Bookshelf Battle

You may have noticed by now, that I’m a pretty kind reviewer. If I don’t like a book, movie, tv show, etc. I generally keep it to myself. After all, I haven’t produced a book, movie, tv show, etc. so who am I to criticize someone who has managed to turn their vision into a consumer product for a mass audience? If I like something, I’ll share it. If I hate it, I’ll keep it to myself.

But where I have to break that rule is with the movie, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. It’s on my mind right now because I’m watching the Indiana Jones Marathon on SpikeTV. SpikeTV, I doubt anyone from your network will ever read this, but if someone does, please remove Crystal Skull from any future Indy marathons. That film is a red hot pile of smelly garbage. Indy purists such as myself prefer to believe that it never happened.

In fact, rather than believe that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg decided to haphazardly slap together a pile of crap to cash in on the name brand of a long beloved film franchise, I instead prefer to believe either:

A) That this movie was the result of Lucas and Spielberg having simultaneous strokes, causing them to produce unintelligible rubbish.

B) That Shia LaBeouf had some kind of dirt on them

C) That the film was made not to entertain but to somehow subtely communicate coded messages about aliens to the world

D) That it was produced by a group of adults who had suffered through having to pay for their dumb kids to go to archaeology school because they saw Indiana Jones and thought that becoming an archaeologist would lead to untold adventures and world travels only to discover that it only leads to a career at Burger King and so they wanted to make the archeology profession look uncool.

I could go on all day about why this movie stinks worse than a pile of day old carp, but here are my big:

1) Aliens – I always enjoyed the Indy movies because of their supernatural elements. Yet, I did not like that aliens were such a big part of Crystal Skull. “But there was all kinds of unbelievable stuff in the first three Indy movies that were just as unbelievable as the idea that aliens exist!” you might argue.

True! And in fact, a topic for another time is that, while to date unproven, the idea of the existence of alien life on other planets is not all the unbelievable. However, in the first three films, there was the idea that if a man were to explore the deepest, darkest parts of the Earth, to study ancient books, tests, puzzles, etc. that he could uncover all kinds of supernatural mysteries. Believable or not, the first three movies are based on ancient cultural and religious ideas. In other words, finding a Holy Grail that grants the drinker holy life is about as believable (or unbelievable) as the existence of aliens, but hey, at least as kids many of us are indoctrinated into believing the bible, religion, etc. so the idea that an archaeologist could study old religious artifacts and legends and so on and unravel supernatural doings just seems awesome whereas having said archaeologist encounter aliens just seems like cheesy science fiction.

2) Failure to Take Itself Seriously – The Nazis provided the perfect villains for the earlier movies but, well, in case you fell asleep in history class, they were removed from power by the 1950’s so another source of villainy had to be found. Naturally, the Russians make for the perfect villains in a cold war era based movie, but the Russians in this movie just failed to be as scary as the Nazis of the other films.

On top of that, there was the scene where Indy gets launched out of a nuclear blast inside a fridge. Enough said.

3) Shia LaBeouf – Hey, he was great in the Transformers but I like to thing the offspring of Indy and Marion Ravenwood would be about 90 percent more awesome.

In conclusion, Indy 4 never happened. Indy 1-3 are the only Indy films that I recognize. There will never be a copy of Indy 4 on my shelf.