So I wasn’t sure whether I’d seen this movie before — I knew I’d seen Last Crusade and The Magic Fridge, but I wasn’t sure about the first two — so figured I’d watch it again/for the first time. (In retrospect, I think I have seen it before, because little bits of it were memorable.)

So this is one of those movies that a lot of people our age watched as kids, but I never did. And I have to say, from the perspective of 2019, wow does it not hold up well. The casual racism can get by as a kind of pulp trapping, but the misogyny is off the charts fucked-up, especially the part where it’s implied that Indy is a pedophile.

But beyond all that, it’s just… not a very good movie. It’s the spiritual heir to the Da Vinci Code — they set up a preposterous historical/mystical mystery, and then have to follow the trail of silly clues. But the connective tissue is weak, it’s really just a collection of setpieces that only make sense if you don’t think carefully about them. (The worst of which is at the end, in which Indy gives advice he has no reason to know, as something happens that has no relation to any of the background they’ve doled out.)

This is obviously a super-iconic movie, but it’s not a good one.