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Director: Steven Spielberg
Screenwriter: David Koepp

By Roderick Heath

Orson Welles never completed the film adaptation of Don Quixote he embarked upon in the late 1950s, but he long harboured the perfect ending for it. Confronting Cervantes’ trio of eternal symbolic heroes with the terrors of the modern world, he intended to show them walking out of an atomic bomb blast unharmed. Faced with the prospect of updating their beloved adventurer Dr Henry ‘Indiana’ Jones Jr into the 1950s and ushering him through the same gate of apocalyptic potential, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas had to face down the same looming threat of impersonal and indiscriminate power utterly alien to the essence of their mock-cavalier hero, even with his greater proximity to the nightmares of the mid-twentieth century, and came up with the same solution. Nineteen years after their third Indiana Jones film, Spielberg and Lucas brought their beloved hero back to movie screens for another dance around the world.

The new film came about after a lengthy, torturous development including multiple scripts by the likes of Jeb Stuart, Frank Darabont, and Jeff Nathanson, sported a leading man in his sixties with the former wunderkind filmmakers not far behind. Lucas, coming off his hugely successful but divisive Star Wars prequel trilogy, already knew the dangers in revisiting such totemic works, whilst Spielberg had largely resisted the temptation to rake over old ground. Hollywood had changed greatly in the intervening years. The rollercoaster-paced, vividly entertaining ideal for a certain kind of immensely popular genre cinema, a style Spielberg and Lucas essentially invented, had since colonised the Dream Factory and taken it over. Stakes had been raised, popular mythologies had supposedly evolved, and the kind of old-fashioned, epic-scaled, physically arduous production style Spielberg and Lucas had once been so adept at had given way to an era of CGI shortcuts and plasticised action enforced by more punitive censorship regimes. Where Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) had brazenly summarised several decades of pulp cinema and serial shenanigans, for many young viewers it was itself the archetype of that style. The new film was a big hit, but again received by many as a failure, even a disgrace, despite Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’s emulation of a familiar approach as opposed to the attempt to create a more rarefied style for the Star Wars prequels.

The failure of the new Star Wars and Indiana Jones films to gain much favour with so many aficionados who had grown up with the sturdy early models perhaps pointed to the problems of trying to recapture the spark of youth. This is, ironically, a major theme of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, a rare entry in the action-adventure genre, in that it contemplates the notion of the adventurer getting older, and finding himself an almost accidental paterfamilias where once he was the devil-may-care buck, in one of the most keenly personal and resonant variations on that common theme of Spielberg’s. When I first saw Kingdom of the Crystal Skull I liked it whilst finding it awkward in certain aspects. The unwieldy title signals something of the long development and a piling up of ideas and elements reflected in the storyline left over from all those drafts. The movie also seemed to struggle with the strong temptation to revisit the material in a manner akin to a greatest hits collection in regards to the previous entries’ established formula, a temptation which, love them or hate them, the Star Wars prequels had for the most part avoided.

Since that first viewing however I’ve kept returning to and thinking about Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and now it looks increasingly like not just the key film of Spielberg’s late oeuvre, but close to profound as a work of popular, blockbuster filmmaking. Fittingly, the first act of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is something of an act of archaeology in itself, both for its hero and the filmmakers. The eventual script was written by David Koepp, who had written Jurassic Park (1992) and War of the Worlds (2005) for Spielberg. The opening sequences immediately propose how personal the film will be as it presents the heady confluence of the original film’s pulp forebears with the youth culture burgeoning when Spielberg and Lucas were themselves children. Where Indy and the Boy Scout troop in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) slowly traversed the Fordian American landscape on horseback, the fastest thing around was the train. Next, a horse. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’s opening moments offer a ’50s hotrod ripping across the dusty west at high speed, scored to Elvis Presley blaring ‘Hound Dog.’ Post-war youth culture has arrived, speed with it, things moving faster than sense.

The opening credit gag-fade that turned the Paramount logo into a real mountain in Raiders of the Lost Ark here is recapitulated as self-satire as the mountain this time becomes a gopher mound, small cute critters who respond to speeding vehicles much as the humans respond to atomic bombs and alien spaceships. Signs that the nuclear age has arrived already haunt the landscape: a rusting neon sign reading Atomic Café, a nod to the title for an Oscar-winning, disturbing retrospective of the era in 1982, stands a blackly humorous shibboleth overlooking the desert. A Russian soldier pretending to be an American soldier driving the lead car of the convoy gives in gleefully to the temptation of racing the teenaged hotrodders, signalling the eventual anticlimactic breakdown of this geopolitical schism already even as it’s reconstructed. The undercover Soviets soon reach a remote air force base, revealed to be the ever-mythologised Area 51, where they kill the guards. Spielberg has the Russians best their Yankee imperialist running dog foes through a framing joke, gun-wielding Commies lined up behind their commandant Dovchenko (Igor Jijikine) and stepping out into view to shoot, like a cold mockery of the lined-up dancers at the start of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984).

