I went.

I saw.

I reviewed.

 

Remember when I used to write really long reviews? Well, turns out I still do. As a matter of fact, this one's gotten so out of hand that I've divided it into chapters so that you can eat, drink, sleep, go to work, or maybe take a vacation between reading. Here's a clickable table of contents so you can navigate around my 40 billion words a little easier.

CHAPTER I: The Set-Up

CHAPTER II: A Legacy Of Suck

CHAPTER III: The Betrayal

CHAPTER IV: The Steakhouse

Now let's get to the hate…

CHAPTER I: The Set-Up

The hierarchy of blame for any cinematic disaster of this magnitude must, by necessity, fall in the following order: director, producer, cast. That is the only truly fair way to distribute the much needed kicks in the ass when things go as badly as they did on this movie. It should be noted that the director/producer/cast order is also the only truly fair way to distribute praise when a movie is good. For example, despite the frequent piles of verbal shit I heap upon George Lucas, you've gotta give credit where credit is due: the guy came up with two EXTREMELY cool ideas in his life and made a fucking fortune putting smiles on peoples' faces.

As happy as he made us with Star Wars, his team-up with Steven Spielberg for Raiders Of The Lost Ark was probably the single best decision of his career. Lucas was a good director for Star Wars, technically speaking, but he lacked social skills. He was hard to work with. The actors didn't like him. He had no ability to deal with people, and the production of Star Wars suffered greatly for it. So for Empire, Jedi and the three Indiana Jones flicks in the '80s, Lucas wisely chose to write the story and produce the films, but not direct. And those five movies were five of the best-selling, most beloved films ever made. They are undisputed and undeniable classics, every one.

Fast forward to 2008. We all know Lucas can't direct any more. The Star Wars prequels proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt. But I had high hopes for Crystal Skull. I mean, if both Spielberg and Harrison Ford agreed to do it, surely it couldn't be that bad, could it? Could it? YES IT COULD.

Like I've written before, I love Indiana Jones. I love the very concept of the character. I love the idea that there's a very intelligent man, a professor and professional archaeologist, who leaves the classroom on occasion to go punch people, and score with beautiful women, and use a bullwhip on Nazis in order to steal priceless historical artifacts so that he and his colleagues can learn more about human history. Think about that concept. It's so bizarre its fucking genius. I love the fact that his name is Indiana, and that, like Batman and The Man With No Name, is an action hero who is human enough to constantly get the crap kicked out of him, but whom, despite his human frailty, will never stop going for what he's after, ever. He's no ninja or superhuman, nor a mindless action hero who wades into danger, guns blazing. He's vulnerable, he bleeds, he gets hurt and scared, he doesn't always have a plan, he avoids danger when possible, he's a sloppy fighter, and he's not hesitant to run away when he's faced with a fight he cannot win. He's funny, he screws up, he's loyal to those he loves, he's not a ruthless killer, he occasionally makes a fool of himself, and when he gets cocky it almost always comes around to bite him on the ass. Boiled down, Indiana Jones is such a wonderful character because he's a person.

At least he was in the first three movies. Indiana Jones was not so much a person in this movie as a prop. He was there to allow Spielberg and Lucas to claim this was an Indiana Jones movie, and that's pretty much it.

There are no spoilers. Movies this disappointing cannot be spoiled. Go watch it if you don't believe me. It was spoiled before you got there. You know what spoils this movie? The entire second half. That said, I will be telling you a lot of shit that happens in the movie. Go away if you don't like it.

Remember the promise made by Spielberg that any CGI used would blend seamlessly with the live-action footage, and that he would only use digital effects to enhance shots, and that even that amount of CGI would be kept to a minimum? That's all a god damn lie. There's so much CGI in this movie you get sick of looking at it. Not only is there a lot of CGI, but there's a lot of completely unnecessary and fake looking CGI, such as CGI leaves and monkeys and sand. Raiders Of The Lost Ark had real leaves and monkeys and sand, was filmed 28 years ago without CGI, cost $165 MILLION LESS TO MAKE, and is in every visually and artistically imaginable way a better movie than Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. ENOUGH WITH THE GODDAMNED CGI. IT DOES NOT WORK.

The opening fucking shot of the film was a CGI effect. You know how every Indy movie opens up with a shot of the Paramount mountain logo which fades into a shot of a mountain or giant rock of some sort? Well, this movie fades from the Paramountain to a motherfucking prairie dog mound. A shitty looking CGI prairie dog mound. Which immediately crumbles with shitty CGI particle system "dirt" cascading from the top to reveal a shitty CGI prairie dog.

You may think this sounds like a fucked up way to start an Indiana Jones movie, which is true, but this opening shot is THE SINGLE MOST PERFECT VISUAL METAPHOR POSSIBLE TO DESCRIBE THIS MOVIE. As a matter of fact, I'm almost willing to imagine that someone in the Spielberg/Lucas Carnival Of Suck™ (©2008, LucasFilm and Amblin Entertainment - all rights reserved) watched this film, knew it was crap, and inserted this effects shot to tell us the same. It tells us, "You are expecting a realistic mountain of a movie, but you're going to get a fake looking molehill."

This prairie dog looks real. That's because ITS FUCKING REAL. See how that works, Spielberg? God, I fucking hate you.

Why would you do this? Dirt is real. Sand is real. Monkeys and leaves and prairie dogs are real. They're all easy to come by and show up perfectly well on film; I know because I've seen each of those things on film long before the letters CGI had any meaning as a word. So why render them digitally? It looks like shit. The digital counterparts of these very real, very visual things don't appear nor behave like the real McCoys. They look 100% FAKE. Fuck you, ILM. Fuck you right in the ass. Your work on this movie SUCKS. Besides, the scene would have made much more sense if had been an anthill instead of a prairie dog burrow, considering the fact that shitty looking CGI ants play a part later in the film. Then again, that might have created some sense of wholeness and continuity to the film which, if the rest of the movie is any indication, Spielberg was working strenuously to avoid.

"Quick, Steven! To the Chodemobile!"

The prairie dog warren is soon smashed by the car you see above behind the two older gentlemen who have apparently exhausted all their talents except for their still finely honed abilities to look like dumpy old retards in pictures. The car, which reminds me very much of something that might have been seen in Lucas's American Graffiti, speeds to a drag race scene on a lonely stretch of Nevada highway where the souped up car full of teenagers like those in American Graffiti tries to bait a convoy of US Army cars and trucks into a race. It's very American Graffiti-esque. As soon as I saw it, I thought, "I bet this will somehow tie in to American Graffiti." And this scene plays to the accompaniment of Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog." This felt like a big 'fuck you' to RCA Records from George Lucas. Why? Because of American Graffiti.

American Graffiti didn't have a musical score at all. Instead, Lucas used over 40 classic '50s and '60s songs as both the soundtrack and score for American Graffiti, and in order to be able to pay for them all, the movie studio worked out a deal where they offered a flat fee for each song to the individual record companies. One company, RCA Records, refused the deal, and therefore Lucas did/could not include any of RCA's Elvis recordings in American Graffiti. Hearing "Hound Dog" while watching this souped-up car felt a lot like watching Lucas raise a petulant middle finger at that little dog listening to the victrola and saying, "Who's got enough money now, bitch?!" It's all good, though, because despite the many complaints I've read about this scene, it actually works pretty well. "Hound Dog" turns out to be damn good race music, and the scene did a great job establishing this as a '50s film. I liked it.

