Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull [use spoiler tags, please]

[Alex]

Why would he feel like a mutt? Up until the reveal he thought his dad was an RAF pilot that died during the war (if I'm remembering that correctly).

I am only bothered by the prairie dogs in hindsight. Before I knew they weren't an anomaly but rather a harbinger of the bad CGI to come.

I agree that all of the previous Indy's, even the first one, had cartoonish effects and stunts. But want to reiterate (and echo Chernabog) that this time around it felt like EVERY stunt and action sequence was stupidly over the top and inflated by (surprisingly poor) CGI.

Another thing that has been percolating for me is that the movie suffers (and this isn't fair to it, really, but remains so) from feeling like it is no longer trailblazing but simply copying its own imitators. That is no longer a riff on a bygone style of movie making but instead a riff on The Mummy and National Treasure and such things. This was brought home when I saw the ending of Crystal Skull called a mash-up of X-Files and The Mummy Returns.

With the first three Indiana Jones movies, even when they weren't sterling works of craft I still felt like they were defining themselves and a genre. I didn't feel that at all this time. Is that fair to the movie as a standalone object? No, but then it isn't like it is being presented as a standalone object
but rather a segment in a generations spanning adventure. So I don't really feel bad for considering it within that larger context.