I think that George Lucas has a very visual, creative mind. Back in the 70s, he was able to create visceral, real worlds that directly contributed to his ability as a film maker. He pushed the envelope of movie technology. Now that technology has caught up with him, it appears that he’s failed to exercise the necessary control to focus on any aspect of filmmaking other than visual flair.

The first 20 minutes of Indiana Jones 4 is a roller coaster. I appreciate directors trying to start the movie on a high octane rush, but IJ4 takes the cake. The sheer number of implausible events, over-the-top sequences, and retrospective callbacks to other films caused lots of eye rolling and annoyed looks between me and my friends. It even solicited a few groans from other audience members (though my party is too well heeled to actually make a sound in a theater).

During the film’s first short expository scene, there’s a constant stream of activity. I assume that it was to take the audience’s attention away from the exceptional boring quality of the actual dialogue but it really only exacerbated the situation. Of course, the amount of exposition is quickly surpassed by a chase scene. It’s actually a decent chase scene and I’ll leave it at that.

The middle parts of IJ4 at least reminded me of Indiana Jones. It reminded me more of the Temple of Doom rather than the other, better films in the series, but I liked ToD anyway so I can’t complain too much. The problem is that the elements are all drawn from the other films. Indiana finds his way to the first crystal skull in a scene that is a lot like the library scene in Last Crusade, including Indiana taking a high vantage point.

The movie feels much more like an Indiana Jones flick in the middle but it is still wrought with problems. For instance, there’s a very odd, very short fight scene when Indiana reaches his first tomb that seems to only exist to set up a joke. There’s another chase scene that involves, hand to G-d, CGI gophers. The chase isn’t bad, but there were a lot of elements that set up more eye-rolling and groans.

The biggest problem is easily the ending. The franchise has always been willing to explore supernatural elements (often involving religious artifacts) but the ending takes the cake. No one in my group actually enjoyed the ending. It was the last groan-inducing moment. Unfortunately, it was supposed to be the payoff to the movie. Not that anything really needed to be explained but the entire ending simply had no internal logic. It was as if the movie got to this point and realized that it forgot to explain what was going on with the macguffin. It was just bad.

In the end, this was one of the worst movies that I’ve seen in a while. Everyone in my party hated it. I can’t recommend it to anyone with any respect for the franchise.