SOURCE.

Watching post-millennial Spielberg riff on fin-de-siècle Spielberg is good fun, and revisiting Indiana Jones and company, however belatedly, is a welcome nostalgia trip; but something has definitely been lost along the way. Gone is the earlier films' undercurrent of mortality—the invigorating tension between popcorn inspiration and weightier philosophical considerations that elevated the Saturday-matinée adventures to full-fledged pop culture mythology. Instead, we now have a protagonist who can withstand ground-zero atomic blasts and successive spills over multiple deadly waterfalls with the resilience and nonchalance of a video game character. Frustratingly, the ingredients for a more satisfying story are all present: the Cold War, weapons of mass destruction, the archeological imperative to preserve the past versus the threat of political expediency to destroy the future—literally tied together with a ribbon of species-consciousness-raising alien intervention; only no one seems to have bothered to assemble the pieces. The resulting absence of any real stakes reaches its apotheosis during an anticlimax where the vaguely menacing bad guys are essentially nonplussed into oblivion by the irritatingly obtuse extra-terrestrials in a sequence that's the visual-effects equivalent of word salad. Cheerful and inconsequential, this latest franchise outing is ultimately, for better and for worse, a pleasant letdown. Grade: B-