Crystal Skull, for me, is really one of the most disappointing continuation of any series ever. It's even worse than the Star Wars prequels (and later on sequels), because those at least managed to set up interesting world building apart from being bad movies. It's no surprise that Lucas had a say in both of them.

Temple of Doom was nowhere near the quality of Raiders or Last Crusade, but it was still a good Indy movie. They should have never touched the franchise again after the trilogy. Harrison Ford is Indy. And Indy without his charisma & agility is just really plain…

I still think it's funny how now some people after watching new SW trilogy go "hell, prequels weren't that bad after all"

In a comparison to the Crystal Skulls, the SW prequels were much better. That doesn't make the prequels good.

In the SW series, the recent versions were not as good as the original trilogy but still better than the prequels.

my thought after seeing Crystal Skull was "THIS was the script they chose?"

like, any of the thousands of fan scripts written in the intervening years would've been better. how did no adult in the room shut it down? how did Harrison Ford not say "this is shit, do it over?"

does George Lucas have just an entire vault of pee tapes, one for each person in Hollywood?

Fate of Atlantis would have made such a good movie almost scene by scene.

I don't think you need pee tapes when you can literally shower them with gold.

Actually, that would be a proper use for all of the de-aging CGI and AI: give us a Fate of Atlantis with real life actors!

Or perhaps it's already possible today with some kind of style transfer where you feed in the game's screenshots...

oh my god i loved that game. I WILL TRADE YOU MY GIRLFRIEND FOR A SQUAB ON A STICK CMON DO IT

I always liked Doom the most. But I was like 13 when I first watched them so perhaps the campiness of Doom appealed to me as it was perhaps Goonies-esque for me at the time..

I don't think audiences have gotten dumber, but what has happened for most major motion pictures like Crystal Skull is that the plots have been simplified for an international audience. When you have to translate a story into 50 different languages, you have to keep the story pretty basic and straight forward or else expend lots of effort in each translation to take into account cultural nuance, humor, innuendo, etc.

That's one reason you see so much more reliance on special effects and crazy action. Because those are pretty universally entertaining.

So in other words, globalization has ruined the film industry.

I found it interesting that the plots always seemed to match the scripts, stereotypes and cinematography styles of the eras that the plots occur in. That's what stood out more to me.

Yes, the dialogue in Crystal Skull wasn't the greatest but it didn't really take away the fun for me.

I remember when Siskel & Ebert (the original Siskel and Ebert) reviewed The Last Crusade in 1989, Siskel gave a thumbs-down because the father-son relationship wasn't believable. Ebert's response was, to paraphrase, this is an Indiana Jones movie, not a real-life drama.