Cornelius Holtorf has written about the movie in the New Scientist; the URL is too long to post here, but you can easily find it in the 14 May edition.

The only bit that actually annoyed me though was indy’s blurting out of “I like Ike!” as his last words. I realize they are trying get a “look and feel”, but come on, would my last words if I had a gun pointed at me by foreign spies be “Gobama!”?

(Well, maybe 20 years from now they’ll have movies about people duking it out with neocon terrorists trying to take over america)

Details aside, I thought the biggest problems were the inclusion of the predictable long lost lover and unknown son cliches. Harrison Ford and Shia Leboeuf had great chemistry without the father/son stuff (which actually kind of turned the good chemistry into tired zingers) and Ford and Karen Allen had no discernible chemistry at all. They really should have cast Calista Flockhart. Karen Allen looked like she hadn’t acted in 25 years. (Has she?)

Oh yeah, John Hurt was totally wasted.

I liked that the “aliens” were from another dimension rather (?) than world. And Cate Blanchett had one of my new favorite movie lines ever–“You fight like a young man; eager to engage, quick to finish.”

My biggest problem, however, was simply that the third act sucked. The first act was great and raised my expectations for the rest of the film, but by the third act I was looking at my watch. But I suppose if we are comparing it to the disaster that was Star Wars Episodes 1-3, then our expectations are already pretty low.

@Elena: Don’t they say that the language of the pictograms is a dead language and that the archaeologists have to translate it via Maya which is what they know?

I actually believe that the over-the-top depiction of “natives” and “aliens” etc.. neutralizes what would have been a more pernicious and insidious result if they had attempted to make a more ’serious’ movie.

But who am I to say, I also loved Cate Blanchett’s terrible Russian accent.