The Russians break open a colossal hanger that anyone who’s seen Raiders of the Lost Ark immediately recognises as the same abode of redacted secrets the Ark of the Covenant was hidden away in at the end of that film. The lore of the Indiana Jones series is invoked but also teased in a manner that confirms a shift in focus: when the Ark is glimpsed peeking out of its broken box it’s left behind as just another relic, as the dramatic horizon has moved on from the awesomely atavistic to the awesomely futuristic. The wrath of Jehovah unleashed in Raiders of the Lost Ark now finds its human-hand analogue in the boiling fire of atomic bomb. One of Indy’s first lines of dialogue, in contemplating how he’s going to escape from a seemingly impossible jam, points up the crucial disparity immediately: when his friend and fellow former wartime spy George ‘Mac’ Michale (Ray Winstone), taken captive along with him whilst digging for relics in Mexico, notes in surveying the Russian soldiers bearing machine guns all around him that an escape won’t be easy, Indy admits, “Not as easy as it used to be.”

Of course, such an admission is immediately dispelled by a display of prowess from this most accomplished of survivors. Captured at the behest of psychic researcher and the late Josef Stalin’s “fair-haired girl” Col. Dr. Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), Indy is forced to locate nothing so arcane as the Ark but a casket containing the sealed remains of what seems to be an alien. Indy is one of the few people who knows anything substantial about the contents of the casket because he was one of the experts called upon to inspect it after the Roswell crash in 1947. Indy, with characteristic smarts and sly method, at once seems to serve his captors in tracking down the highly magnetic casket whilst also literally disarming them by convincing them to use their gunpowder to seek it out, plucking out just enough of their teeth to give him a fighting chance to escape. Indy is shocked when Mac proves to be in league with the Soviets and foils his gambit, protesting that “I’m a capitalist, and they pay.” Indy manages to flee anyway, making for what appears to be a nearby town, but instead proves to be a fake suburb built for an atomic bomb test about to go off.

The first half of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is deliberate in ticking off reference points rooted in the era of pop culture it engages as well as its own series lore. The series always subtextually linked its own surveys of and steals from a panoply of old movies and novels with Indy’s search for buried treasure, and Raiders of the Lost Ark had spun its alloy out of commenting on the young Movie Brats’ quests in tricking money out of monolithic and decaying old studios, outsiders becoming adept at playing insider games. Over the years however Indy slowly grew from a cheeky fantasy projection of masculine self-confidence and independence from some rather less than rugged young nerds to a character who has become Spielberg’s essential autobiographical figure, contending in his four adventures with the difficulties of being a son and a father, gaining a social conscience, battling fascism, and celebrating cultural inheritance. Each entry in the series gave something new to Indy: an adopted son in Temple of Doom, an estranged father in The Last Crusade, and finally in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull a wife and a son of his loins. Initially in this film Indy is presented as a bit of a relic who’s recently lost his father and his former boss and best friend Marcus Brody in the last two years, and faces the betrayal of his other loyal pal Mac, whose actions not only sour the memories of his wartime heroism but put his patriotism under question as he’s grilled by a pair of obnoxious FBI agents (Joel Stoffer and Neil Flynn).

Indy’s battle to escape the Soviets sees him and Dovchenko fight in the first of repeat clashes throughout the film, only to both find themselves launched out into the desert night aboard a sled propelled by an experimental jet engine. The nuclear test village takes the film’s conflation of cliffhanger thrills and ironic self-assessment to a logical and almost cruelly sardonic extreme. Indy stumbles into a simulacrum of the suburban world Spielberg, Lucas, and much of the rest of their generation grew up in, and to which they pitched their movies, without ever quite fitting in. Indy finds himself in an illusory netherworld of friendly postmen and beaming housewives and Howdy Doody on the TV, confronted by the ideal nuclear family on a couch before the TV only to realise they’re mannequins, a Potemkin Village of post-war prosperity built to be incinerated. The homey perfection is plastic and insubstantial, erected in the desert, Spielberg’s ironically personalised and genre-revised take on the same joke in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), the American Dream realised just in time to be mightily wiped clean by the wrath of the god plutonium. It’s also a bogus version of a world that mocks Indy, an outsider in this settled, forcibly becalmed, conformist zone, a survivor from ye olde swashbuckling days, Greatest Generation hero forced to confront a world he’s missed sliding into, for better and for worse, even as the bite of some of his life choices is starting to sting. The bomb blows it all to smithereens, Indy saved only by packing himself into a refrigerator in another sly gag nodding to common urban scaremongering about lead-lined fridges and children getting themselves locked in them: death-trap hiding in plain sight becomes vessel of survival. The fridge is hurled clear across the desert even as the hellfire swallows up some of the Soviets who fled leaving him behind.

