Short little movie reviews are going to become a fairly common thing on Exploding Wumpus for the next little while as so many great movies are coming out. I’m hoping to see pretty much every movie that is on our Movie To See lists for each month. So without further ado, here is my review of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I’ve been a huge fan of the original Indiana Jones trilogy pretty much all of my life. I’m too young to have seen it when it was originally on theaters but ever since i first saw them i had really liked them. They are up there with the original Star Wars trilogy as one of my favorite trilogies. Me and a few of my friends got together a little over a month ago and watched all of the original trilogy so i’ve got the trilogy fresh in my memory.

Everything from this point on is going to have some spoilers, so if you don’t want any spoilers then don’t keep reading.

The first half of this movie follows the general Indiana Jones formula and isn’t screwed up but there also isn’t anything out of the ordinary. The “new” stuff starts to come at the end of the movie when things start to get extremely Sci-Fi-y. Now i would usually have no problem with this but it wasn’t made to be that interesting and just really didn’t fit in with the rest of the Indiana Jones series. Every other Indiana Jones movie has been at least somewhat Religiously oriented but Crystal Skull didn’t have any religion in it whatsoever. Maybe they just didn’t want to stir up controversy, but come on, don’t be pussies.

This movie has a fucking vine swinging, tarzan style scene. You wouldn’t believe how outraged i was by this scene. And not just because this is Indiana Jones, but because no movie ever needs to use vines as a method of transportation, unless it’s the sole means of transportation(and of course theirs a few other exceptions), but as a general rule, just no.

There is a possible route that i could see the Indiana Jones franchise going, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas could make another trilogy. Sorta like the second trilogy with the Star Wars series, but hopefully this one won’t be as much of a shit fest. Well i can’t even compare this to the shitfest that was Episode I, so i guess we are off to a much better start this time around. Apparently George Lucas already has an idea for a 5th movie and we all know how much he likes doing things in trilogies so we will see what happens.

Overall, i greatly enjoyed this movie. There was a few scenes and sections that would have ruined it for me, if it was anything other then Indiana Jones(Especially the aforementioned “Tarzan” scene). But it was great to see all of the old character back in full force as well as some new ones. I give this film a 7.7/10 and if you liked the previous Indiana Jones movies(and especially the characters) then i recommend you go see this as it’s a somewhat faithful progression of the story.

And of course, as usual, here is the trailer for the movie.