By now, the sins of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull are well documented. The laundry list of complaints against the 2008 sequel, until recently the last adventure for Harrison Ford’s famed hero, have become a gospel and a cautionary tale for the archaeologists of Hollywood franchise history.
At the top of that list is the scene where Indy survives a nuclear blast by crawling into a refrigerator—a bit of atomic-age slapstick that briefly inspired calls to replace “jump the shark” with “nuke the fridge” as a shorthand for the moment a series veers hopelessly off course. There was also the business of Mutt (Shia LaBeouf), bastard son of Indiana Jones, swinging from vine to vine like Tarzan, and triggering a kind of telepathic bond with a swarm of monkeys, suddenly synchronized to his movements. And the less said about the ending with the alien ship, the better.
One might understand the new entry in the series, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, as an attempt to atone. “The last one ended in kind of a suspended animation,” Ford carefully said in a recent interview. “There was not a real strong feeling of the conclusion or the closure that I always hoped for.” True to the star’s remarks, this fifth and purportedly final installment positions itself as a proper sendoff, a more official “adios amigo”. Explicit conclusiveness aside, it’s also clearly been designed to function as a make-up, a mea culpa, the final Indiana Jones movie the character and the fans really deserve.
Dial even performs a kind of blood sacrifice for those still seething with anger over Crystal Skull. No one could have sensibly expected LaBeouf to return as Indy Jr., but could we have guessed that the producers would actually kill his character off? Mutt Williams—prototypical ’50s greaser, switchblade-wielding rebel without a cause—has gone to that big motorcycle rally in the sky, having perished between sequels in the jungles of Vietnam. It’s a tragic, unassuming end for a character once tipped to assume the globe-hopping mantle of his famous father—a dream of succession dashed by a few lines of dialogue in Dial.
The new movie doesn’t exactly dance on Mutt’s grave: His death provides eightysomething Indy some fresh dramatic motivation, a trauma to belabor. More than anything, it reflects the more serious nature of part five, whose eulogy for an unpopular addition to the family tree is all part of its attempt to give the legendary Indiana Jones a less-silly parting adventure.
Silliness, though, is inherent to Indiana Jones. The series was built on a bedrock of it—the cartoon pulp improbabilities of the Saturday-afternoon serials George Lucas and Steven Spielberg consumed like candy in their respective youths. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull may push the absurdities of this swashbuckling material over the ravine, but it was certainly made in the same spirit as its predecessors, a kind of guileless appetite for more: More snakes! More chases! More melting villains! That’s the best case to be made for the much-maligned Crystal Skull, which premiered to a chorus of boos 15 years ago this summer.
For at least its first hour, the film gets by on a giddy, boyish appreciation for such things—and on Spielberg’s undiminished talent for making movies that spin madly like tops. His staging is remarkable, even when the plotting isn’t. Look at the opening scene, where the camera glides balletically across a stretch of desert road, catching action in the reflection of mirrors and hubcaps, turning a playful joy-ride race between ’50s sock-hop teens and a fleet of military vehicles into a kind of dance. Anytime Spielberg crawls into the seat of a careening vehicle, for a chase across campus or an acrobatic, perilous jungle pursuit, Crystal Skull outpaces its follies. In those moments, it gets back in touch with the proudly adolescent appeal of the original trilogy, the promise of derring-do.
The actors know the movie they’re making; most of them lean into the archetypal nature of their characters. You can debate whether Russians belong in an Indiana Jones adventure—at heart, this is a series all about kicking Nazi ass—and still savor Cate Blanchett’s helmet-haired, thickly accented villain, a flavorful Cold War caricature. She’s very cartoonish —but again, isn’t that what you might want from an Indiana Jones heavy? And at the risk of inciting a riot, LaBeouf fits fine into the silhouette of his onscreen father: His Muppet Baby Brando routine suits the effort to push Indiana Jones into the post-war ’50s, a different era of outlaw swagger. As for Karen Allen, it’s a pleasure to see Indy’s perfect match back in the saddle, though it’d be a bigger pleasure if she and Ford’s famously testy rapport weren’t suddenly closer in tone to sitcom squabbling.
Ready for some true blasphemy? The best scene in Crystal Skull might be the most reviled: that roll in the fridge. There’s just too much eerie resonance in seeing Jones, a hero of yesterday’s America, stagger through a facsimile of the world his heroics helped secure—the perfectly unreal, plastic vision of the 1950s, blown to smithereens by the atom-splitting, history-dividing force of Oppenheimer’s bomb. The final, painterly image of Jones gaping upon a mushroom cloud is among the most striking of the entire series, like something off the cover of a dog-eared paperback. It’s in keeping with the feat Spielberg accomplished with Raiders of the Lost Ark: building a lighthearted adventure in the shadow of offscreen horrors, here Hiroshima instead of the Holocaust.
There’s no denying Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has blemishes that time hasn’t healed. For all the enthusiasm of Spielberg’s blocking, the movie can’t totally overcome the uncanny-valley unsightliness of its CGI imagery. Has a film shot by Janusz Kamiński ever boasted such a plastic luster? The temples and jungles of a vintage Indy story lose their grandeur without the texture of celluloid; they look chintzy in a way these movies never did in the pre-digital 1980s. Crystal Skull stumbles over the line separating nifty throwback artifice from blatant Hollywood fakery.
And the goofier plot contrivances, most widely attributed to Lucas, don’t look much better in retrospect than they looked in 2008. Silliness is instrumental to Indiana Jones, but not all silliness is created equal: Judeo-Christian hokum just fits Indiana Jones better than the sudden tilt towards sci-fi cliche, the extraterrestrials invading Spielberg’s world of holy chalices, staffs, and the like.
Even that change, though, calls for a mild defense. Set in Eisenhower’s America, under the shadow of growing UFO obsession, at the dawn of entwined space and atomic ages, Crystal Skull crystallizes the moment that science became a new American religion, and where science fiction began to compete with the Biblical epics that were big in Hollywood mid-century. In that respect, at least, Dial of Destiny picks up where Crystal Skull left off; the new film is set, after all, during the week we landed on the moon.
Throughout Crystal Skull, Spielberg keeps the tone breezy, even carefree. It may not always visually resemble the Indiana Jones movies of the ’80s, but it usually moves like them, bounding playfully from set piece to set piece. It remains true, in other words, to the original conception of the character as a living, breathing expression of cinema’s unpretentious pleasures; he’s as much a vehicle as the cars and bikes he commandeers. The destination is still throwback fun, even if the road there is bumpier. And the goofiest diversions have some precedent in the pulp to which Lucas and Spielberg have always been paying tribute. Crystal Skull is Buck Rogers meets Tarzan. It exists on a continuum of silliness.
Maybe Indy deserved one last chance to stick it to Hitler’s artifact-chasing minions. Those fans who share Ford’s wistful desire for closure may well appreciate the nostalgic victory lap Dial of Destiny arranges for the dashing adventurer. But there is something fitting, too, about the light-hearted, light-headed punctuation Crystal Skull put on the series a decade and a half ago; for all its considerable flaws, Spielberg’s final Indy movie felt faithful to the indomitable B-movie-on-an-A-budget nature of Indiana Jones. It wasn’t a classic, but it was classical in pulp sensibility. And you won’t find a lot of that in today’s blockbusters. As Mutt goes, so goes Hollywood.