This sequence proved a focal point for fan complaint afterwards, accusing it of betraying the series’ relatively believable mould. Whilst indeed the series had offered glimpses of supernatural power and might burning through the substance of coarse reality, these displays were portrayed as something distinct from what the mere humans do, in a series that resisted the colossal spectacle of Lucas’ Star Wars films and instead wrung its thrills out of stuntmen hanging off vintage trucks. On the other hand, the series had also exhibited a rather post-modern edge to its understanding of the interaction between audience and disbelief, most famously the witty elision of the question as to just how Indy manages to hitch a ride on the U-Boat in Raiders of the Lost Ark, as well as the deep influence of silent movie stars who mixed slapstick with action like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. Indy’s hilarious survival is offered as an episode of high slapstick comedy with an underside of absurdist meaning, more reminiscent in method of Richard Lester or Jerry Lewis. No, Indy should not survive an atomic blast, especially not in a fridge. Nevertheless. Spielberg acknowledges at once Indy’s smallness in the atomic age but also his persistence even in the face of such awful power: the world-spirit he represents and incarnates still lurches forth. Indy crawls out of the fridge relatively intact only to be confronted with the mushroom cloud billowing up into the sky, the power of suns now wielded by politicians, bureaucrats, and military men. This image finds its echo at the climax of the film in an example of Lucas’ “rhyming” ideal for mythic storytelling, as the image of technology as death gives way to the image of renewed awe, mystery, and hope.

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull demanded Spielberg return to the kind of the filmmaker he had been in the ‘80s, not that anyone doubted he had lost his knack for it. But Spielberg was just coming off the most generally dark and fretful run of his career: Saving Private Ryan (1998), AI: Artificial Intelligence (2000), Minority Report (2002), War of the Worlds, and Munich (2006) all wrestled with the angst of protecting and losing children in social contexts variably fascistic and anarchic, only partly relieved by the politically slanted screwball comedy of The Terminal (2003) and the superficially fun but actually deeply anxious Catch Me If You Can (2002). The latter allowed a sidelong self-portrait of Spielberg in its young, wandering genius-shyster hero, who finishes up gazing in on an excluding mockery of his own home-restoring ideals, much as Indy encounters something similar in the nuclear village, whilst Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf) takes on the mantle of confused young man trying to forge himself an identity. Spielberg tellingly uses Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to telescope the concerns of those movies and set something of a seal on his long-running theme of a family either found on the run or reforged through adversity. Likewise the film signals Spielberg’s shift to studies in post-war history and contemplation of Cold War-age vicissitudes in Bridge of Spies (2015) and The Post (2017), as well as the more historically remote but just as inquisitive Lincoln (2012), with their contemplation of different kinds of civic duty and the problems of how to avoid in resisting monsters becoming them.

The version of Indy presented here is at once instantly recognisable, his signature hat appearing on screen before he does, but also quite different to the iteration first glimpsed in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The sly, readily violent young rogue who somehow inhabited both bespectacled teacher and rugged soldier-of-fortune without cognitive dissonance, a man called a mercenary and a grave robber, has been supplanted by a wiser elder affirmed in his patriotic credentials, an Ike-liking war hero who now seems much less strange amidst the climes of Ivy League academia, but whose killer and professorial instincts can kick in at odd and apposite moments. Time mellows us all, apparently, but this all also signals that Indy’s life has certainly added up, that he has become something at the expense of losing other things. Brody’s successor as Dean of Indy’s workplace Marshall College, Charles Stanforth (Jim Broadbent), notes with gravity, whilst Indy glances at photos of Brody and his father, that they seem to have “reached the age when life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.” Naturally, the rest of the film dedicates itself to disputing that proposal.

Most intriguingly, Indy’s maturation has made him more aware and open to transcendental experience than he ever was when young: where Indy did not dare to look at the open Ark and risk Jehovah’s judgement, he keeps his eyes and his mind wide open for the grand and transformative here. Acknowledgement of shifted geopolitics is casually tossed in, as now Indy considers going to teach in Leipzig after he’s fired for political reasons in the good old USA. Indy’s success in escaping his Commie captors to alert the government nonetheless sees him become the object of suspicion in a Reds-under-the-bed age, with even the intervention of General Scott (Alan Dale), a former commander, insufficient to ward off the spectre of blacklisting. Indy finds himself suspended from teaching and only retaining pay thanks to the valiant self-sacrifice of Stanforth, who admits to resigning to swing it. Before Indy can leave on a train, he’s chased down by Mutt, a greaser riding a motorcycle, introduced in a shot carefully patterned after Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953). Another pop culture archetype in the mix, this one the devolved but still potent echo in the post-war rebel of the old frontier dream.

