06.10.08
Lee1990 Movie Review - Indiana Jones and the Kindom of the Crystal Skull
Art Bell would LOVE this movie.
Things for Indiana Jones take a turn away from the purely mystical to the more sci-fi in this worthy entry in the Indiana Jones “quadilogy.” To give a clue, the movie starts in Area 51 in 1956 as Russian KGB agents eject Indiana from the trunk of a car (he always seems to start the movie being roughed up in some way).
The agents are led by a female psychic who demands of Indy that he locate an item that he helped to retrieve from the Nevada desert shortly after the end of WW2 (sound familiar?).
After much daring do, Indiana manages one of his death (not to mention probability) defying escapes, only to find that he has escaped into a mock-up town on an atomic bomb test sight. How he gets out of that one is so improbable as to be silly, but I won’t give too much away.
The movie also takes a swipe at the Red Scare that was gripping the country throughout most of the 1950’s, as Indiana is sweated by FBI agents after being rescued for “helping” the KGB. He is also fired from his teaching job due to his suspected “sympathizing”.
Indiana is considering his options when a young man approaches telling him that his mentor, one of Indiana’s oldest friends, has been kidnapped and the boy has the key to what he wants.
It seems that the boy’s mentor was taken because of an artifact he had found in South America near the so-called Nazca lines. The artifact as it turns out is an odd elongated crystal skull.
All parties (KGB and the Indiana bunch) actually share the same goal; return the skull back where it came from - a legendary city of gold. It is said that whoever returns the skull will be granted the use of its immense psychic power. Tying in to this is a statement the evil KGB woman makes about how she will use the skull’s power to influence the youth of the West to “transform you into us”. (Turns out they didn’t need that, just cooperative teachers and Barack Obama. )
The ending is pure Art Bell Coast to Coast AM stuff, but spectacularly done. The villains perish in the usual and appropriately terrible way.
A fun ride keeping with the Indiana Jones tradition.
8 out of 10.
