From The Sunday Times, May 25, 2008
Cosmo Landesman 
I can’t remember a time when so much talk about the cinema was dominated by the age of its leading men. The sixties brigade are everywhere. Sylvester Stallone, 61, has revived Rambo; De Niro, 64, and Pacino, 68, are churning out films, sometimes together; and now along comes Harrison Ford, 65, back in the role of Indiana Jones. We ooh and ahh, saying how great they look for their age, while the ageing women of Hollywood are subjected to surgery, sneers or silence.
The question is, why has this film been made? It can’t be the money. Steven Spielberg and co claim they did it because fans wanted another Indy film. Nonsense: fans would like another Jaws by Spielberg, but they won’t be getting it. No, those involved are having a midlife movie crisis. Both Spielberg and Ford need a big hit. After all, these are the men who created the event movie back in the 1970s and have been gradually fading from view ever since. So, it’s come-back time. For fans, the news is good: it’s an entertaining if uninspired film that delivers what you’d expect. Whether younger viewers will go for it is another matter, but for those who saw the trilogy the first time around, it’s a cue to relive a past when we watched films that were in turn nostalgic for the past.
The last time we saw Indiana Jones, the world was on the brink of war. Now, it’s 1957. It’s a decade of teenage innocence and adult anxiety: Elvis and the bomb, hot rods and the cold war. The villains are a brigade of Russians who want to rule the world through mind control. But I suspect, for the liberal-minded Spielberg, the real villains are the American forces of anticommunism. It’s their hysteria that costs Jones his teaching job and sets him off on his latest adventure... [artcle continues]
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