Mutt wants Indy to help him find his missing mother Mary and her friend Harold “Ox” Oxley (John Hurt), a former pal and colleague of Indy’s: Mary went missing seeking Ox, but managed to send Mutt a letter filled with incomprehensible scrawlings and quotations connected with Ox’s supposed discovery of a crystal skull resembling other Pre-Columbian artefacts. Soon enough Indy realises they’re being shadowed by KGB agents who chase them through the campus, but fail to stop them flying south and following Ox’s garbled instructions. These lead them to an ancient cemetery above the Nazca Desert where Indy unearths the crystal skull, buried with the remains of the fabled conquistador Francisco de Orellana, whose obsession with gold led him to search for a lost city called Akator: the skull seems to have been brought with de Orellana and his men from the city. But locating and retrieving the skull proves only to be what Spalko had hoped for, as Mac and Dovchenko take Indy and Mutt prisoner and spirit them to Spalko’s encampment in the Amazon jungle. There they find Ox captive in an apparently lunatic state, along with Mutt’s mother who, not too surprisingly, turns out to be Marion (Karen Allen), Indy’s old flame.

The Indiana Jones series stands as both an exemplar of popular movie entertainment but also one that suffered to a degree in being scared of itself. Whilst Raiders of the Lost Ark is the more perfect movie, with its lean, mean, virtuosic sense of narrative motive joined to thrill-mongering, the series surely reached its height in the second half of Temple of Doom with its total, fervent, almost lunatic embrace of tapping childhood ideals and fears in relation to a parental image. Indy veers from subordinated villain to messianic hero, as his dark side is ritually cleansed in a manner that also resembles a child’s bewilderment when they perceive a parent’s dark side for the first time, before the action unleashed becomes a compulsive battle of good and evil. This was played out in an Arabian Nights fantasia built from an unstable blend of imperialist adventure tropes, Hammer horror imagery, and old Hollywood B-movie chic, all bashed into a coherent shape by Spielberg’s all-pervading sense of cinematic spectacle. There was also the first glimmerings of his interest in social conscience and subjugation-liberation themes, which would lead on to movies like Schindler’s List (1993) and Amistad (1997), and Indy’s journey in the film also reflects the maturation from a seeker of “fortune and glory” to a man with a potent sense of righteous anger. Some complaints, that it revived racist clichés and offered too frightening a stew for a young audience, had a valid aspect, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that in denying the film’s dangerous, antisocial edge Spielberg and Lucas were denying a vital streak in their creativity for the sake of remaining acceptable.

When Raiders of the Lost Ark plundered hoary old stories and movies the filmmakers felt confident their audience would take such backdated tropes as camp, but ironically such recognition grew less sure over time. The complaints unleashed obliged Spielberg and Lucas to file down the franchise’s teeth for The Last Crusade and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: the latter, the filmmakers readily admitted, patterns itself more after the The Last Crusade than the first two films. But Kingdom of the Crystal Skull finally accrues a tone closer to a Jules Vernian adventure along the lines of Captain Grant’s Children than to the serial movie mould that initially defined the series as a tale of globetrotting and reunion, and film versions of Verne like Henry Levin’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), which is directly quoted at the end. Douglas Slocombe, who had filmed the first three films for Spielberg with a signature look balancing almost expressionistic effects with shadow and light with rich colour palettes, had retired, so Spielberg’s favoured new cinematographic collaborator Janusz Kaminski, whose shooting style usually quelled and mediated colour effects, offered his own, lushly textured variation. The animated camerawork nonetheless also often keeps its distance from events and actors, with Spielberg working through a fascination for master shots containing multiple planes of arrangement for actors, carefully setting the scene for when action erupts along horizontal lines of pursuit.

Whilst it has problems in terms of pacing its plot, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is on a deeper level a master class in how to directorially pace more fundamental business, to pack a movie with curlicues of humour and context-enriching flourishes. The film is close to relaxed in places, suborning action-adventure thrills to letting its heroes and villains work through their various obsessions, and yet there’s scarcely a second wasted in making some sort of point about them as well as the genre and historical setting they inhabit. The first proper scene featuring Indy and Mutt, charting their development of something like rapport, plays out in a diner adjoining the college where young collegians and greasers gather. This scene is abound with deft bits of business as Mutt’s forced shows of attitude and condescension as an avatar of a cocky new generation contends with Indy’s sanguine cool and sense of paternalistic propriety. Spielberg quotes John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) as Mutt tries to steal a beer surreptitiously from a waitress only for Indy to replace it, even as their conversation on other matters unfolds. Mutt keeps his obsessively maintained pompadour rigid by dipping his comb in some luckless student’s Coke.

