Destroy All Onions!

I’m not long back from the cinema, from watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I know, the second time back at the cinema in only three weeks, but I couldn’t resist. There’s a couple of spoilers below, so if you don’t want to see the results, you may want to look away now.

So, what’s it like? Well, to be honest, I found it a bit unsatisfying. It’s got most of the right ingredients, but it just didn’t really work for me. It’s got good action sequences, (although a little silly in places) it’s got some good humour (as usual). It’s good a good cast, (though perhaps quite a large one), and I think Cate Blanchett made a reasonable baddie. Despite some concerns about his age, Harrison Ford can still pull it off, and I have to admit that I quite liked Shia Lebeouf (who I also liked in Transformers) as the young sidekick.

So what was it that didn’t work? Well, as is often the problem with these things, it’s all about the script. It starts straight into the action, slightly jarringly, with no real introduction. But I can forgive it that. What really doesn’t work for me is the central plot device. As I have blogged before, I still have the image in my mind of the famous crystal skull from Arthur C. Clarkes Mysterious World, but this film isn’t about that real skull, or one like it. Instead it becomes fairly clear from an early stage that this is an alien skull. The Indiana Jones movies have always had a supernatural element to them, but somehow having an alien artefact at the heart of the film rather than a supernatural one seems to cheapen it to me. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe it’s because of Stargate, where the whole thesis of the show is that supernatural things have scientific explanations, and there are no gods. Or maybe it comes back to my christian rejection of the Erich Von Daniken thesis that all of our religions are just based on alien visitations. In any case, I found it to be slightly flat, and lacking in the sense of wonder that the previous movies gave me.

But on the bright side, it must have been better than the Eurovision Song Contest 😀