As a matter of fact, I didn't really have to much of a problem with a lot of the first part of this movie. It starts in Nevada in 1957, and the US Army convoy soon arrives at Area/Hangar 51 where they kill the very few soldiers guarding the base and reveal themselves to be Russians under the command of Agent Something-or-other Spalko, played by cadaverous Cate Blanchett who was killed, vacuum dried, mummified, then brought back from the dead just for this role. Indy is with the Soviets in the trunk of one of the cars where he and his utterly useless friend Mac were stashed after having been kidnapped. The Soviets have brought them to Area 51 to infiltrate the compound and find an object he helped examine 10 years ago. 1957 - 10 = 1947 = Roswell. Jones was one of the investigators of the Roswell incident.

I'm going to boil a lot of things down from here, and I'm doing so because at this point I was loving the movie. I'm not kidding. Yeah, Ford moves a little slower and looks a little older, and Mac was a completely worthless addition to the Indy mythos even at this early stage, but at this point I was still watching a brand new, holy shit, it's Indiana Jones movie, and it was taking me by surprise how much I was into it. Spalko is crazy as a loon and not in the slightest bit threatening, despite the bullshit Spielberg and Lucas keep spouting to the effect that she's the most terrifying Indiana Jones villain ever. She believes she is a psychic Russian mind wizard, although this is brought up here and never proven or even really touched on in any significant way again in the film. She tries to read Indy's thoughts. But she can't, see. Cuz he's Indiana Jones, bitch, and there ain't no twat in the world can pull one over on Dr. Jones (except for Dr. Elsa Schneider, and she's dead at the bottom of a pit in an ancient Christian holy site in the Valley of the Crescent Moon, where the cup that holds the blood of Jesus Christ resides forever).

Jones - utilizing some shamefully poor science and more shitty digital effects - leads the Soviets to the crate, they open it, and he is surprised to see an alien hand inside. Jones almost escapes, is betrayed by Mac who turns out to be working for the Ruskies, escapes for real, gets chased through the compound by Soviets, accidentally gets dumped onto a rocket sled used for testing jet engines, gets blasted through the desert, escapes to a small town in the middle of nowhere populated by plastic people, realizes he is inside a nuclear test zone, and hides inside a lead-lined fridge which not only protects him from the blast, but protects him from bodily damage after being thrown miles from the test site. Don't believe me? Check out the trading card:

If you click the pic, the ancient alien power of the crystal skull will mysteriously make the text easier to read. Also, this card requires correction and clarification. At no point in the movie is the place referred to as "Doom Town." The Russian soldiers weren't vaporized, they were burned to death. The fridge doesn't "thump" to a landing, it hits and rolls for quite some time. And the fucknut at Topps who came up with the term "Indy-in-a-can" needs to have his ass kicked. Same goes to the copy editor for not changing that stupid line.

In the criticisms of this movie I have read, the phrase "lead-lined fridge" comes up more than anything else. That baffles me. Of all the tons and tons of shit to complain about in this movie, this is hardly the worst. The fridge thing is unrealistic, dorky, and stupid, true. Not only because a nuclear weapon would either crush or vaporize the fridge and Indy with it, but because there's no such fucking thing as a lead-lined household refrigerator, and there never has been. But there's never been any such thing as giant vampire bats either, and they were in Temple Of Doom. It's just cartoonish Indiana Jones fun. If you can get past Indy surviving the double raft fall Temple Of Doom and the idea of a German fighter losing its wings and sliding along the road inside a mountain tunnel in Last Crusade, then the fridge thing shouldn't be that big a deal. In the context of the other movies, this is totally forgivable. The shitty CGI prairie dog making another pointless appearance after he gets out of the fridge, however, is not.

This is a real prairie dog. He's far more popular than most of the people in this movie. Why wasn't he cast?

After the fridge escape Indy is picked up by the US Army and, as he has just helped Russian invaders steal the Roswell wreckage from American soil, his patriotism is questioned by the FBI. An Army friend defends him, pointing out the work he did as an operative for the OSS during WWII, but Hoover's G-Men don't buy it. As he is questioned, Indy reveals that he and several others were brought in by the Army/US government to investigate the Roswell wreckage in 1947, but that no team or individual was ever allowed to see all of the wreckage, and none of them was told what it was they were looking at. Indy had no idea it may have been a spacecraft, and had obviously never seen the alien. However, the FBI, full of '50s anti-Communism zeal, suspects Jones may know more than he's letting on, and may have purposefully leaked secrets to the Russians.

Historically speaking, by 1957 the witch hunts of McCarthyism were dying down. Not dead by any means, but definitely on the way out. Edward R. Murrow's "A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy" broadcast and the Army-McCarthy Hearings in 1954 had severely damaged the once unstoppable paranoid anti-Commie juggernaut in the US. However, the Red Scare was still plenty strong in some parts of the government in 1957, so the threat to Indy's personal and professional freedom was very real. Even the most trusted and proven patriots were suspect during McCarthy's witch hunts, so their suspicion of Indy is right at home in this story. I don't think its at all a stretch to imagine that in 1947 the US government might treat an incredibly powerful, incredibly dangerous alien artifact much as they treated an incredibly powerful, incredibly dangerous religious artifact 11 years earlier. And I don't think its a stretch that they might have called on the same guy to help with both. When a bunch of weird, unexplainable wreckage is discovered in New Mexico, and its too powerful and otherworldly for the US Army and the FBI to handle, then who you gonna call? Indiana Jones.

FUCKING AWESOME. I'm not kidding, I absolutely loved this story so far. It was interesting and well presented. I was simply floored; there I was watching a George Lucas production with an actual goddamn plot. We see Indy enmeshed in the action, politics,and modern myths of the day, and it was all good. Here's something I thought I would never write: the whole alien angle, which I was sure I would hate, was actually pretty cool. In fact, I kind of dug it. It wasn't at all the thing that ruined this movie. As a matter of fact, it was one of the few really interesting things about the film, and was nicely set into what I consider to be a pretty fucking awesome backstory about what Indiana Jones had been up to since we last saw him in 1938. Jones, whom the government and military know to be able to work with powerful artifacts, was tapped by the OSS (the WWII secret intelligence agency of the US) to deal with the occasional weird shit that came up both during the war and after. Makes sense to me; they trusted him to get the Ark before the war was on, so it seems natural, seeing how he kicked all kinds of Nazi ass doing that, that they might come see him for help with other things.

But the Army's support and his long list of service to his country was not enough. Indiana Jones gets semi-blacklisted, and his professorship at his university suspended indefinitely. Jobless, hopeless, and still brooding over the deaths of his father and Marcus Brody, Indy essentially says  "fuck it" to everything he knows, and decides to leave. Leave the country, I think. I really don't remember where he was going. It doesn't matter. He doesn't get there. He's stopped at the station by this guy, who calls himself Mutt.

It is no surprise to anyone who has a pulse that this turns out to be Indy's kid. They're both rebels and loners. They're both in leather jackets. They're both handy with a motorcycle. They're both named after dogs. And the fact that Shia was Indy's kid was plastered all over the internet from the instant he was announced as part of the cast. We have to watch them go through the whole "unrelated strangers who are family unbeknownst to them" routine which Spielberg should have known better than to include in this film. Any Indiana Jones movie is going to get a LOT of attention, and this isn't 1989 any more. The internet is ubiquitous now, and news travels faster and farther than ever before. The fact that this was Indy's son was GOING to get out. And once it was out, it was going to spread like wildfire. Why drag the audience through this hokey shit toward a "revelation" they're already going to be well aware of? That's stupid and pointless. It only serves to weaken the story. Time to step it up a notch, Spielberg. Make a movie consistent with the century you're living in.

