This morning, at the first showing, my wife and I viewed the movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The movie was entertaining, was filled with action, and wrapped itself up with the current, growing worldview that seethes with New Age Gnosticism.
At the beginning of the film it is apparent that this installment of the Indiana Jones series is unlike any of the past films in the sense that it is dealing with an older Dr. Jones. His father and friends have passed on. He is older, grayer, and not as quick as in his younger years. The German Nazis are long gone, but a new enemy has risen through the new Cold War. The Soviet Union, like Nazi Germany, is in search of power, and a way to dominate the globe. This power, however, is unlike any of the treasures from the previous films, or at least unlike the treasures from the first and third films.
Indy can't pretend to be the man that he was, and the film uses nostalgia and the joke of old age as the framework of the film. The new Nazis, the communist Russians, are searching for a crystal skull - one that looks interestingly like the head of a Roswell alien.
The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a weakness for the film going in. The title alludes to some kind of mystical artifact and cultural representation that people really don't care about. And, like the sankara stones in Temple of Doom — the crystal skull doesn’t ring any bells for the average moviegoer.
Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade were movies that were both set in a Judeo-Christian context, familiar to the viewer, and lending the films an aura of importance, even spiritual significance. With Raiders of the Lost Ark, they had us at “Lost Ark”; and of course in the Last Crusade, the Holy Grail is, after all, also an important lost artifact. Just ask Monty Python.
After such important Judeo-Christian artifacts, where can you go next with the latest Indiana movie?
Raiders of the Lost Ark was such a tour-de-force, and the Last Crusade, enlisting the superior talent of Sean Connery, was such a breath of fresh air after the Temple of Doom which carries the dubious distinction of being the least consequential of Dr. Jones’s adventures. Perhaps any tale the Indiana Jones writers could come up with would have been anticlimactic, and hardly worthy of the series. But looking at the three movies prior to this one, and how the second one was not nearly as good as the others, surely they could have done better than going back to mystic stone artifacts from some tribal culture.
Crystal Skull dabbles slightly with the pitfalls of New Age philosophies which lurk on all sides of the subject matter. Crystal skulls really exist, though they don’t look anything like the ones in the film, and enthusiasts tout them as pre-Columbian Mesoamerican artifacts, exceeding the capacity of premodern craftsmanship and possessing psychic or healing powers — claims connected with New Age beliefs in ancient visitors from the stars, premodern super-technology, and the paranormal properties of crystals. (Experts believe that crystal skulls are of modern origin.)
How strange is it that those that find the idea of a Christian God creating our world too fantastic, choose to believe the a race of alien beings seeded this planet instead?
Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed the movie. It was second-rate when compared to Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Last Crusade, but it was a fun fictional tale. I just wonder how many people took seriously the gnostic worldview hiding in the wings, and the progressively silly over-the-top cartoonish action scenes.
What movie-goers also enjoyed about Raiders of the Lost Ark was that Indiana Jones was vulnerable, and mortal. With each of these sequels, Dr. Jones is becoming more like a super hero, and less like the archaeologist that so happens to find himself unwittingly (or perhaps not so unwittingly) thrown into these incredible adventures. The action was a horn-o-plenty in Crystal Skull, but the realism was set aside with scenes like when the characters intentionally drove off a 300-foot cliff, breaking their fall on a tree, falling into a river and surviving. The refrigerator in the nuclear blast, a ridiculous Tarzan vine-swinging bit, and Indiana’s extended hand to hand combat fight with a much younger, taller, and stronger Russian officer (in which Indy actually seems tougher than he did against the Germans in Raiders) was just too much for me.
The film’s best moments are low-key. The return of Marion from the first movie was a treat, as was the sequence with Indy and his new found Marion sinking into a pit of sand, which makes the scene about the characters rather than the crisis they find themselves in.
However, about when I finally decided all was lost, the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ends on a nostalgic, neat note, where for a moment the film playfully flirts with the notion of the patented Indiana Jones fedora passing to Shia’s character. But the movie is smart enough to know that there will never be another Indy — and, even in his 60s, Indiana Jones has too much style to pass the torch to some young, inexperienced kid. The fedora belongs to Indiana Jones. And in our hearts it can only be Harrison Ford that wears it, now and forever.