Movie Review: The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
The news of this movie’s awfulness has been greatly exaggerated. This undersell has been built largely on three things and (spoiler for the three people who haven’t seen it) here they are:
Gophers, ants and aliens.
People seemed to be put-off by the aliens because they weren’t believable or they didn’t fit the genre. Please. These movies are all about supernatural/religious fiction. You have to suspend your disbelief walking in the door. And for those who weren’t paying attention, this was not really sci-fi. The alien beings in this film were spiritual/religious… “Intra-dimensional beings.” (This aspect is hugely interesting from so many angles, but the topic covers an entire entry already planned for next month.)
The ants were not as bad as some people made them out to be. Sure, they were computer generated, but everything is nowadays, and these were not distractingly so. It is an obligatory part of the Jones formula anyway: snakes, bugs, rats…
The humor represented by the gophers is cheesy Lucas, but not as bad as he can and has been. The fact that people remembered them by the end enough to say it ruined the movie for them makes you think it bothered them so much they got up and walked out of the movie in its first few minutes.
The only thing that really comes close to ruining this film is Marion Ravenwood. She was bearable but grating in Raiders, but here she overstays her welcome…a curse of the Jones girls. She was needed to reveal Mutt’s true identity, but somewhat extra baggage the rest of the time.
The biggest disappointment of this film? We will never get a movie of the years between Crusade and Crystal
MY problems with the movie were the poor writing, poor acting, and, yeah, I was one of those saying "Come on!" with the space ship, even though I recognize the religious fervor of the die-hard UFO/extra-terrestrial group. But, Jason, I was there for the first, fantastic one, and this is a watered-down, has-been version.
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