I’d heard from a friend that the new movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was terrible, but I thought to myself, ‘It’s Indiana Jones, my childhood hero, Harrison Ford at his finest, Steven Spielberg directing – can it really be THAT bad?’ The answer, my friends, is an emphatic YES.

            First, the lighting. By no stretch of anyone’s imagination am I an award winning cinematographer. I barely have a grasp of the basic 3-point lighting structure. But when I’m watching your movie and I’m distracted by the lighting, that’s a bad sign. Maybe Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg’s cinematographer on pretty much every great movie he’s directed, and a genius in his own

right, was going for something I just missed. That’s more than likely the case. But for the first 20 minutes or so of the movie, I was so distracted by the bad lighting that I couldn’t pay attention to the story. Maybe THAT’S what they were going for. If so, they should have done it for the rest of the movie. In any case, I still can’t get over how nicely the top of the actors heads were lit, especially in the restaurant scene. Maybe they just wanted to make sure we knew none of them are going bald.

            Second, the ridiculous. According to this movie, every Soviet soldier in history is a worse shot than a naked epileptic in an ice storm. They consistently miss point blank shots with automatic machine guns. Now I realize that bad guys in movies are always terrible shots, but this movie really took it to another level. Also, Indiana Jones is tough. REALLY fuckin’ tough. So tough, that he can survive a nuclear explosion simply by climbing into an old lead refrigerator. So tough, that even when said refrigerator is thrown roughly a mile away (and thousands of feet in the air) from the blast, Indy can just roll out of the refrigerator and walk away after it lands. So tough, that when he gets on a military land speed-testing vehicle that rockets along at several thousand miles an hour, his skin isn’t torn from his bones. He’s just a little dazed. In that case he should save money and start asking airlines to book him a seat on the wing. It’d freak out John Lithgow and William Shatner, but why not save a few bucks, right? Oh and by the way, Shia LeBeouf can stand on two speeding cars, 1 with each leg, as they ride over rough terrain in the jungle. More importantly, if he needs to catch up to those speeding cars when they have about a quarter-mile head start on him, all he has to do is find a pack of monkeys and swing on vines with them until they catch up. Very, very fast vines. Really George Lucas and (screenwriter) David Koepp? REEEAAALLLY?

            Third, the script. If you look at David Koepp’s IMDB page, you see that he isn’t exactly Charlie Kauffman or Paul Thomas Anderson. I also realize that George Lucas probably is as much to blame as Koepp is, if not more, for this raping of my childhood hero. But (with British accent for affect) how dare you sir? Did you really have to make it so trite and obvious (when it wasn’t

outrageous) at every turn? Shia Lebeouf is Indy’s son? Wow, didn’t see that coming. Nice work. And you had to bring back Marion, Indy’s worst love interest ever? Bad acting aside, Karen Allen’s chemistry with Harrison Ford is enough to make Tommy Lee shrivel and go soft. You couldn’t bring back the sexy blonde Austrian historian Elsa Schneider? She and Ford had great chemistry, and she was far better than Karen Allen ever was. But worst of all, in addition to all the other bad lines in this movie, you wrote this exchange:

Marion Ravenwood: I'm sure I wasn't the only one to go on with my life. There must have been plenty of women for you over the years.

Indiana Jones: There were a few. But they all had the same problem.

Marion Ravenwood: Yeah, what's that?

Indiana Jones: They weren't you, honey

Trust me, it’s even worse on screen. It hurt so much in my bad place.

            Now I realize that it’s an adventure movie, not a gritty drama, and I’m supposed to suspend my disbelief a little and just enjoy it. And at a few (and very far between) moments, I did. But this wasn’t the Indy I loved so much as a kid. HE was brave, smart and funny. This Indy is apparently a cheesy, tired, God-like figure. One of, if not the best, adventure series of all time just got shit on. Did you need the money that bad, George?

Say It Ain’t So, Indy