Spoilers ahead as I will probably reveal almost every retarded plot point in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to tell you exactly what is wrong with the latest Indy installment.

The movie opens on a sour note… CGI prairie dogs.  Is it so hard to find actual prairie dogs that they had to rely on CGI?  Perhaps not a big deal, but Indiana Jones movies are supposed to be full of campy old fashioned effects.  Not creepy unrealistic rodents.

Next, for no reason that appears to have any bearing on the rest of the movie, Russians, posing as US soldiers, attack some secretive base in what appears to be Nevada.  Nuclear testing is going on, so Nevada is a likely candidate.  They break into a hangar to steal stuff from the Roswell UFO crash.  This is when you say, “Dear lord, this movie had better not be about aliens.”  Don’t hold your breath.  The doors of this massive warehouse/hangar are covered with a giant “51″.  At this point I, being a huge nerd, first got really mad at the movie.  Everyone knows that (Area) “51″ is the secret base in Nevada where the Air Force tests UFO technology, it’s not a hangar designation.  It also goes without saying that the Roswell crash remains are kept in Hangar 18 on an airbase in Ohio.  And I shouldn’t have to tell you that the Ark of the Covenant (seen briefly as Indy makes his escape) is stored in an Army crate in an Army warehouse (See Raiders of the Lost Ark) and that the Roswell remains would have been kept by the Air Force.

After some silly fighting in what appears to be Jabba’s palace with some old knobs and switches, Indy makes his way into a small town.  Sneaking past the commies, he slips into a house only to find that all of the people there are mannequins.  He seems puzzled until an air raid siren anounces that it’s time for personnel to get the hell out of Dodge as there is only one minute until a nuclear test.  Indy stumbles awkwardly over a few plastic people until he blunders his way into a lead lined refridgerator.  The bomb goes off in the distance and the town is vaporized, except for Indy’s fridge.  It is thrown miles away and our hero escapes unharmed to turn and stare into the giant fireball he so narrowly escaped from.  Let’s review the facts:

• Being 2 miles from a nuclear bomb, you need more than a few millimeters of lead to protect you from the radiation.  In fact, you need more than that to protect you from an XRay machine.
• Lead has a very low melting point, about 620 degrees Fahrenheit.  The initial flash from a nuclear bomb can burn your shadow into concrete.  We’re talking thousands of degrees.
• No matter how much shielding from heat and radiation you might have, the resulting shock wave would turn a fridge into dust, not propel it to a safe distance.
• Whoever came up with this scene should not be allowed to breed.

Moving on… we spend a long time with a lot of boring parts.  The FBI sends two bumbling clowns to investigate Indy, he gets fired, commies hate statues and we find out that the only way to make Shia LeBeouf less appealing is to make him a “greaser”.  Also, Indiana Jones was a spy?  WTF?  He’s not a spy, he’s a professor/archeologist.  That’s what drives him.  If I could revoke Spielberg’s right to the character, I would.  Oh, before I forget, the instant that LeBeouf reveals that he’s looking for his mother who knows Indy, you realize that he’s Indy’s son.  The movie will string you along for another 90 minutes, but it will be no surprise.

Some silly clues send Indy to South America to seek the Crystal Skull in Peru ontop of Weathertop.  While he and LeBeouf are poking around, they get attacked by Nazgul indigenous people.  I learned from this scene that poisoned darts are pointy and poisoned on both ends and if you just force the dart back toward the person holding the blow gun, it’ll poison him instead.  I also learned that this movie was going to be unrelentingly stupid.  Indy, of course, finds the crystal skull and learns that gold is attracted to magnetic substances.  The skull itself is obviously supposed to be an actual alien’s skull, not just a representation.  Nevermind that the jaw and cranium appear to be one solid piece that would allow no movement of the mouth.  In true Indiana Jones fashion, the bad guys stop Indy as he leaves the cave and capture him and the skull and LeBeouf (french for “the beouf”).

Their escape from Cate Blanchett’s (I’ll say this, this isn’t her worst movie, but it’s not much better than Bandits) nefarious clutches is possibly the most drawn out, convoluted fight scene I’ve ever witnessed.  Characters are jumping back and forth between vehicles so often that you feel like you’re playing three-card monte.  All is confusing and absurd enough, but the movie has to take it one step further.  Somehow, LeBouef finds himself dangling from a vine dozens of feet in the air after being yanked off a vehicle (some kind of magical vine).  Next to him, he sees one of his own kind.  A spider monkey.  Suddenly, everything makes sense to our confused greaser.  Shouting, “Monkeys go!” (ok, that part, I made up, the rest is true) he literally swings into action along with a gang of other monkeys.  He is suddenly one with the monkeys, swinging gracefully from tree to tree.  Maybe his father wasn’t Indy, but a spider monkey.  He and his new-found family attack Cate Blanchett’s vehicle, which is soon swarming with monkeys (still not making this up).

Because the movie hadn’t given us an absurd enough look at the fauna of the Amazon, the fight soon ends up on the hill of a fictional species of gigantor ant.  These ants don’t just eat people, they drag them whole into their lair.  I know that the Amazon has some pretty scary species of ants, but none of them will drag you off in one piece.  I think you can imagine how this action sequence goes.

From there, the movie follows a few more jumps in logic until all of the characters are implausibly brought before the council of crystal alien skeletons who use their eye lasers to burn out Cate Blanchett’s eyes.  By this point, I had lost the will to live. The End.

P.S. – Mr Spielberg, if you hand over the Indiana Jones reins to Shia LeBoof, I will never forgive you.  You will be dead to me.