Shia LaBeouf does not suck in this movie. He's not really as bothersome as I thought he'd be. He's only irritating in the fact that both he and Harrison Ford act like, well… nothing. They don't act. All their scenes are like lifeless read-throughs. Its like they were filming rehearsals and everyone was sick of reading the script and just wanted to go home. They act completely bored, or at the very least massively disinterested, almost all the time. Mutt is looking for his stand-in father, Professor Oxley, who is also Indy's old friend. They're bored during the conversation. Mutt threatens to stab Indy because he thinks he done went and insulted his mama. Shia looks like he's reading the lines for the first time as he delivers them, and Indy's response is pretty much "Whatever." Then they get into a jock vs. greaser fight with some Russian spies at a coffee shop. They seem bored. They get into an action packed motorcycle chase. They seem bored. They go back to Indy's place to research a clue left by Oxley which might lead them to El Dorado, the fabled lost South American city made of gold. They seem bored. They realize they're going to have to take a flight to Nazca, Peru to gather some more of Ox's clues. They start to pick up a little. Probably because they both realize they're going to take a flight that will result in a red line tracing it's way across a map while the Raiders theme plays. That's classic Indy!

Lack of chemistry between Harrison and Shia aside, can you see so far how this is a good story? More to the point, it's a good Indiana Jones story. Sure, the interaction between Indy and Mutt is complete fucking dud, and the part where he takes Mutt back to his place to explain what El Dorado is was a little slow, but overall, this is still a fucking Indiana Jones movie. Mutt is tolerable as a sidekick; he's an uncharismatic bore and his tits aren't as nice as Kate Capshaw's, but at least he's nowhere near as annoying as Willie Scott was in Temple Of Doom.

Up to this point this has been the most densely packed with Indy info of all four films. Interesting, good, likable Indy info. When Indy and Mutt head to Peru to find more clues as to the whereabouts of El Dorado, Indy reveals to Mutt that he rode with Poncho Villa, which brings stories from The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles into Indy canon. Fucking hell, they were absolutely packing this movie with Indy news! And I was absolutely thrilled with it. And when Mutt and Indy head off to the jungle to find the tomb of some conquistador who apparently found El Dorado, I was sure they movie was going to get even better.

But that's when it all falls apart.

CHAPTER II: A Legacy Of Suck

In order for me to illustrate exactly how enormously ass-tastic the second half of this movie is, there are a few things I need to make clear. The first of those things is that Steven Spielberg can no longer direct fun movies. Lucas wrote an excellent first half of a film, then he and Spielberg worked together to tear down all of that and make the second half of Crystal Skull just as pointless and stupid as Phantom Menace. Honestly, maybe more so. Remember that scene in Minority Report where the jet pack cooked the hamburgers right in the middle of a fairly serious action sequence, ruining said scene and the tone of most of the rest of the movie? Well, imagine if that disappointment and disgust you felt during the hamburger jet pack scene had lasted for a whole hour and was focused on a world-famous character that you and millions of others had loved for over 20 years. That hour would be the entire second half of Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull.

As disappointing as this movie was, nothing has been more of a mood killer than the consistent lying and general shittiness of both attitude and character displayed by Spielberg and Lucas surrounding the release of this film. These guys are fucking useless wastes of human protein. Here's George Lucas jibbering on about the "reality" of the Indiana Jones stories in an interview with Entertainment Weekly:

"The supernatural part has to be real… You have to have a supernatural object that people actually believe in. People believe that there was an Ark of the Covenant, and it has these powers. Same thing with the Sankara stones, same thing with the Holy Grail. We may have exaggerated some of its powers, but basically there are people who believe there is a Holy Grail, brought back by the Knights Templar… You do a whole lot of research around the subject matter to try to get it as plausible as possible. We don't deal with time machines. We don't deal with phony notebooks that don't exist. We don't deal with pyramids in 10,000 B.C., because there weren't any."

No, Lucas, you don't have time machines or 12,000 year old pyramids. But you do have a goddamn flying saucer hidden inside an ancient pyramid in a South American jungle surrounded by savage alien worshiping jungle warriors, so I wouldn't be too quick to point out the cultural and anthropological mistakes of other filmmakers. Also, you portray crystal skulls as having been present in South America since at least 1000 BC, but there weren't any of those either, you fucking hack. There have never been references to crystal skulls in ANY mythologies, religions, histories or legends of any ancient culture, anywhere. NOT EVER. The skulls were hoaxes, and every one of them has been discredited. All the crystal skulls ever "discovered" were made with modern tools and subsequently debunked as hoaxes in the 19th and 20th centuries. There has never been a crystal skull that has ever figured into any primitive religious rite or belief system anywhere, ever, in the history of the world. NOT EVER. They're total bullshit. No one believes these things are real except for the tragically stupid. Which apparently includes you, Georgie boy.

Here Lucas proves himself to be made of 100% Grade-A Hollywood shit. He's gonna bash other movies, specifically National Treasure: Book Of Secrets and 10,000 B.C., for being historically and factually outlandish. Well, son of a bitch! I find it fascinating that George Lucas would target Book Of Secrets as being an inferior story, seeing as how he ripped some of Book Of Secret's core concepts off and put them into Crystal Skull. Consider that the main characters in Book Of Secrets are also looking for a lost native American city made of gold which is guarded in part by a tilting floor device with Mesoamerican calendar glyphs on it, and which fills up with water as a means of preventing its secrets from being plundered. All these ideas were lifted directly, and lamely, from Book Of Secrets. I find it very hard to believe that its even conceivable that Lucas was not aware of these scenes since he clearly shows knowledge of the plot of Book Of Secrets. I have to conclude he's guilty. He fucking stole this stuff from Disney. As far as Spielberg's guilt is concerned, who knows, but Lucas has writing and story credits on Crystal Skull, so if he's really the one who wrote those scenes, then he ripped off National Treasure: Book Of Secrets as sure as I'm sitting here. Fuck anyone who says otherwise.

National Treasure: Book Of Secrets is a great popcorn movie. Pop it in, turn off the brain, and have a little fun for a couple of hours. It never blatantly insults your intelligence, its annoying sidekick is less worthless than Indiana Jones's annoying sidekicks, it has car chases that are actually fun to watch, and a real live pretty girl instead of a puffy old lady and a dried-up undead voodoo monster.  It's better than Crystal Skull by a mile.

To use a couple of Balthazar's favorite insults, Lucas is a fucking cockmonger bitch nugget. This takes a lot of goddamn gall. Sure, National Treasure was a pretty clear rip-off of an Indiana Jones style treasure hunting movie, but lifting central ideas from Book Of Secrets and putting them directly into an Indiana Jones movie a mere one year after Book Of Secrets was released is shitty to new degree. And then to go back and insult the source of the very scenes that he stole? Someone needs to invent a new type of horrible death. Inoperable eyeball cancer is too good for this guy.

