Close encounters

After just one week online, the trailer for Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was viewed at the official site more than 200 million times. That’s not including rips of the clip on YouTube and other video depots.

So what do fans get in those precious first clips of new Indy footage since 1989’s The Last Crusade? Continuity purists may be wishing a fourth installment had been made 15 or even 10 years ago. Though still in whip-crackin’ shape, star Harrison Ford’s advanced age pushes the timeline up from the WWII-era 1930s to 1957. Gone are the Saturday matinee references, the post-Depression hues and the Nazis, replaced with B-movie science fiction, American Graffiti nostalgia, and plenty of Soviets—yes, even Cate Blanchett can do a cold-blooded, Cold War Ruskie.

Karen Allen returns as the feisty Marion Ravenwood, and John Hurt joins as her father Abner, who last we heard was dead in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The unsolved mysteries don’t stop there. The trailer gives us a glimpse at a magnetized crate labeled Roswell and shows Indy swinging from the rafters of the government warehouse shown at the end of Raiders as the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant.

Is Indy after the Ark again? Does he see little green men? Is the kid from Transformers really his son? Give us the crack of that whip and the trumpet hums of John Williams’ theme song, and the answers don’t matter all that much. Everyone’s favorite part-time teacher and “obtainer of rare antiquities” is back in action. “It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage.” Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull opens May 22. indianajones.com