Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Lost Skills

Okay, so I saw Indiana Jones at the midnight show last Wednesday night... held off on posting this until after the weekend so's not to throw any biases out there! This is one of the two movies I've been really looking forward to this year ("Dark Knight" being the other one). And as I'd sen very mixed reviews ahead of time from the Cannes premiere at least I wasn't too disappointed.

But overall, I didn't think much of it.

The middle was... okay. Not bad, some good fun in there, I especially liked the scenes at and around the college. The beginning should have been exciting and fun, but something about the pacing, the timing of everything just didn't work. It's always been traditional to jump right into an adventure with Indy in these movies, but after 19 years I think that was a big mistake here... we should've been introduced to Indy in his "mundane" classroom life first... let's see who our hero has become, before following him back onto the field. Think of the fun if we spend 20 minutes or so with Professor Jones, and then he has to go back in the field with Mutt so we get a big reveal scene of him putting on the costume once more! But no.

I see what they were doing. They're playing on the 50's B movie plots, as they did with the 30's and 40's adventure serials. Okay. But, it didn't work with the same character from those earlier serials.

It was fantastic, awesome to see Karen Allen back as Marion. But, she didn't really have much to DO now, did she? And except for the one fun dialogue scene in the back of the Russian truck (and it's set-up while they're sinking in the jungle), there wasn't a lot of chances for real chemistry between the two of them.

And man, is there some bad dialogue, especially near the end... wow.

So not too much detail here, still don't want to give away spoilers, but I think it was an opportunity missed. Some nice moments to treat the fans, subtle ("I've got a bad feeling about this") and not-so-subtle (Sean Connery's photo, a statue of Denholm Elliott). It's absolutely still a must-see to any fan of the franchise. I also know a few people that really liked it, though most are in the middle (I'm slightly below the middle, I'd say!) So go, and make of it as you will.