Five things you should know about the new Indiana Jones:
arod:
I can’t believe none of my friends (with the exception of Pete) were as excited for this as I was. SHAME.
1. It’s better than Temple of Doom (which I rank behind Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, in that order).
2. Shia LaBeouf is surprisingly good. Karen Allen is not. Cate Blanchette, unsurprisingly, blows everybody else away.
3. Russian Communists are the new Nazis.4. It is a science fiction movie, which I think is fantastic but the majority of the reviews I’ve read think is anything but.
5. Harrison Ford
A. is 65 years old.
B. does all of his own stunts.
C. still makes me fantasize about the day I will meet him, hit it, and never quit it.
D. All of the above.
That’s more like 9 things, but agreed.
This is basically a passable Spielberg film (not his best, not nearly his worst) which means you must see it in theaters, unless you actually own a theater at home. (Some of you do.) The sound is big and the visuals are bigger. At various moments I thought about Jurassic Park, AI, and War of the Worlds (with a little ET sprinkled in), but the script is, like the other Indiana Jones scripts, better than all of them and the characters are more likable. Hey, after this and his last SNL gig, I might actually be turning around on Shia! He might be tolerable after all!
But I must warn you: if you saw any of the first three in the theaters, this movie is not for your generation. The plot and pacing are the same as prior films, bad guys are still dispatched in slapstick and/or supernaturally creepy ways, the effects are different but not necessarily worse or better (definitely more of them and more effectively deployed), but if you’re looking for something better than what you remember, it’s not there. For what it’s worth, what you remember probably wasn’t as good as you thought it was. But that’s fine. These are great movies for kids and non-jaded people. As an adventure ride, it’s one of the best you’ll see this year. And if you walk out of this movie complaining, there’s something wrong with you.
It’s a good movie. Go see it.