The attempt by KGB agents to take them prisoner obliges some quick thinking, as Indy gets Mutt to thump a “Joe College” and spark a brawl between the college kids and greasers to give them a chance at a getaway. The idea of staging an action sequence around the environs of Indy’s workplace is so great it’s a wonder the series never found a way of working one in before, with Indy and Mutt riding his motorcycle, battling and outrunning the pursuing goons and finishing up sliding across the floor of the college library to the consternation of students. This scene is again flecked with an astounding number of throwaway yet substantial touches. Mutt’s punch sparks a schism between the two camps of youth culture, squares and rebels, which allows another struggle, with all its geopolitical and culture war overtones, to unfold unhindered. The chasers careen through an anti-Communist demonstration, a last gasp of cultural centrism on campus before the oppositional tilt kicking in in the 1960s. One of the chasing KGB teams finishes up foiled by the decapitated head from a statue of Brody, and the sequence finishes in a comic-heroic diminuendo with Indy advising preferred historical models to one of his students before advising him to get out of the library even as he and Mutt ride the motorcycle out the door.

The journey to Chile in following Ox’s clues sees Indy and Mutt generating a tentative working partnership, Indy bewildered by Mutt’s worshipful treatment of his motorcycle, Mutt slowly working up a level of respect for the guy he first calls “old man” as Indy recounts adventures with Pancho Villa as a youth (allowing one priceless bit of character business as Indy remembers to spit on the ground after mentioning the name of Victoriano Huerta). Their arrival at the ancient cemetery sees them set upon by mask-wearing, martial arts-adept natives who try killing them with poisoned darts, leading Indy to surprise one by blowing the dart back up his pipe into the assassin’s mouth. Indy and Mutt’s penetration of the tomb sees Indy dealing expertly with problems familiar to him that still terrify Mutt. But Mutt displays his own edge of diligence as he successfully shames Indy for purloining a knife from one of the dead conquistadors in a manner quite reminiscent of old, cavalier approach to such things. When the duo finally do find de Orellana and his men, buried in preserving grave wrappings in a Mayan style, they also find the crystal skull Ox hid away, a confounding object impossible to manufacture and possessed of bewildering magnetic properties towards all metals. Indy deduces that Ox discovered the tomb and the skull, and returned the skull in a desperate attempt to mollify its powerful but inchoate, to him at least, psychic demands.

The elastic snap between frivolity and melodrama, character byplay and plot service throughout much of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull might well represent that closest Spielberg has come since Jaws (1975) to truly honouring his cinema’s precursors in Ford and Howard Hawks, particularly those filmmakers’ loosely-structured, Shakespearean Pastoral-like late films like Hatari! (1962), Donovan’s Reef (1963), and El Dorado (1966). Indeed, whilst auteurist critics eventually rescued those films from the dustbin of regard and recognised their richness, they too were largely dismissed initially as shabby throwaways by titans slipping towards senescence. Such movies follow their characters in exploring a contest of personalities at once fractious but also fused together by bonds of camaraderie and codes of honour, driven out to contend in the wilderness but in search of a homecoming. El Dorado most crucially dealt similarly with aging heroes who find themselves commanding a ragged band of young surrogates and new partners. The major difference between Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and such models is that Spielberg tries to mate their ambling, barely narrative form with the rolling set-piece structure the Indiana Jones films took from classic serials, not the easiest styles to blend.

This might partly explain the relative awkwardness of the film’s middle act, which keeps seeming to build to new eruptions of action, as Indy and Mutt delve into de Orellana’s grave and attempt escape from the Soviet jungle camp, but both situations end with frustration, the latter devolving into farce as Indy and Marion stray into a quicksand pit and the deranged Ox, sent for help, fetches the Russians. The major difference between Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and its forebear Raiders of the Lost Ark lies in precisely this disparity. Where once Spielberg and Lucas had their hero crawl under a truck specifically because it was a cool thing to do, and Indy was invented entirely to be a figure who did such things, the action scenes in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull instead serve largely the opposite purpose, deployed to draw out the characters, to dramatize and visualise their essence as people and the connections that bind them together. The chase through Marshall and the later pursuit through the jungle are rolling acts of meeting and reconciliation, maturation and discovery. The quicksand scene becomes a moment of crucial revelation as Marion tells Indy Mutt is his son (“Why didn’t you make him stay in school?” Indy demands immediately, after telling Mutt dropping out was fine if it suited him), blended with less momentous but equally felicitous shading as Indy speaks like both a teacher and a man of experience as he contemplates the actual threat level of the sand, and is forced to temper his old phobia as Mutt tries to save his life by using a python as a rope.