The whole Indiana Jones concept is a direct rip-off of treasure hunting movies that they were making 50 fucking years before Raiders came out. Stop pretending you invented something, Lucas, you worthless cockbiting piece of shit asshole. You stole everything you've ever done from older, better filmmakers, including Star Wars. And now you're gonna get shitty when the guys who made National Treasure make an interesting, entertaining movie, the very kind you're no longer capable of making? Fuck you. I hope you die slowly and painfully.

Want proof that Lucas ripped off the idea for Indiana Jones? Click the pics pf Cheston and watch all these videos for yourselves if you don't believe me. Indy's whole life and look was swiped from Secret Of The Incas (1954). Leather jacket, fedora, rakish attitude, using rays of light at certain angles to find hidden treasure, finding said treasure and returning it to the natives to revitalize their community like in Temple Of Doom - Lucas took ALL of that from Secret Of The Incas. It's also interesting to note that Secret Of The Incas, despite its growing popularity online, has never been released to VHS or DVD. Guess who owns it? Paramount, the same people who release the Indiana Jones movies. Anybody want to take a wild guess why its never been released? Because it would expose Lucas as a fucking sham, that's why. I'd bet good money that Lucas has made a deal with Paramount not to have this film released. Don't worry, once Paramount and/or the bootleggers realize how much money there is to be made from a movie that people now know inspired and heavily influenced Raiders Of The Lost Ark, it'll eventually make its way to DVD. Then we'll all be able to hit Best Buy anytime we want for more rock solid proof that George Lucas is a piece of shit.

Deborah Nadoolman Landis, the costume designer on Raiders Of The Lost Ark, had this to say when she was asked where they got Indy's distinctive look:

"Secret Of The Incas, starring Charlton Heston and directed by Jerry Hopper, is almost a shot for shot Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Since both were made by Paramount, and Secret is no longer available on video – I can only guess that Larry Kasdan took that script and updated it for Steven. A great idea. We did watch this film together as a crew several times, and I always thought it strange that the filmmakers did not credit it later as the inspiration for the series. Raiders stands on it’s own as a modern classic, but the fedora jacket and whip are right there on Charlton Heston in 1954."

CHAPTER III: The Betrayal

Alright, back to Crystal Skull. Honestly, over the 20 minutes or so following Mutt and Indy's arrival in Peru, the movie just completely unravels. No, 'unravels' is too kind. It nosedives into absolute shit. As if saying goodbye to the rather enjoyable first half of the film, the second half starts with an unbearably lame search for clues about Mutt's stand-in father, nicknamed Ox, who… wait a minute… Ox. That's an animal. Indiana was a dog's name. Short Round was a dog's name. Willie was a dog's name. Mutt. Ox. Abner and Marion RAVENwood. Do I see a theme here? Animal names! Yay! Everyone gets animal names! And in case you forget it, the name "Ox" will be repeated every 4 seconds for the rest of this fucking movie. Ox Ox Ox Ox Ox Ox Ox.

Ox's old friend Jones and Ox's boy Mutt talk to some guys (about Ox) who speak a dialect of some Mesoamerican language (just like Ox does) that Indy picked up while he rode with Poncho (Ox) Villa, thus bringing the events of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles into (Ox) canon. All of which is doubtless a not so subtle nod to the fact that LucOx wants you to buy more Young Indiana Jones DVDOXs, the final set of which was released when CrystOx Skull was. Ain't that a coincidence? Ox?

Its wild that these Peruvian men would know an ancient Mayan dialect. I mean, I know in the Spielberg/Lucas camp anyone who isn't a Jew and/or white male is pretty much interchangeable with anyone else, but this stretches even the incredibly elastic cultural and racial boundaries these two have demonstrated. Not that I'm a civil rights/Holocaust survivor champion or anything, but anybody who's a Jew in a Spielberg movie is a good guy, despite his flaws. 'Cause, you know, he's a Jew. And anybody who's ever seen Phantom Menace can tell you Lucas's Al Jolson/Charlie Chan two-punch racist combo of Jar Jar Binks and those fish faced Nute Gunray guys was just about as close to blackface as American cinema has come in a long time. Lucas is like a moral photonegative of Spike Lee. And has there EVER been a realistic woman in any of their films, or even just a woman that was useful in some way? One who wasn't just there to get captured, then scream a lot, then get saved? I'm not saying that Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Spike Lee are racists or sexists or anything, I'm just saying… wait, yes I am. They are racist sexists.

I guess my main problem with this Peruvian/Mayan switch can be summed up in the fact that THERE WERE NO GODDAMN MAYANS IN SOUTH AMERICA. Mayans and Aztecs, the cultures of which this movie draws upon heavily, come from Mexico. You know, George, Mexico, the hot place down south with all the tacos and cheap labor and brown people drinking infected water? You live in California, how can you not know what a Mexican is? And how the fuck are we supposed to buy that these guys are Mayans IN FUCKING PERU!? The Mayans and Aztecs and all of their descendants live 2500 miles away on another goddamn continent. Have you ever seen a Mexican? How about a Peruvian? They don't even fucking look alike. This is fucking retarded. It's like saying you couldn't find any real Comanches to be in your Western, so you just hired some Korean guys and a few Saudis to play the parts, 'cause fuck it, if they ain't white it's all the same. $185 million spent on this movie and this is the best you guys can muster? Fuck you both. Go buy a fucking map. This isn't a minor nitpick, not when the film is supposed to be based on ancient cultures and the central character is a world famous archaeologist. This is a deep, serious flaw. THERE WERE NO GODDAMN MAYANS IN SOUTH MOTHERFUCKING AMERICA.

So they find that Ox was put in an asylum of some sort, and when they investigate the enormous room they gave him - which is about as roomy as the first floor of my house, just like I always imagined most South American dungeons would be - they find that he has scratched all kinds of crystal skull related clues into the walls. Cryptic clues that lead nowhere. Then, remembering that he was once in a much cooler movie starring Marcus Brody and Sallah and Sean Connery, Indy climbs to a high spot and looks down at the floor. X marks the spot. He tells Mutt, who has never seen this building or these people before in his life, to go get a broom. Fortunately for Mutt there is a broom conveniently located just outside the door, and you may as well get used to seeing a lot of stupidly convenient setups like that because they happen almost non-stop for the rest of the movie. Its like they were just making this up as they filmed it. Anyway, Indiana Jones bosses Mutt around and makes him clean up the floor, and by doing so discovers Ox's big clue through the mysterious ancient power of common housework.

When Indy and Mutt get to the temple/tomb/ruin thingy, there's a pointless fight scene that is in no way threatening or fun. It is at this point, thought, that we get the ONLY satisfying bit of action in this entire movie. It was provided by Indy (fortunately), and its not the half-ass fight he and Mutt get into with weird skull faced native guys. Although that fight was mildly interesting because the native dudes moved in absolute silence, overall it was a waste of time. It did nothing except highlight the fact that Spielberg cannot shoot interesting action anymore and instead opted for a fake-looking scene where small semi-naked anonymous brown people jumped around like they were in the Matrix and completely destroyed our suspension of disbelief. 

No, the one great piece of Raiders-esque action is the end of that fight. The good Dr. Jones grabs the business end of a blowgun being held by a skull worshiper and blows the poison dart right back into the guy's throat. That was AWESOME. And I hope that short little piece of footage will tide you over until the end of the film, because from that point on the movie is almost completely bereft of awesome. As a matter of fact, it runneth over with suck.

