Movie review: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

We all love Indiana Jones and the wait for the fourth installment has been years. Is it any good? In a word yes. Is it the best? Probably not, but it has merit and is a fine addition to the tome.

We are introduced to new friends/enemies and significant others. Indiana Jones is embroiled in a search for Crystal Sculls that takes him to South America and to battle the powers of the Soviet Union.

The pace of the movie starts well, but dips when we are intoduced to Mutt Williams, a young greaser who was mentored by Professor Oxley, an archaeologist kidnapped whilst on his quest to solve the riddle of the Crystal Skulls.

It is during this part of the movie that the slower pace really shows, and not wanting to be too Kermodian, it became apparent that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a watershed moment, it is the Birth of "over narrative" cinema. Many films in the past two years have assumed that the audiance is too dumb to work out for themselves what is quite plainly happening on screen and so have the protagonists engage in useless, time consuming chatter to point out the plot line. My two favourite examples were; "..the darts are poison!" - I think we could work that out Indy and; "..duck, machine gun!" (or something like that). Well, I think the audience can assume that ducking in the face of a machine gun weilding Soviet agent is an obvious thing to do.

Don't get me wrong, despite the over narrative dialogue and the reams of continuity errors, this is a fun movie that I really enjoyed and would whole heartedly reccommend.

Verdict

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a solid sequel 8/10.