Indiana Jones and the Lost Art of Movie Reviews

I'm old enough to have seen each Indiana Jones movie in the theater on opening days.

I love the character and truly relish pulp serials … the cliffhangers.

Growing up, I was able to see all of the "King of the Rocket Men" serial chapters from 1949 on television. Each chapter was a short film which ended with the main character hurtling toward certain doom. Just before the danger - such as hanging from a cliff - is resolved, the chapter ends leaving viewers waiting for the next installment to see what happens.

Logic and plausibility were not high on the priority list in solving a cliffhanger ending. Often times it was pure luck that saved our hero. There was a lot of cheesiness to the serials, leaving them more escapist material for youngsters then grand cinema aimed at the noblest purpose of art.

This is part of the appeal for me. I enjoyed watching Indiana Jones jump from certain doom at the hands of the Nazis, wrath of God, Thugee cult and various other villains with a gleeful roller coaster sensation.

It's been 19 years between Indiana Jones ran loose in the world with his father Henry in tow, and 27 years since we met him running from a large ball of rock just to jump out of the cave and into the path of a villain and a jungle tribe complete with blow guns and poisonous darts.

The latest installment is set in the 1950s, complete with everything a good 1950s pulp serial would contain except it was missing large insects mutated by atomic bombs. There were ants, but they didn't appear atomically mutated.

It had Area 51, Roswell, Russians instead of Nazis, the alien-shaped crystal skull and even a bit of Mayan ruins to complete the story.

The biggest hurdle for Indy wasn't the villains but the movie critics. In their attempts to display their cinematic intellect, many ignored the escapist feel of the pulp serials and managed to get off track. It often showed their lack of experience or their personal absorption of their own world, where they are at the center of it.

Philip Martin of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette displayed his intolerance for fun movies by writing, "… bored me to the point that I really wanted to get up and leave the theater."

Critic Stephen Himes reviewed the wrong movie. He is obviously a "Star Wars" fan who is still upset with Indiana Jones movies producer George Lucas about "Star Wars: Episode I."

"You sense that if Lucas had his way, Harrison Ford would have measured Shia LeBouuf's midiclorian levels," Himes wrote.

Hollywood Report Card's Ross Anthony almost had it right but continued and demonstrated his lack of understanding of the serial world logic. I suspect he is a Michael Bay fan.

"An amusement park ride. Kind of fun, but we know there's no real danger. The film never has an edge (save for a great hotrod scene)," Anthony wrote.

Chances are these critics never took time to understand the genre.

Most critics got it. They understood the lightweight action movie serials and what the Indiana Jones series is meant to be.

Even Lisa Schwarzbaum from Entertainment Weekly magazine seemed to understand it, despite her reputation for basing reviews of movies with how close they follow her feminist ideals. But by the end of the review, she appears to be trying to prove her intelligence when trying to find reasons to dislike it.

The shame is these critics, people whom we look to for advice on movies, fail to tell us if the film is entertaining. In reviews I see a lot of personal opinions that have nothing to do with the movie.

One critic wrote a review for the DVD release of "A Star is Born," with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, and spent the entire time telling readers how he hated 1970s fashion and hairstyles without ever talking about the story, characters or movie in general.

The new Indiana Jones movie was very entertaining. It held the power to make many of us feel 13 again. We had a favorite hero staying in character, a "new" set of villains and henchmen doing their best to thwart our hero, familiar story elements providing a degree of comfort and excitement, laughs, thrills and a bit of cliffhanging.

A lot of people have seen it. If viewers act as critics when buying tickets, it would mean the inexperienced or off-the-track critics are outnumbered.

Heck, I've already seen it twice. Take that, Philip Martin of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Bill Stevenson is the managing editor of the Columbia Basin Herald, and also a revered elder role model to the editorial staff, some of whom weren't born when Indiana Jones first cracked his whip across the screen.