Indiana Jones and the Hopes of a Generation

By Martha Brockenbrough
MSN Cinemama

Harrison Ford just had his chest hair waxed to protest deforestation. The sentiment is admirable, but, when it comes to Harrison Ford, all I really care about these days is his next movie, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull."

If this long-awaited sequel is a stinker, I'm going to wax some body part of mine and send the trimmings to Hollywood in a baggie.

The Earth may well suffer when her stubbly beard of trees is ripped out, but so do we when favorite movies of our childhood re-emerge as brain-damaged clones of their former selves.

So that's really the question here: Will the new Indiana Jones movie be another attack of the clones? Or will it be a reminder of all that was great about "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade"? (I'm willfully ignoring "Temple of Doom.")

For many of us parents, "Raiders of the Lost Ark" remains an archaeological exhibit of our childhoods. The years may have stacked up like sediment and petrified camel dung, but anyone who got to see "Raiders" in the theater when it came out in 1981 can no doubt unearth a memory that is equal parts awe, laughter and adoration.

Ford, fresh off his turn as Han Solo in "Star Wars" and "The Empire Strikes Back," was the perfect adventure hero: handsome, brave, funny and smart as -- and with -- a whip.

He was the kind of actor loved by men, women and children. And the movie itself was a brilliant send-up of B movies from the 1930s, mixed with humor, high stakes and clever characterization. We had to care not just for Indiana Jones, but for the whole world, which relied on his success.

It is in no way a coincidence that, even years later, leather bomber jackets were coveted by people who never intended to drop explosives from a plane.

Of the three movies in the original series, "Raiders" is the best, though the third movie, "Last Crusade," holds up pretty darned well, too.

"Raiders" starts with an incredible scene, in which Indiana Jones travels through a sultry jungle in search of a lost idol. He finds it and is nearly flattened by a giant meatball of a boulder, only to lose his trophy to an amoral French archaeologist.

The real story begins, though, when Dr. Jones is asked to find the lost Ark of the Covenant before the Nazis do. In a sharp twist, it turns out the Frenchman is working for the Nazis. The rest of the story unfolds with more twists than a pretzel, offering fistfights, knife fights, gunfights, infernos, snakes and supernatural happenings at a pace that still feels brisk today.

"Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," the second in the series, doesn't have the same delightful twists. What's more, the love interest, played by Kate Capshaw (director Steven Spielberg's wife), is nowhere near the compelling heroine that Karen Allen was in the first film.

It's good news, then, that Allen will be back in the new movie. Unlike Capshaw's whiny Willie, Allen's Marion is brave and dangerous -- a fitting match for Indy.

He's also got a compelling enemy in "Crystal Skull," just like the Nazis of the first and third movies. This time, Indy's up against the Cold War-era Soviets. What's more, special effects have improved significantly since 1981, when the first movie came out.

So what this movie is likely to come down to is the story. And that is what makes me more nervous than an archaeologist dangling over a pit of snakes. The gap between Indiana Jones movies hasn't been entirely barren. George Lucas, the story writer for the original movies, produced a TV series in the early 1990s called "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles." All three seasons of the show are out on DVD in impressively packaged sets.

They're beautiful to look at -- shot around the world on fancy sets. But this doesn't make them anywhere near as good as the movies, even with guest appearances by Catherine Zeta-Jones, Daniel Craig and Vanessa Redgrave. The issue here is the storytelling. It has none of the fizz of the movies.

For some reason, Lucas, the executive producer, decided to make this show like a little history lesson. The brand-new third set has seven episodes of the show, but dozens of short documentaries about the people he encountered during the narrative. The documentaries are pretty cool, but the zeal for history sort of takes over for good storytelling in the episodes of Young Indiana.

The episode in which Indy meets Ernest Hemingway, for example, was utterly predictable -- and Hemingway seemed like a more interesting character than young Indy. It's one of those things that sounded really good on paper, and yet doesn't really ever come to life in practice.

For the people who really love Indiana Jones, these three box sets will fill many hours between now and the May 22 movie release. They just don't offer any assurance that the movie will be everything we've missed in the last 19 years, and everything we hope our kids can experience when they behold Indiana Jones on the big screen for the first time.

Speaking of taking kids to this movie: All three Indiana Jones movies are pretty violent. The first two were rated PG, and the third was PG-13, which had just come out. "Crystal Skull" doesn't have a rating yet, but it's probably a safe bet they won't scale back on the fisticuffs, shooting and bare-handed heart removals of the original movies.

That's worth thinking about before you take really young or sensitive kids to the theater, eager to show them what you grew up watching.

After all, even though Indiana Jones will be getting a little long in the tooth, he's going to want to prove neither he -- nor his franchise -- belongs in a museum.

Here's hoping he succeeds.

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Martha Brockenbrough is Cinemama for the Parents' Movie Guide on MSN. She is also the author of "It Could Happen to You: Diary of a Pregnancy and Beyond" and the founder of SPOGG, the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar. She writes a fun-with-kids column for Cranium.com, as well as an educational humor column for Encarta. Check out her Web site.

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