The actual storyline is a giddy mishmash of ideas, particularly the ancient astronaut theory mooted by Erich von Daaniken in his 1969 book Chariots of the Gods?, a book that helped kick off a burgeoning fascination with new-age esoterica in subsequent decades. Such notions always had a troublingly racist scepticism over technological and architectural achievements by “primitive” civilisations, but also captured imaginations by suggesting deeper, more fantastical influences and forces at work in history. This is mixed with authentic pieces of modern folklore like Stalin’s interest in psychic research, and contentious artefacts like probably faked crystal skulls “discovered” by various archaeologists including Anna and F.A. Mitchell-Hedges. All this entails a shift away from the vital thread of the earlier films in the series, where religious and mythical truth subsisted like a secret river of wonder. That river flowed under the apparent solidity of Indy’s mythologised 1930s world, hovering as it did between the classical and the properly modern, where Judeo-Christian and Hindu mysticism were place on a level footing and genuine historical quests and enigmas were used as linchpins for the stories. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull nonetheless still invokes the same pattern, taking on the myth-crusted history of de Orellana, who gave the Amazon its name, and his search for cities of gold, the search for raw satiation of greed and the hunt for transcendental wonder not easy to separate. The eventual revelation of an alien influence connects easily with Spielberg’s exploration of divine seeking through the prism of UFO mythology in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Spalko theorises that the smaller, less advanced aliens retrieved from the Roswell crash are relatives of the beings who built Akator, and the crystal skull itself contains some remnant of intelligence that retains incredible potency, reducing Ox to apparent lunacy and, when Spalko forcibly exposes Indy to its influence, commanding him to take it to Akator.

Marion’s reappearance in Indy’s life immediately stirs their oldest reflexes of attraction and aggression as their first encounter in decades before a crowd of onlooking Soviet soldiers becomes an instant verbal battle laced with screwball comedy postures, Marion’s fierce declarations that she’s had a “damn good, really good life” charged with protest-too-much electricity. A core pleasure in the film is seeing Allen’s undimmed smile as she feels the old Indy charm again. Substituting Indy’s familiar Nazi enemies for Soviets was a pretty obvious direction to go in, although they just don’t have the same crackle of instant enmity. It’s hinted that Spalko represents a kind of holdout faction of fanatical Stalinists, their commander representing intellectual avarice detached from any kind of social accountability even as she sees herself as a warrior for her political faith, whilst Dovchenko is a straightforward thug who gives Indy plenty of motivation to resist him by casually shooting American soldiers (“I’m sorry – drop dead, Comrade”). That Spielberg can’t quite take his Commies as seriously as villains is still plain as he offers the soldiers dancing the kazatchok around their jungle campfire, perhaps fitting in a movie that’s less about pure evil and more about clashing forces of imperial arrogance and cultural domain in an age defined by moral ambiguity.

Some don’t like her, but to me Spalko presents Indy with his fittest antagonist since Belloq, a strident blend of cerebral and physical honing, a haughty egotist (“Be careful, you might get exactly what you want.” “I usually do.”) supposedly representing egalitarianism whose first insult to Indy is casually kicking aside a handful of relics he and Mac dug up out in the desert: not even Belloq was that barbarian. Spalko seeks out atavistic knowledge purely in the interests of gaining control over the future, spelling out a delightful bullet point of potential uses for harnessing the apparent psychic force of the aliens to “place our thoughts into the minds of your leaders, make your teachers teach the true version of history,” loaning substance to decades of the most deeply paranoid fantasies about Communist infiltration. Spalko resembles Garbo’s Ninotchka reborn as a post-gender dominatrix who hands Mutt his ass on a plate but proves to have her own limits when even she is rendered queasy and terrified by a horde of erupting soldier ants. Blanchett’s elegant, witty performance expertly captures the cartoonish aspect of the character but also fully inhabits her too, equipped as she is with a Louise Brooks-as-Lulu hairdo and a sword on her hip that stands to attention like a mock erection when she gets too close to the alien remains she so eagerly seeks. The edge of vaguely sexual tension between her and Indy is also new, good touch, with Spalko’s sense of imperiousness extending into that realm too as she keeps trying to penetrate his mind with her psychic talents, only to keep meeting his mused disdain. “You’re a hard man to read, Doctor Jones,” she comments whilst giving his face a patronising pat, and later places her hands seductively on his thighs as she again tries to mind-rape him. This moment plays out as something of a sarcastic inversion of Marion’s scenes contending with Belloq’s overtures whilst his prisoner in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Broadbent, Winstone, and Hurt extend Spielberg’s penchant for great British character actors brought in to augment the team, although the actors’ roles don’t really require such talents. Regardless, Hurt is a delight as the crazed Ox, whose communing with the skull has left him a cosmic conduit with the switch stuck on, hands writing complex messages whilst his mouth pours forth babble. It’s fun seeing Winstone in a different kind of part compared to the bruisers he usually plays, as the inherently likeable yet deeply shifty Mac. The character does serve a solid purpose in representing the temptation to surrender to the inherent ambiguity of the age that Indy must resist. But the film trips repeatedly over the problem of what to do with him, his confession to being an undercover CIA agent infiltrating Spalko’s team later proving to be another fraud: “What are you, some kind of triple agent?” “Nah, I just lied about being a double.” Winstone at least plays him cleverly enough so that no matter how duplicitous he gets he still seems more a jovial rogue than a real villain, and when he finally gets his punishment, sucked into a vortex of interdimensional oblivion, there’s the feeling that his last, confident pronouncement that “I’m gonna be all right,” might still turn out true, somewhere, somewhen.

