun watching, almost from beginning to end.
Almost. Rumored claims that Ford did much of his stunt work are clearly preposterous. Judging from the amount of footage in the first several reels where Indy is running in a medium shot with his face hidden in shadows, CV seriously doubts Ford did anything strenuous or dangerous, and the movie gets off to a slow start. By the time he takes refuge in the refrigerator in a suspiciously life-sized doll house on a military reservation, though, you know you’re in the hands of masters who carry you on a thrill ride for the next hour and a half with just enough comic relief and inside jokes along the way to let you catch your breath and enjoy the entire ride. The movie deserves its PG-13 rating (not that this will keep idiot parents from bringing their toddlers) but anyone old enough to ride an adult roller coaster should go see it.
There is an entire generation of moviegoers who have never seen an Indiana Jones movie on the big screen before. Nowadays, CGI makes any screen image possible and thereby makes none of them magical any longer, and it’s hard to describe how audiences felt when the first Star Wars movie was released in 1977 or when Raiders Of The Lost Ark was released in 1981. In fact, in terms of film history, Raiders really only updated the black and white Saturday afternoon “cliffhanger” serials of the 40s and 50s, but then that’s like saying modern medicine has only updated the practices of leeching and bleeding patients. What Lucas and Spielberg and Ford managed to create in the late 70s and early 80s truly was magical. Best of all, they haven’t forgotten how.
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