Adventure is back with Indiana Jones

In theaters Thursday: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

New on DVD: National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets

Like Star Wars and the first Batman, the Indiana Jones movies were adventures I literally grew up watching. I was a young kid in the 1980s and watching this college professor run rampant through barely escapable scenarios with whip in hand was more than entertainment for this 7-year-old. I felt like I was learning something about the world — both fact and fiction — and a little, too, about the heart.

I’ll be in the theater this weekend watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I know some reviews have been negative, while others, including a standing ovation at Cannes, have been quite good. But as often as I review new movies and DVDs, I can’t honestly say that I am going into this one as a critic. When the lights go down and that familiar mountaintop Paramount logo emerges, the insignificant accessories of a movie writer — the notebook, the rating systems, the cerebral spin on cinema, the know-it-all tone — are going to melt away (not unlike those Nazi faces at the end of Raiders), and time will stand still then spin backwards as the challenges of adulthood and all the ugly cynicism and rationalizations that come with it will simply become untrue, until all that remains is a little kid who pleaded with his mom for a leather jacket, not because he wanted to look stylish at school, but because he wanted to be Indiana Jones for Halloween. The one who practiced Harrison Ford’s dialogue in the mirror. The one who, when his older sister asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, said without hesitation “archeologist.”

I guess you could say my expectations are really high, but in another sense I don’t have any at all. What other expectations can be had when yours have already been met and surpassed by a long shot? All that remains is joy. Writer Peter Martin is another Indiana Jones fanatic and you can read his honest critique of each movie here. And the great Roger Ebert gives us his take on Crystal Skull, too. Just so you know, this is one of the few links I’ve ever posted in my blog that I did not actually click through. So I don’t know intricate plot details or any of the twists and turns. I don’t want to know. I want the movie to be a surprise. Kids love those.