Mutt’s choice of nom-de-guerre is a clever touch in itself, suggesting both sarcastic pride in playing the outlaw bad boy even though he’s actually a private school reject, whilst also nodding to the way Indy preferred his family dog’s name to his own (and its real source in Lucas’ pet dog). Both father and son struggle through realising new dimensions to their identity. LaBeouf had earned a deal of general enmity for his overbearing performances as the whiny shit somehow anointed as galactic hero in Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, and it’s fair to say he never makes a convincing inheritor for Ford (who could be?). But LaBeouf is nonetheless actually very good as Mutt, leaving behind junior Woody Allen neuroticism for a deft portrayal of a wannabe rugged type who’s not quite there yet, humiliated occasionally in his efforts to seem up to the task but also making sterling shows of intelligence and gumption whilst also trying to hold character, as when he takes a moment, when Spalko threatens to torture him to make Indy give up information, to make sure his hair is perfect again before inviting her to do her worst. Mutt also has flashes of real concern and pity for Ox, who has served as something of a surrogate father figure for him, that reveal the deeper, maturing man within. Indy’s own, more fractious relationship with Ox is summarised as he tries to get through to him: “You were born in Leeds, England. You and I went to school together at the University of Chicago and you were never this interesting.”

As for Ford himself, his career and reputation had been waning although he was still a top leading man in the late 1990s and early 2000s, from frowning his way through too many lacklustre vehicles. Returning to playing Dr Jones, whilst not entirely free of moments where he strains to hit the same old cocky charm, nonetheless did much to revive him, and the quality of his performances in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) and Blade Runner 2046 (2017) owe much to the way he connected his aging self to his younger here. The sight of a sixty-something rumbling has its silly side and yet fits the character to a certain extent. Indy was always defined by both his durability but also his undeniable physical realism, a man who most definitely felt the pains of his exertions afterwards, whilst here he seems more energised, more angrily potent, the more knocks he tales: grant me an old man’s frenzy indeed. The performance works ultimately because the film allows Indy’s funny side to come to the fore, as Ford is particularly good when Indy struggles through his new family troubles with an amusing blend of outrage and pathos. The worms finally turn as Indy, Mutt, and Marion ride in a Soviet truck as Spalko’s team follow the clues Indy deciphers from Ox’s ravings towards Akator, a road-clearing engine leading a convoy through the depths of the Amazon.

A family argument rages as the trio accost one-another for betrayals and absences, Mutt’s own discovery that Indy is his father comes with its own edge of shock, forced to reconfigure his view of himself as emulating the wild and doomed pattern of his stepfather, a fighter pilot who died during the war, rather than “some teacher.” When the annoyed Dovchenko moves to silence Marion, Indy and Mutt, squabbling tooth and nail a second before, work in perfect concert to knock Dovchenko out and free themselves from their bonds. Indy’s totemic confession to Marion about the other women in his life – “They all had the same problem, they weren’t you, honey” – proves the elusive key to both healing the rift and powering them all up for a battle with the Soviets, Indy blowing up the road engine with a rocket launcher and sparking a frenetic chase through the jungle and down the river to the fringes of Akator. This sequence is one of my favourite action interludes in any movie: god knows how many times I’ve thought of it whilst wading through others with their variably shapeless roundelays of punching and shooting and gibberish editing or lack of any invention in the way the action unfolds.

Whereas here, again, Spielberg offers a master class in how to do this sort of thing, with beautifully coherent lines of action matched to flowing, dashing camera work, the customary fisticuffs packed with humour and flashes of absurdism. Far too much, many carped, but there’s also a madcap ferocity apparent in touches like Spalko firing off a heavy machine she clings to in a desperately messy attempt to take out Marion behind the wheel as they careen through the bush. The two factions try desperately to capture the skull, Indy and Marion using speed and manoeuvring and the jungle cover to foil their enemies’ firepower. Mutt’s mooted talent for fencing is brought to bear as he and Spalko face off standing on the backs of speeding jeeps, turning the fight into a rite of passage for the next generation. Indy grins in fatherly approval; Marion instructs his fencing like a stage mom. Mutt does well but is teased by Spalko for fighting “like a young man – eager to begin, quick to finish,” and gets more literally blue-balled as he keeps getting whacked in the crotch by stems beneath, before Spalko wallops him properly with some expert judo.

Mutt gets his own back swinging through the trees Tarzan-style with a horde of mimicking monkeys, and manages to snatch away the skull, whilst Indy gets into a tooth-and-nail brawl with Dovchenko who finishes up being dragged into a nest of colossal ants after Indy finally knocks him on his ass amongst them. Marion gets her own crazy brainwave and drives the amphibious vehicle she’s commandeered with all her charges off a cliff into a huge tree’s bowers, letting it deliver them gently into the river, only to then plunge over a triple waterfall. Spielberg punctuates with dramatic dolly shots onto Spalko’s face as she realises a fired-up Jones is going to be one hell of a crimp in her plans, matched later as she draws her rapier to do battle with full, murderous commitment to the swashbuckling. John Williams’ scoring is particularly strong in capturing just the right tone in this scene, his familiar heroic strains momentarily interrupted by a lapse into Slavic reels as a nudge in the ribs alert to not just the not-so-secret edge of the pantomime to all this but also the dance-like orchestration of movement. Much complaint was also made about the amount of CGI used to augment aspects of this sequence, which has a valid edge again. But then, the series had never been shy of special effects, nor had its precursors and influences, and the visual texture resembles the matte paintings utilised in earlier films imbued with mobility.