Indy, who looks tired and bored, and Mutt, who gives every impression of being a stoner who just woke up and is secretly trying to figure out where he is, beat the skull faced guys, get inside the ruins and get attacked by scorpions. And by get attacked, I mean they see some and Mutt manages to fall down on top of them and get stung. And nothing happens. Turns out they're the really big kind of scorpions, which Indy reveals are harmless. There's another perfect metaphor for this movie; a scorpion so big that its harmless. It means nothing. Its all bloated fake danger. The other Indy flicks at least felt real. This action in this movie is about as alive and breathing as a silent film of a puppet show. What a waste.

Next Indy discovers a super secret booby trap floor hiding the burial chamber of the conquistador who discovered the crystal skull. He cleverly discovers this secret floor by crawling on it. I'm serious. Mutt shines a flashlight into a crevice and sees it a dead end, then gives up. But not Indy. Indy crawls toward the back of the crevice and his body weight makes the floor tilt down, revealing a door on the other side. Cue the Raiders theme to let the audience know that this is exciting Indy action! This scene cracked me up, because it was absolutely clear at this point that Spielberg had no idea what to do with this movie. This secret mechanism was about as complex as a door hinge. This wasn't worthy of Indiana Jones's attention. My fat ass could have discovered this by accident. It didn't even do anything dangerous or tricky. It just tilted slowly, safely down about a two and a half feet. Heart-stopping thrills!

After Indy gets into the tomb and finds the skull, he and Mutt are captured by the Russians. Up to this point, despite all my complaints, I was still willing to give the movie a chance. I thought maybe we'd just hit a little lull and there was a possibility things would get back on track. No, sir. I was wrong. I wasn't counting on this interminable jungle scene, which lasted approximately 800,000 minutes. It was SO long. In it, Indy, who already has all the reason he needs to be on this adventure, keeps getting reason upon reason to keep going heaped upon him. He's looking for his old friend Ox and a lost treasure of immense value and incredible historical significance. 'Nuff said. In the other movies, that's all Indy would have needed to grab his whip and hop on a plane. But they keep layering it on, and belaboring the point so damn much that you get sick of it.

First we learn that the Soviets want to use the skull as a psychic weapon for mind controlling America. Then Mac reappears to remind us that Indy wants revenge. Then Marion is there as a Soviet hostage or prisoner or whatever. Then Indy is strapped to a chair and made to look into the eyes of the crystal skull, which gives him a seizure and asks him to return it to where it belongs with its mind powers. And then Ox is revealed to be still alive and driven insane by the skull, and holds the secret of the location of El Dorado in his fractured mind, and WE GET IT. He has a shitload of motivation to go on this quest. Move on.

Here's my favorite part of this review. The part where I get to pat myself on the back for being so smart and clever. Ah, how wonderful it must be for you people to bask in my glory. Its a pity I'll never know how incredible you must feel to be around me, but I guess that's just the way it goes; after all, the sun can't shine on itself. Of course, I'm ignoring the facts that I was WAY off with my prediction that this movie would be good, and that I owe Mrs. X a beer for calling it as the CGI crapfest it was, and that I deserve a mighty kick in the ass for titling my initial article Chris already loves 'Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull' - Part I, which not only implies that I will love the movie, but that I will love it so much that my love will not be able to be contained by a single article, and must instead be divided between a number of different odes to the movie. So basically ignore everything I just said about how great I am. I suck. Anywho, check out the few things I was right about.

Remember way back when I examined what the story might be based on the possible titles that were being thrown around for the movie? One of the titles was Indiana Jones And The Lost City Of Gold, which I took to refer to the legend of El Dorado, the lost city of gold hidden somewhere in South America. Bingo! The temple of the crystal skull is located in El Dorado, which they also call Akator or somesuch in the movie. Whatever. It's El Dorado. They also pitched the title Indiana Jones And The Destroyer of Worlds which is from a quote Oppenheimer recited while watching the world's first nuclear test in 1945. Spalko repeats the quote word for word and even cites Oppenheimer as the source. Go me!

Anyway, I'm sure it will come as no great surprise to anyone that Indy and the ridiculous number of hangers-on he has accumulated at this point manage to escape the Russians, and the rest of the movie turns into the stupidest fucking chase scene you can imagine. I mean its just minute after minute of nonsense. And I think Spielberg was keenly aware that it was nonsense because he didn't even bother to try to justify or explain any of it.

First Indy and Marion get caught in quicksand which Indy explains is dry quicksand, which works differently from normal quicksand. Why this needed to be in the script is a mystery to me, since it looked like quicksand, and they were sinking in it, and it was going to kill them. As far as this scene was concerned, it was just quicksand. The little science lesson was pointless. You might as well had a dissertation on all the different ways you can prepare scrambled eggs for all the relevance this information held. It wasn't even all that dangerous. Those trees were plenty close to the quicksand; where was Indy's whip? Wouldn't he have tried to snag one of those branches, or at least throw it to Mutt? Besides, there were only two of them in the sand. The other two were free help. As a matter of fact they said over and over to Ox, who is out of his mind, the vague instruction "Go get help!" Well, who the fuck is he going to get? It was only Jones's team and the Russians in the jungle. They may as well have flashed some subtitles across the screen: "THIS IS THE SETUP FOR A GAG THAT'LL PAY OFF IN A MINUTE."

Any one of The Sci-Fi Guys, every one of us an overweight geek with too many hours on his ass in front of a computer and absolutely no jungle adventuring experience, could have escaped this trap. They were sinking about as fast as hair grows, which is not even how dry quicksand works as I understand it. They should have been instantly swallowed up like the lightning sands in The Princess Bride. But they had to have time for Marion to tell Indy Mutt was his kid, and completely fail to surprise the audience with this shocking revelation. And, because the whole movie is pretty much lacking in the characteristic clever humor that made the other Indy movies so lovable, we need some laughs. To that end, Ox, in his addled mental state, brought back the Russians as help. Didn't see that coming! Jesus. This joke was so poorly setup and executed that the pay-off was exactly as unfunny as it sounds. The audience was silent. They might as well have played that "wahh wahh wahh wahhhhh" music they play when someone bids too high on The Price Is Right. Steven Spielberg, lick my muddy taint.

Click this pic and check out how high they are above the jungle floor below the cliff. In a matter of what could not have been more than two miles further along this chase, there is no jungle below them, just a calmly moving river that is no more than 100 feet down and lies flush with the cliff face. Nice continuity, Spielberg. He must have shot this movie in the same magical terrain changing jungle he shot Jurassic Park.

Next we have the incredibly overhyped car chase through the jungle which fails to entertain at every turn. There was honestly not one exciting thing about this scene. The CGI jungle looked like CGI jungle, there was no sense of danger, Mutt got hit in the balls by jungle plants about 50 times after it stopped being amusing, the scene where the giant ants eat a guy looked more fake than the beetles that ate that guy in The Mummy, and there was a sword fight. In 1957. You see, Spalko carries a sword around with her, because she's apparently under the impression that instead of working for the Soviet Union she's actually a high ranking member of the Confederate Calvary and the year is 1863. Actually, they never give an excuse for her carrying this around, but we know well in advance of seeing this played out on screen that she's going to fight Mutt with it. Back when they were looking for Ox, Mutt told Indy that he had fencing lessons. Indy didn't ask or anything, nor was it in any way germane to the story or even relevant the conversation they were having, but he threw it out there to justify the fact that he would be using these skills later. Yeah, that's the kind of movie this turns into, folks. Don't go see it.

