What to say about this latest installment of one of my favorite movie series? It was actually somewhat disappointing, I must say. Although the fighting scenes were great and nicely reminiscent of the three original movies (Lost Ark, Temple of Doom, and Last Crusade), the alien angle was overkill. The previous movies dealt with more supernatural, magical, or religious things (take your pick) while the aliens were just out of place. Fine, even if the aliens were still in the movie, the giant saucer at the end was seriously awful.
This Indiana Jones film is hard not to compare to the earlier movies, for obvious reasons. As an individual action flick it was rather good, but for Indiana Jones it was disheartening. You see, the other films left you wondering about what would happen now, like with the ark or the weird glowing stones, or the Holy Grail, here, you saw the saucer and it left nothing to the imagination. If at least the saucer was left out, the movie would have been much better. The bad guy did perish in the classic Indiana Jones style in this newest addition, that is, they were too greedy for whatever item they were searching for which was their ultimate undoing.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull did have good points though. The filmmakers were very smart to have made the main character, Indy, the age that Harrison Ford (the actor that portrayed Indy) relatively was. If they had attempted to make Indiana Jones the same age as before, it would have been a complete disaster, even without aliens and flying saucers. It was very strange though that Indiana Jones finally settled down with Marion (first seen in Lost Ark, portrayed by Karen Allen) although it was a pleasant development in the story after a series of unsuccessful romances in the previous films.
At the very end it was obvious that there would be more sequels in which Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf), Jones’s son, will take Indy’s adventurous hat and take up the legacy for several adventures of his own.