The horde of monstrous ants that torment the heroes and villains alike suggests homage to Byron Haskin’s The Naked Jungle (1953). Whilst Kingdom of the Crystal Skull does play a pretty clean game in terms of gore, compared to the delightfully infamous excesses of the first two films, at least the image of Dovchenko being swallowed up by the critters, like the blowback dart earlier in the film and Spalko’s death by brain fry later in the film, offer a tasty reminder of the Indy’s, and his films’, willingness to play a bit dirty and flirt with horror visuals. The absurdism hits a new height as the heroic team plunge over the waterfalls in a Keatonesque sequence that concludes with the sight of Marion still clinging to the steering wheel of the amphibious vehicle after washing up ashore. After surviving the journey the adventurers enter the surrounds of Akator, where they have to brave the fearsome native trustees who guard it and penetrate its deepest vaults, entering the central pyramid via a gateway opened through releasing sand from underneath a monolith.

It’s only here that I find the film starts to develop a real problem, not because it slows down but rather because it perhaps ought to. Koepp’s script keeps letting his heroes use the skull to unlock barriers, including parting the guarding army of natives, rather than finding new and clever ways through each challenge. The final movement of The Last Crusade retains tremendous affection from its fans for the way it entwines clear and urgent character stakes whilst shifting from swashbuckling to something more subtle, as the quest engages Indy’s learning and mental prowess as well as physical bravery. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is more straightforward, lacking surprise and cleverness, except for when Indy works out how to penetrate the pyramid in a touch that again tips its hat to a model, this time to Hawks’ Land of the Pharaohs (1955). Otherwise what we get on the approach to what Lucas’ inspiration Joseph Campbell called the innermost cave feels a little too much like one of the series’ video game imitators like Tomb Raider.

When the heroes and villains both penetrate the inner chamber where the collective of alien skeletons still reside and reform into a gestalt projection, Spalko and Mac meet their comeuppances, both foiled by their divergent brands of greed, and the aspect of the series influenced moralistic fairy tale returns. Spalko has her brain burned out by the relentless flow of knowledge the alien collective exudes, a fate wittily mediated by Spalko’s almost erotic revelry as streams of psychic energy pierce her being but eventually, literally blow her mind, her mantra “I want to know!” finally gaining orgasmic climax as flames sprout from her eyes. The parochial quality to the film’s ultimate moral – “Knowledge was their treasure,” Indy declares after realising the aliens were archaeologist like him in collecting artefacts – is at once corny but also fits its surrounds like a glove: the aliens ultimately vindicate Indy’s faith in his metier. And if the immediate scenes preceding lack the feeling of real novelty, Spielberg nonetheless makes up for it and then some, with his crescendo image of the alien craft buried under Akator rising out of the ground. The pyramid and city disintegrate as a churning whirlwind grows, a colossal, silver flying saucer rising amidst flying stony debris before vanishing. Debris falls back to earth when free of the gravity flux in a thunderous rain of stone and the Amazon River is unleashed in a deluge through punctured gaps in fringing hills, slamming down upon the ruins and drowning them.

This is certainly Spielberg’s most direct emulation of one his eternal filmic touchstones, the parting of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments (1956). It’s also the counterpoint to the sight of the atomic bomb, with Indy again framed as dwarfed yet determinedly witnessing as the rules of reality are again rewritten, this time opening vast new horizons of experience rather than merely threatening doomsday: the eternal trade-off of modernity encapsulated in one great arc of vision. This shot also resolves the film’s visual language, the recourse to fluid master shots throughout finally gaining ultimate context as Spielberg presents this image of wonder in one, fixated, brilliantly executed shot that binds the cosmic and the human, locating the essence of cinematic spectacle in the direct gaze. The coda resorts to a wryly campy but also fulsome portrayal of homecoming and restoration. Indy is made Associate Dean and marries Marion before approving guests including Mutt, Ox, and Stanforth, Marion kissing her husband with merry lustfulness that startles the old roué. Mutt picks up Indy’s wind-toppled hat from the church floor only for Indy to pluck it from his grasp on his way out. Not quite yet, son. The deep-veined richness of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the fact that it really only uses genre thrills to hang its delight with life’s wayward adventure upon, perhaps indicates why it aggravated people seeking more monotone pleasures, but also stands as reason why, like its hero, its best days still wait before it.