In defense of Indy IV

So I went home this weekend. It was homecoming at my high school, so a lot of my friends were going to be home. Also my boss at my old job was going out of town, it's a small video rental store where only one person works at a time. Since it was homecoming, his regular employees didn't want to work very much, and he wasn't going to be there to cover the open shifts, so he asked me to work a bit, which I happily agreed to since it's the easiest job ever. Friday night, I saw the DVD for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull sitting right next to me behind the counter. Obviously I put it in. Now I've already seen it, I saw it at the theater, and I didn't dislike it. I thought the aliens were maybe a little out of place, but no biggie. It was a fun adventure which is really all I expect from Indy. Watching it a second time, though, I decided it was actually much better than I had originally thought. It pretty much follows the formula of Raiders and Last Crusade, ignoring Temple of Doom because that movie sucks so bad I don't want to even think about it.

Anyway, here's what happens in an Indy movie: Indy gets roped into chasing down some artifact (the MacGuffin, if you will), follows it to some legendary ancient location, and discovers the legends about said place/artifact are true. Following this formula, what other legends should have been used? Now obviously there are SOME other choices, but there really aren't any that are as interesting as the Central/South American indians, are there? They might have chosen something from the bible again, but I'm not sour about them trying something different. And if you choose those civilizations, what is the most interesting legend? Definitely aliens (think 2012). I suppose they could have thrown in something about Quetzacoatl or something like that, but first of all lots of people might not know who that is, and there really aren't any interesting things that Quetzacoatl does. Like, the Judeo-Christian god at least has those interesting things like the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail, whose supernatural elements shown by Indiana Jones aren't really in the bible, are still intriguing, mysterious legends. Another thing that Kingdom suffers from is the lack of Nazis, but when you wait 20 years to make a movie some updating is required. If it's a tradeoff from Nazis to Cate Blanchett, I'm pretty much down with that. And also, Shia LaBeouf? Not a huge fan, but he played his part ably.

Now just don't get me started on Speed Racer, because that movie is so, so awesome and underrated that it makes me angry just thinking about how it gets made fun of.