There are, inevitably, spoilers here if you’ve not had the pleasure of Indiana Jones & The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull yet… 1. Shia And, if I was him, I’d have snapped up any role offered in a fifth Indiana Jones film without even reading the script. The problem is, that does seem to be what happened. It was the most disconcerting sight of the movie – worse even than the son of Superman subplot unsubtly bubbling up in Superman Returns – to see him pop the infamous hat on his head at the end of Crystal Skull, and the mere thought of him picking up some kind of Indy Jr franchise is not a happy one. Here’s hoping that Shia’s role is curtailed for Indy 5, which given that a further Transformers film is on the way too, might yet happen. 2. Work out who’s in charge Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are both very rich and very creative people, who in different ways are at the top of their game. I’m pleased for them, and you can’t deny that they’ve gambled, innovated and earned their place at the top of the tree. Hierarchy on a movie project, we’d wager, is a good thing. And Indiana Jones is crying out for a single boss, rather than a committee… 3. An ending worthy of the name The series has always, to an extent, been built on some degree of ‘fantasy’ elements (the walkway in Last Crusade, the ark in Raiders), but it’s been deep-rooted in the spirit of the early adventure films, and that’s what was thrown out of the window with an ending that a) made little sense, b) offered little entertainment and c) was, if we’re cutting to the chase, just plain terrible. Contrast it to the ending of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, or the saving of Sean Connery in Last Crusade, and it’s barely fit to grace a straight to DVD sci-fi wreck, yet alone an Indiana Jones film. Gents? You’ve had your fun. Can we have our proper endings back now, please? 4. Common sense I’m all for a bit of escapist fun in the movies, but I’m not utterly stupid. My scientific qualifications are fairly weak, but I could comfortably predict that, were I sat in a fridge when a nuclear blast went off, I would not survive. I’m going to go out even further on a limb here, and suggest that even if said fridge wasn’t instantly taken out by the blast that had managed to completely level everything else, I wouldn’t walk out of it were it instead flung a great distance. Fridges are not superhero protective armour. They are fridges. I find them perfectly fine for keeping things cold, but that’s pretty much it from where I’m sitting. By all means be creative, and by all means have fun with the narrative. But please: don’t rely on something so ridiculously dumb that it flies in the face of simple human common sense. The biggest plea of all. If I could get just one wish off this list, this would be it (although the knock on effect, of course, would be that the ending options would be altered). I recall much being made – and it may be my memory playing tricks on me – of the fact that with Indiana Jones films the action is primarily in the view of the camera’s lens, and thus special effects were supposedly firmly off the agenda for Indy 4. Hmmm. Granted, special effects were present and correct in the earlier films, but they were tightly woven, and for the most part hardly overt. But from the opening shot of Crystal Skull, through to the influx of bugs, the simply embarrassing snake sequence and the aforementioned denouement, this is a movie that feels like it was overtaken by effects from the off. Leave your own thoughts in the comments below!
