Review: Indiana Jones 4 Sucked

Published 2008-06-02 at 15:18:38Z under homepage, Movies
2 of 5 stars
Indiana Jones 4

As far as I'm concerned, there are only three Indiana Jones movies. The fourth
simply does not count. Lucas took a great thing and tried to stretch it just a
little too far and ended up with something horrifying.

As far as I'm concerned, there are only three Indiana Jones movies. The fourth
simply does not count. Lucas took a great thing and tried to stretch it just a
little too far and ended up with something horrifying. There are spoilers
below, so if you haven't seen the movie, stop reading now.

The first are the big changes. The film takes place the 1950s. No more Nazis.
Our villains this time are the commie Russians. Our main antagonist, played by
Cate Blanchett, feels like a James Bond villain rather than the villains we've
known from earlier films. Way overdone. And then there were the aliens. But
more on that later.

Ford was great. The same Indy we've grown to love. But his character went
through a number of events that were completely implausible. I could write off
some of the fantastic events of previous movies by getting into the story.
Maybe there was a Grail. If the Ark was real, maybe it would have powers. But I
couldn't do that with this movie.

First there was the "magnetism". Jones threw up some gunpowder to see where it
would be drawn through the air. First, neither gunpowder nor lead shot is
magnetic, so whatever it was that was attracting this stuff, it wasn't
magnetism. Second, magnetic fields follow the inverse square law. Double the
distance, quarter the strength of the field. If throwing this stuff up in the
air caused it to fly toward the source, he should have felt it tugging on the
stuff while it was in his hand, and given the speed it was moving, gravity
should have yanked it back down harder than the "magnetic" field. But fine,
this was something "alien" so maybe it wasn't really a magnetic field. But it
was the first sign that something wasn't quite right.

Next was the atomic bomb. Jones found himself in a mock town about to be blown
up by a nuclear test. He hides in a lead-lined refrigerator to protect himself
from the radiation, which seems like it could be effective (no idea if the lead
would be enough), but when the shock wave hits, destroying the town, he's
thrown (seemingly) miles away, landing in the desert, a safe distance from the
explosion. No human would survive the forces of the initial blast nor cratering
in the desert floor inside a freakin' refrigerator. It's getting worse.

Jones and crew then survived three falls over giant waterfalls, inside a
vehicle. My physics may be a bit rusty, but once the front of the vehicle hits
bottom, your body is still in a free-fall, and the vehicle is now stopped just
as surely as it had been if it were waiting at the bottom of the falls.

And then there was the flying saucer. The "crystal skulls" were in fact alien
skulls, and you put them back together and they become a real alien, who then
starts up his giant flying saucer and disappears, with what appears to be a
cubic mile worth of dirt and rock swirling around him.

How can you have a flying saucer in an Indiana Jones movie?

But beyond all of the above, the movie simply didn't have an engaging story. I
wasn't motivated to solve the puzzle with Indy. This was a sad day.

π
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