Well this was a very entertaining movie. Disengage your brain, sit back, and enjoy the ride. I have a problem with calling this an "Indiana Jones" movie. While there is always excitement, always thrills, always a tenacious villain, always intriguing legends even though sometimes obscure, and there is also always at least plausible science. The last is where this falls down. I will explain this further on.
It's nineteen fifty-seven and the movie starts with a kidnapped Indy being brought to the warehouse that we last saw at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark". The object they want is highly magnetized so Indy uses the iron in the gunpowder from several grenades to find the case. He throws handfuls up and they follow the trail. Given the size of the warehouse and the limited potential for iron in grenades the power levels on the case must be off the scale. When they finally find it, the pull while evident, is so mild as to be negligible to the metal wearing, gun toting soviets. It doesn't even stick to the jeep when it is hit by a truck.
Escaping the Soviets is truly a case of out of the frying pan. He finds himself in a strange town with plastic people and no water. Everybody say its' atom bomb testing. Indy survives by locking himself in a refrigerator. As a result of this encounter the FBI (this is during the McCarthy era) makes his life hell and the university puts him on extended leave. While leaving on a train he is both followed and found, the former obviously KGB, the latter "Mutt" (Shia). Mutt has a letter from his mother with a page from Indy's friend with strange writing. Indy and Mutt follow the clues to Peru and then to Brazil. Along the way they encounter Marion Indy's ex-fiancee from Raiders, oh yeah she is Mutt's mom.
Indy solves the rest of the clues and they save the world. The soviets get the bad end they deserve. Everybody goes home happy.
Extras
They consist of the usual making of, stills, trailers, post production, special on props, pre-visualization sequences, and a game. The game (Indiana Jones Legos) is only for the Xbox360. The pre-visualization sequences are pretty neat, kind of like a "Clone Wars" style Indiana Jones short. The Prop special and the Skull special both contain neat info on how the props were made and gives an interesting insight into how they chose each item.
Overall kind of fun. We're watching it over the holiday.
Three and one half stars out of five stars. - Bob LaPierre
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