Indiana Jones And The Order Of The Phoenix

Or whatever it was called.

Imagine this. You bump into an old friend somewhere, and you're glad to see
them. So you arrange to go out for a drink with them. And you do. And you
reminisce, and you catch up, and you have a perfectly pleasant time. And then
at the end of the evening, you both say "we really must do this again", and
then neither of you ever bothers calling the other one again.

This film is like that kind of evening. Essentially, we have a perfectly
pleasant couple of hours going over all the times we've had with Indy in the
past, catching up with what he's been up to since we last saw him, have a few
laughs, and then we're done.

This is pretty much Indy by the numbers. Essentially, there's a lot of people
getting thrown out of lorries, mysterious artifacts you don't want to be in the
same room as when they go off, Nazis (albeit actually much less satisfying to
shoot commies these days) and some of the greatest pre-industrial engineering
ever made, mostly involving stone slabs and counterbalances.

It's practically a remake of Raiders, with very little indeed added or
subtracted from the formula. Spielburg and Lucas clearly thought that if it
ain't broke, don't fix it, which I must say is a refreshing departure for
Lucas. What it doesn't do is advance or even change the plot at all. As such, I
just don't see the need for it.

In defence of the movie, as effectively an adequate re-run of Raiders of the
Lost Ark, it's a pretty diverting use of two hours, and it really is nice to
see Indy back in action again. Not too much is made of the fact he's got older,
and rather than doing the creaky "ooh, I'm not as young as I used to be" crap
all the time, we're given the impression that he's just getting better at
kicking the shit out of people and throwing them out of trucks as time goes on.
Kind of like Cohen the Barbarian in the Discworld novels.

Ultimately, it's an idle pleasure, a pointless diversion, albeit quite an
entertaining one.