At the end of this car chase is the stupidest god-awful thing you will ever imagine in an Indiana Jones movie. Marion drives the amphibious car over a several hundred foot cliff into a tree. Like magic, the tree catches the car, lowers it gently into the water below where our "heroes" make their escape. This wouldn't be so bad if she'd had no choice. But the Soviets weren't even winning at this point. They were hanging over the edge of the cliff. Indy and crew were in no danger. In all of the other movies Indy only does the crazy shit that he does because he's left with few alternatives. He faced with the choice of doing something incredibly dangerous or dying. Not so here. There were any number of smarter, more reasonable things they might have done. But no, they drove off a cliff into a tree. This was just plain stupid, and it was insulting to the audience. Its as if Spielberg had popped up on-screen and said "You people are fucking idiots and I'm so much better than you that you'll eat any manner of shit I feed you without question."

"Uh… did they just drive off this cliff? What the fuck, dude?"

This point in the movie was total shit, but also kind of awesome because you could feel the exact moment when the movie lost most of the audience. It was like a palpable wave of disappointment swept over the cinema. The audience had been jerked around there was no pay off, just a big "fuck you" from LucasFilm. These were people that had been singing the Raiders theme while we were all sitting in the theatre waiting for the lights to go down. People of all ages who had come in groups to see this movie, and were proudly displaying their love for Indiana Jones by spouting Indy quotes left and right. They were there to see an event and were instead shown something so increasingly idiotic you wouldn't even put it on a bad TV show. To add further insult, Indy and company immediately have to go down three waterfalls, any of which would have killed them all and destroyed the amphibious car. The first one kind of sneaks up on them, but they actually discuss the second two before they go over. They don't try to drive the car to shore, or even swim for it in hopes that they can climb down, they just sit in the car and allow themselves to be washed down two more waterfalls as they scream and make "oh my god this is so scary" faces. No one laughed or had much of a reaction at all. The audience was disconnected from the film at this point. The damage was done.

When they hit bottom they find the entrance into Akator. It is a giant skull carved into the canyon wall, because there was Mayan word for "subtlety." This well hidden sculpture has more native guys inside and is underground but filled with sunlight. This is never touched upon. Also not touched upon is why there is an Aztec astronomical sun calendar on the floor. The Aztecs lived even farther away from Peru than the Mayans did, and an Aztec calendar was not advanced enough to incorporate the complex Mayan number system. Nor would it have been useful for keeping track of time like the Mayans did, which tracked three separate time cycles at once. It's like Spielberg and Lucas kinda half-ass understood that the Mayans were incredibly mathematically advanced for what was essentially a stone-age culture, but didn't bother to learn that they weren't the same as Aztecs and didn't live in South America with the Incas. This is just fucking sloppy.

"It blew like nothing has blown before!" - tombollocks, Yahoo! Answers

Indy and company run away from the ugly scary natives and make their way to a giant pyramid. Indy knocks a bunch of rocks out of place, releasing an amount of sand that I don't believe could have possibly fit inside these rocks. Even if it could, what it was doing there was never explained. He knocks out the rocks, releases the sand, and somehow that allows four fucking ENORMOUS stone pillars to rise up, come together, and sink into the hollow pyramid. How is it doing this? Why is it doing this? How does releasing the weight of all that sand help to lift those giant stones into the air? What the fuck is going on?

I don't need to have every little thing explained to me, especially during an over the top story like you get with Indiana Jones, but I really prefer my movies to make some kind of fucking sense, even by the thin rationalizations of comic book science. I've never really dug the fact that the Hovitos idol chamber in Raiders had light-sensitive ruins that somehow didn't get triggered at night. In 2000 years, a monkey or snake or growing tree branch or one of those tarantulas didn't trigger a light-sensitive trap? Not fucking likely. But I can ignore that because it's a small thing and not really central to the story. But this stone pyramid sand trap was as central to the ending of this movie as the three challenges were in Last Crusade. They were the booby traps he had to figure out in order for the story to proceed to Indy's ultimate goal. They needed to make sense and be explained so the audience gets a sense of danger and of Indy's accomplishment, and in Last Crusade they were. But not this. This pyramid thing makes no sense and is just another piece of ILM effects nonsense that was thrown in so that someone didn't have to sit down and actually think of anything interesting and sensible to challenge Indy. This was a cop out.

Once they get to the bottom of the CGI temple, they dick around and find some ancient Maya hieroglyphs, and as soon as Ox helps them translate it, BAM!, he's cured of his insanity. No explanation. They find a bunch of treasure and realize the aliens were here to study Earth. I dig the fact that Indy realizes that the aliens were archaeologists, but it's too late for anything cool that ties the aliens in to the overall mythology of the character to save this movie. It doesn't matter at this point. The movie is broken.

Indy uses the crystal skull to open the door to the temple/spaceship throne room/bridge, making for yet another utter lack of reason that we are supposed to ignore. So the crystal skull is the key to entering the temple/spaceship. But the crystal skull was INSIDE the temple/spaceship with the other 12 skulls when it was stolen. How the fuck did the conquistadors get inside to steal it? Also, there were 12 other skulls in there with complete crystal skeletons, not to mention that there was gold and treasure all over the place. Why didn't the conquistadors, who weren't known for being shy about pillaging and stealing anything they could get their hands on, take anything else while they were there? ANSWER ME, SPIELBERG!

While we're on the subject of thing that require an explanation, why the fuck does Indy have to go through all this shit in the first place? The skull told him to bring it back to the temple. It didn't warn him about all this shit? The alien(s) clearly want the skull to be found and returned, and it wasn't as if their existence was a big secret to the ancient Mayans. According to the story the aliens came down and taught the Mayans agriculture and astronomy and whatnot. Why would they hide themselves at all? And if both the aliens and the natives want the skull returned, why the fuck would they booby-trap the place and keep trying to kill everybody? What possible sense does that make? It would be like me starting a small Mom & Pop corner grocery store which, obviously, would thrive on sales. Only instead of a checkout aisle, I have a cash register positioned on the far side of a pit of starving crocodiles which you have to jump over to make your purchase. I'd be out of business in a matter of minutes. Thanks for shopping, come back and see us again.

Alright, we need to stop for a minute.

I want you to close your eyes and think back to the most boggled your mind has ever been. I don't mean like the time your co-worker mispronounced it "floppy dicks" or when your mildly senile grandma called you by your dead aunt's name. That's bush league shit. I'm talking about those rare times in your life when you encounter something so beyond the realm of the ordinary that for a few seconds you feel a little part of your sanity slip away. Like maybe you walked in on your dad blowing your grandpa while wearing a furry panda costume, and your mom was in the corner of the room videotaping the whole thing while getting double fisted by Björk and Charles Manson, all the while singing Steeleye Span's "All Around My Hat" in her best Sunday choir soprano. Something like that.

Now, I want you to imagine that you had somehow received a warning that something so disturbing was coming. You knew you had to look at it, that was inevitable, but you were given the opportunity to prepare for it. Answer this question: how would you brace yourself for this mental assault? Whatever your answer is I want you to go ahead and do it right now, because I love you, and I'm not going to just let you be hit with the following madness like I was. Go on, prepare yourself. I'll wait.

