james bond and the crystal skull.

I was worried that the new Indiana Jones movie would be like Never Say Never Again, the "unofficial" James Bond movie that Sean Connery made in 1983 (only about five years before he played Indiana Jones' dad). I love Bond and I love Connery, but the man was just too old. They made jokes about his age and they weren't trying to hide anything. They wanted us to believe that old James Bond is still James Bond. I didn't fall for it.

Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull was not like that. But if I may continue with the 007 comparison, it was kind of like watching a Roger Moore movie. You imagine a writing session of those Moore-era Bond movies to involve polling ten year old boys as to what would make super cool action sequences, regardless of whether any of the stunts are actually feasible.

"Oh, what if he went skiing off a cliff and had a parachute!"

"Ooh, yeah, and then he can cross a river by hopping on crocodiles!"

"Yeah, yeah, and then he can jump his car over a broken bridge and does a full 360 in mid-air!"

Yes, I know that Connery as Bond had his fair share of ridiculous stunts. But in the Moore movies, it was downright silly. And that's sort of fun, but it's not good film-making. Every time you watch a movie, you're making a deal with it.

"Hey, movie, I would like to be entertained. I love a good story."

"Well, I am a good story. Action! Adventure! Love! You'll like me. There's this thing, though. To make me really exciting, my makers had to play around with the laws of the universe a bit. You know. Break a couple of rules."

"Oh, I know all about that. It's cool. As long as the dialogue is good and the good guys are likeable and the bad guys are scary, I can handle throwing out my expectations of realism. Don't push it, though. I mean, I'm suspending disbelief here, but try and stay within reason, okay?"

"Of course. Have some popcorn."

And it's like that. If you at any point go, "Uhmmm, no, that could never happen" then the movie has failed by venturing outside the range of what is acceptably believable in the movie world. Raiders of the Lost Ark stayed within that range. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull did not. For me, the turning point was the characters surviving falling down three successive waterfalls in an amphibious tank. At that point, my brain said, "Nope, sorry, we're not going along." I had even managed to go along with the surviving a nuclear blast by hiding in a refrigerator bit, because it was neat, but the waterfalls were too much. After that, I couldn't stop finding bits that were just ridiculous. The movie broke its promise to me.

That's not to say the movie is not enjoyable. Indy is still Indy, and they brought back the not-annoying, not-Nazi girl. There's some good dialogue and some cute throwbacks to the other movies. It's just a different kind of entertainment. It is not a good movie. But it's a fun one.