Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Skip it. What is worth saying is that the idea underneath it is sound, which is not the usual defence offered and is more interesting than the usual complaints.

The original films are pastiches of 1930s adventure serials. Moving Indy to 1957 and swapping Nazi occultism for flying saucers is the correct next move, because that is exactly what those serials became: the pulp of the late fifties is Cold War paranoia and visitors from elsewhere. Greaser kids, a nuclear test site, Soviet agents and a crystal skull are all the right furniture. The film is not wrong in conception.

It is wrong in execution, and in a specific way: it stopped being made out of physical objects. Raiders is a film of real trucks and real dust. This is a film of digital jungle, digital waterfalls, a digital chase with two vehicles that were never in the same place, and a sequence of computer-generated animals that have no weight. The famous refrigerator survives a nuclear blast, and the problem with that scene is not the physics, it is that nothing in it looks like it is happening. Ford is good, Marion's return is welcome, and the warehouse opening is the only stretch that feels like the old films.

Nothing requires it. If you want the later-period Indy, Dial of Destiny does the same job with more on its mind.