Ready? Ok, here's what happened next in an Indiana Jones movie: 

Inside the throne room are 13 crystal alien skeletons, one of which is missing a skull. Indy takes the crystal skull and places it back on the skeleton. The dead crystal alien spine fuses back together, and sits back up straight in its throne. Then the Aztec floor starts spinning and the  whole Mayan temple starts coming apart, leaving gaping holes in the floor and walls, threatening imminent collapse of this massive stone structure. Nobody runs. Then a TransFormers looking mechanical CGI portal to another dimension appears in the ceiling and starts sucking everything in. Then all thirteen alien skeletons stand up and fuse together one at a time, each one causing more and more flesh to appear on the original skeleton. Eventually this results in a single, completely retarded looking live flesh-and-blood alien standing in the room, who was one of the aliens who came to Earth thousands of years ago to befriend mankind and teach humans to survive with farming and astronomy and higher math. And to prove his benevolent nature he wordlessly sets Cate Blanchett on fire with his mind, and we get to watch her eye sockets burn like railroad flares.

Seriously. That's really what happened. You okay? I know, I took it pretty hard, too. Why would they do this to us, you ask? Its a natural reaction to want to understand. We're all good people, we don't deserve this. We don't deserve to see Indiana Jones treated like this. We all want to know why. Well, here's why: not that it's any of our god damn business, but because ILM can make it happen, that's why. They don't need reasons when they've got bleeding edge particle systems and more processing power than NASA and the DOD. Who fucking cares about reasons? They've got special effects.

Maybe the most telling piece of non-action in this movie was Mac's death. Harrison Ford looks unsteady and unsure when he's throwing punches in this flick, but the scenes where he wields his whip were just painful to watch. It was like watching a marionette controlled by Michael J. Fox try to crack a whip. Awkward, unstable, slow, jerky, unconvincing, and, it sucks to say, a little embarrassing. But he gets the chance to do it one last time when Mac needs some help. Mac, who is gathering up all the gold artifacts he can carry, trips and falls down as the vortex to another dimension creeps up on him. Now, to understand how fucking lame this was, you need to understand that by "trips and falls" I really mean that Mac stumbled slightly and took a knee. I've seem my grandmother take a worse fall and get right back up. But it takes Mac about ten minutes of floundering around to even half-ass regain his feet. It was moronic. No human being who could have gone through all the physical exertion he had gone through to get into the damn pyramid would not have been able to stand right back up and WALK out of the temple faster than that vortex was coming at him. But no, he wallows around like a paraplegic who fell out of his chair until the vortex is just about to swallow him.

Indy, who would do anything for his friends which is the whole god damn reason he's in Peru in the first place, watches the whole thing go down. He watches, and that's it. He just stands there thirty feet away not doing anything. He just watches. It was RIDICULOUS. There was no way in hell you could justify this after all the things we've seen these men do. There's no way they couldn't have escaped this without a scratch. The only explanation is shitty writing and even shittier directing. This should have never been allowed on screen. And when Indy throws Mac the whip, again, he just stands there. His friend is at the end of this bullwhip being pulled into another dimension powerfully enough that he's floating in the air, and Indy just stands there like he's not exerting himself at all. Nice acting, Harrison. Way to make us believe.

Mac eventually lets go of the whip so Indy won't get sucked in, which seems unlikely. It looked like the only thing Indy was in danger of being pulled into was a quick nap while he waited the six hours it would take for this vortex to reach where he was standing. This little redemption play was completely stupid. No one cared about Mac. He'd betrayed Indy three or four times at this point, he helped the Russians steal American military secrets, participated in Indy's interrogation/torture in the jungle, led the Russians into the temple, and did nothing but try to get his hands on gold and money for the entire film. Who gives a fuck about this guy? Who cares if he half-ass redeems himself by not letting Indy get pulled into the vortex? He's a loathsome character. Let him die.

The movie's over at this point, but for some reason it keeps on going. They all get shot up a big tube by a bunch of water that was rushing into the temple. The people who designed the temple wanted to kill you on the way in, but left a great big hole to escape through just in case you made it out of there with all their gold. Thoughtful. Then they watched the pyramid which they just came out of collapse, but the hole they exited through was magically three miles away and safely up a mountain above all the water that HADN'T EVEN FILLED THE VALLEY YET. We just saw it wash through the temple and carry them to safety, but when they get to the top of the hole we see that the water which just carried them to the top of this mountain HAS NOT YET COLLAPSED INTO THE VALLEY AND FILLED THE PYRAMID. This movie should have been called Indiana Jones And The Fucked Up Time-Loops. The water didn't collapse into the valley until they were somehow already washed away by it and had reached a safe position where they could watch it happen. You know, 'cause that's the way gravity and water and time works.

Anywho, the temple breaks up completely and the giant UFO takes off. Ox just barely gets through explaining that it's not a ship for traveling through space but through other dimensions when the thing takes off and flies up. Into space. Okey-dokey, artichokey. At least the 50s style flying saucer looked pretty cool. Once it leaves Indy explains that the Mayan word for treasure could also mean knowledge, and the aliens' real treasure was all the things they had learned, not gold. This is something he probably should have brought up on one of the three hundred occasions during this ordeal that Mac told him he sold him out for money. Might have made the whole trip a little easier to not have Mac trying to sell him out to the Russians at every turn so he can get his hands on the gold of El Dorado. Of course, it doesn't explain the fact that we just saw Indy walking around in a temple that was actually full of fucking gold. How could Indy have forgotten this? It happened three minutes ago. It's like they used the same actors and costumes and filmed the end of a completely different movie. Was this scene even from the same script? Nothing about this makes any sense.

Because we haven't been mentally and emotionally abused enough by this point, the movie still  stubbornly fucking refuses to end. No, we have to watch a Indy and Marion get fucking married, and Shia pick up Indy's hat and almost put it on like he's going to be the new Indiana Jones, which I'm sure is a movie that absolutely everyone will go and see a billion times. I plan on seeing it at least 30 times its opening week. I only have one thing I have to do first, and that is see every other god damn movie ever made before I'll watch Shia LeBeouf stumble his wooden ass through another Indiana Jones flick.

The movie ends. Game over. We all lose. 

Imagine a movie theatre is a steakhouse. The movies are your meals. Obviously the more you pay for a meal, the more you expect that meal to be worth it. It doesn't matter if you consider your payment as your money, your time, your emotional expectations, or maybe all of the above. What matters is that you expect to get something worthwhile in exchange for your payment.

The advertising campaign for any movie is as important a part of the movie going experience as the menu is the dining experience. It tells you what you should expect to get for your investment. The advertising for Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull was almost entirely based on nostalgia. It sets up an understanding that the viewer will invest some emotional expectations in this movie, because what they're going to get in return its going be like the Indiana Jones movies they love and remember. While this is never explicitly spoken, it doesn't have to be; that's what nostalgia based advertising is. Its an emotional promise. And when emotional promises are broken, people react emotionally. That's not the customer's fault; that's the nature of the game you decided on when you sell nostalgia, and the risk you run when you advertise based on emotion. Nostalgia based advertising is tricky, because its an easy promise to make but a difficult one to deliver, and if you don't match the expectations you've set up with your advertising you've placed yourself in a very bad position.

