We saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull last night. (Spoilers below, after the jump, although they only involve stuff from the first part of the movie.)

I thoroughly enjoyed it. I loved that it was in many ways a throwback to 1980s movie-making, which is what Spielberg intended, as he said in Vanity Fair a few months ago:

Rather than update the franchise to match current styles, Lucas and Spielberg decided to stay true to the prior films’ look, tone, and pace. During pre-production, Spielberg watched the first three Indiana Jones movies at an Amblin screening room with Janusz Kaminski, who has shot the director’s last 10 films. He replaces Douglas Slocombe, who shot the first three Indy movies (and is now retired at age 94), as the man mainly responsible for the film’s look. “I needed to show them to Janusz,” Spielberg says, “because I didn’t want Janusz to modernize and bring us into the 21st century. I still wanted the film to have a lighting style not dissimilar to the work Doug Slocombe had achieved, which meant that both Janusz and I had to swallow our pride. Janusz had to approximate another cinematographer’s look, and I had to approximate this younger director’s look that I thought I had moved away from after almost two decades.”

Spielberg promises no tricky editing for the new one, saying, “I go for geography. I want the audience to know not only which side the good guy’s on and the bad guy’s on, but which side of the screen they’re in, and I want the audience to be able to edit as quickly as they want in a shot that I am loath to cut away from. And that’s been my style with all four of these Indiana Jones pictures. Quick-cutting is very effective in some movies, like the Bourne pictures, but you sacrifice geography when you go for quick-cutting. Which is fine, because audiences get a huge adrenaline rush from a cut every second and a half on The Bourne Ultimatum, and there’s just enough geography for the audience never to be lost, especially in the last Bourne film, which I thought was the best of the three. But, by the same token, Indy is a little more old-fashioned than the modern-day action adventure.”

Spoilers follow.

I love the fact that Crystal Skull takes place 19 years after Last Crusade (1957 vs. 1938), the same amount of time it’s been since the last movie was released (2008 vs. 1989). That gives us a realistic sense of the passage of time. World War II has come and gone, it’s the height of the Cold War, and Americans live in a conformist, television culture. I enjoyed the occasional references to Indy’s adventures over the years and I felt kind of sad that we missed out on them.

If 1989 was 1938, and 2008 is 1957, then that means that World War II was as long ago relative to the new movie as the early 1990s were for us today. The atomic bombs fell on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945 (1996). Milton Berle became a big television hit in 1948 (1999). I Love Lucy premiered in 1951 (2002). The Army-McCarthy hearings were in 1954 (2005). And now Indy’s a middle-aged archeology professor on a 1950s college campus.

I like thinking about things like that.

Oh, and I don’t know whether it was intentional or not, but one scene in the new movie echoed a scene in the Back to the Future, which made me happy. (Steven Spielberg’s team is the executive producer of both movie franchises.) There’s a fight in a malt shop, just like in BTTF. The camera cuts to an exterior shot of the shop’s entrance, just like in BTTF, with people running out of the shop, just like in BTTF, and the shop’s entrance is on a street corner, placed similarly to Lou’s Cafe in BTTF.

Also, as a writer on a Back to the Future fan site points out, the original draft of the BTTF screenplay includes a couple of other dropped concepts that foreshadow the new Indiana Jones movie. In the original BTFF script, the time machine involves a lead-lined refrigerator, and Doc and Marty wind up at a 1950’s nuclear test site designed to look like suburbia, where there’s a living room with a TV showing Howdy Doody.

Here’s an excerpt from that draft.

INT. TRACT HOUSE – MARTY

Amazingly enough, it looks like a model home—there is furniture, magazines on the tables, a TV, a radio.

In the dining room, more MANNEQUINS are seated at the table, which is set with full place settings. Marty wanders through the house, chuckling at the idiocy of it all.

MARTY

goes into the kitchen and has a look around. There is a Frigidaire refrigerator—Marty opens it and discovers it is well stocked with food, including meat, cheese, milk, eggs, Coke, fruit and vegetables. Marty takes an apple, has a bite, and returns to the living room.

INT. LIVING ROOM

Marty turns on the TV. Snow. He switches channels and finally tunes in a picture—the “Howdy Doody” Show. Marty watches Clarabell dancing around and shakes his head.

MARTY

The “fabulous fifties.”

INT. DETONATION CONTROL

The countdown continues.

Weird, huh?