Sequels are like ordering the same meals you've ordered in the past. The previous installments of a series are the meals you've liked before. You came back and ordered the same thing again because you enjoyed it last time and you want a similar experience now. Its understood, of course, that its impossible to eat the exact same steak dinner twice, but you can get a very similar steak dinner. And you can expect a similar experience. This principle of expectation of familiar quality is the fundamental concept upon which both restaurants and entertainment series are inherently dependent; delivering consistent, worthwhile product to a specific target group. If a restaurant or entertainment series cannot do this they will not only lose consumers, they will alienate them.

Whenever I read a review or hear someone say something to the effect that you have to judge each individual movie (or book, or television episode, etc.) of a series or franchise independently, I know I'm listening to a fucking retard who should be sterilized as soon as possible so they never raise children who display such a core ignorance of socially acceptable logic and reason. This statement is completely asinine. Would you ever say this about a restaurant? If it reasonable to assume that a porterhouse, or a New York strip, or even a Whopper or Big Mac might taste completely different from the last time you had one? Or that those meals might, in fact, contain completely different ingredients, and that consumers should not only understand this but accept it as the norm? That's ridiculous. It's equally ridiculous with film franchises.

If you want me to judge a movie based solely on its own merits, then show me a movie that's unrelated to other films. Its idiocy to imply that you can make a derivative of something and expect that work to be considered as something wholly separate from the work from which it is derived. That's like saying that this year at Christmas it would be unreasonable of me to expect that there will be jingle bells and Santa Clauses and Christmas lights because, although Christmas 2008 will be Christmas, it'll be a different Christmas, so you can't judge it based on the trappings of Christmases that came before. Fuck you. If you're the kind of moron who accepts this type of argument as reasonable, then you need to stop using my oxygen. Please take a pistol and shovel out to some secluded location, dig a very deep hole, lie down in it, and blow your own brains out. Your services on this planet are no longer required.

Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull menu: FAILURE 

The director of a movie is the head chef. No matter what the dish tastes like, no matter how it looks, no matter if the waiters bring it out cold, the head chef is the one who is ultimately responsible for the food. If the food is bad it's because the head chef hasn't done his job, which is to make sure that what the menu promises is delivered to the customer exactly as they asked for it. If this means that he has to bring it to the customer himself and personally make sure that each dish meets expectations, then that's the way it has to be. There are no excuses; the food is the responsibility of the head chef. If the food is bad its his fault, period. Crystal Skull is Spielberg's creation. You can say all you want about Lucas's story and Ford's questionable lack of presence in this movie, Spielberg is still responsible. Its his job to get the very best ovie possible out of what he's given, and if he can't produce a quality meal from the ingredients at his disposal, it's his responsibility not to serve it. Refusing to serve bad food is not just a right every head chef enjoys, it's his fucking duty. You don't give the customer something that's unfit to be served. When Spielberg original read Lucas's recipe for Crystal Skull 20 years ago, both he and Ford refused to serve it. It wasn't quality. Now 20 years have gone by and they're trying to serve the same shit that wasn't good enough 20 years ago, and they're trying to serve it to a far more sophisticated audience with higher expectations. Is there any question as to why this movie has received such bad reviews? Shitty product is shitty product, no matter when you make it. And you don't EVER server the customer shitty product.

Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull head chef: FAILURE

The producer of a movie is the owner of the restaurant. Its his job to make sure everything is in place and is exactly what the chef needs to deliver on the promises in the menu. Its also his responsibility to make sure the restaurant is clean, attractive, appropriately lit, and comfortable for the customer. In Lucas's case, he's the guy who put too much in the restaurant. He focuses so strongly on making the movie look good that it becomes over saturated with visuals. Not only that, but he concentrates so much on making his restaurant look good that he neglects to buy quality food. The net result is that Crystal Skull is a substandard meal served in a restaurant that is so overburdened with things to look at that it becomes gaudy.

Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull owner: FAILURE

The writers of a movie are your wait staff. If there's a thumbprint in your mashed potatoes or a hair in your soup, they're the ones that put it there. Alternately, mediocre food can be made more palatable by a particularly charismatic waitress who knows how to talk to people. Presentation means a lot to diners whether they consciously notice it or not, and a personable, socially skillful wait staff is the single most effective part of food presentation. As a matter of fact, great waiters can make a dining experience so enjoyable that people will purposefully come back again and again and buy food that is just so-so, just to be charmed by their servers. Don't believe me? How else do you explain the phenomenal cult success of Escape From New York and Army Of Darkness? If it weren't for the wit and personality of the scripts, those movies would be almost unwatchable. But as they stand they're something I've come back to over and over again and have loved every time. Crystal Skull? Not so much. The writing on Crystal Skull was like the service you'd receive from a waitress that does her best to get every oder right, but then fucks up every single thing after the orders are taken. She's too distracted to get anything right or even notice all the mistakes she's making. You might tip this chick, but not generously, and only out of a feeling of responsibility. This is not good work.

Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull wait staff: FAILURE

The actors and actresses in a movie are everything that appears on your plate. The core stars are the entrée and sides, and the rest of the cast is the spice. Harrison Ford was not at his best. He was uncooked and stringy. He wasn't as good as he would have been if he'd been cooked earlier in the week, and he certainly didn't mix well with the rest of the food. Cate Blanchett was only okay, but certainly not as tasty as you've come to expect. John Hurt was so fucking disappointing that you have to wonder how the chef could have possibly fucked him up. He's usually so good… its just such a let down. And Shia LeBouef, Karen Allen and whoever the hell the guy playing Mac was were not spices. They were parsley. They were a visual component of the Crystal Skull meal, but had absolutely no other function. They contributed no flavor whatsoever, and as the meal went on, they quickly withered into flat, soggy, meaningless, unattractive pieces of detritus on the plate. They should never have been there in the first place. They serve no purpose. The whole meal is saturated with food coloring but lacking in any flavor. What a waste.

Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull food: FAILURE

I hear a lot of people make a lot of excuses for bad entertainment, and I'm baffled by it. If I'm paying for something, I shouldn't be expected to turn my brain off and defend it. On the contrary, if my money's involved I should be even more critical of what I receive. Make them work for your dollar. Don't ever let anyone convince you to pay for garbage. And if they do trick you into it like Crystal Skull tricked me, complain long and loud and mercilessly. Movie makers are just like restaurants; if they can't make consistent quality product, they don't deserve to stay in business.

What you put into your mind is just as important as what you put into your body. If this movie were a meal, you wouldn't accept any excuses for its lack of quality. It would be a meal that was tolerable when you first got it piping hot right out of the oven, but that becomes increasingly unpalatable as you're eating it and it cools. You know what this whole movie tastes like? It tastes like a meal that has been prepared and plated then left to get cold and dry. Then when you ordered it, they just reheated it. It feels like minimal effort. It feels like you sat down for a meal and they just gave you whatever food was sitting around because fuck you, who are you? What do they care what you think? They're rich and they own a restaurant. They no longer care about customers and food. They may call themselves restauranteurs, but their business isn't providing quality food. Not anymore. Their business is being in business, and that's all they're concerned with. And the reason it feels like that is because that's the truth of the matter.

Spielberg and Lucas and Ford don't care that what they're serving is shit. They don't make great food anymore. They're not concerned with that. They're businessmen now. All they care about is that you sat down and are thus obliged to pay the check. What happens in between is no longer their concern. Now that I've had time to mull it over, I think that Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull may be the most disappointing meal I've ever had, and no matter how many more dishes they cook up or how good they make the menu look, I'm making this vow here and now: I will never go back for another meal there ever again.

I'm done with that place.