The Methods of Dr. Jones

CNN: Experts: 'Indiana Jones' pure fiction

Indiana Jones managed to retrieve the trinket he was after in the opening moments of "Raiders of the Lost Ark." He pretty much wrecked everything else in the ancient South American temple where the little gold idol had rested for millennia.

Though he preaches research and good science in the classroom, the world's most famous archaeologist often is an acquisitive tomb raider in the field with a scorched-earth policy about what he leaves behind. While actual archaeologists like the guy and his movies, they wouldn't necessarily want to work alongside him on a dig.

Indy's bull-in-a-china-shop approach to archaeology will be on display again May 22 with "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," in which he's sure to rain destruction down on more historic sites and priceless artifacts.

To argue that Indy is an 'acquisitive tomb raider' who has a 'bull-in-a-china-shop approach to archaeology' is to entirely miss the point of the Indiana Jones movies.

And I don't mean in the sense that it's Hollywood, so of course it's going to misportray the methods of archaeology. I mean that in the plots of the Indiana Jones movies, the traditional methods of archaeology become a moot point.

Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are, fundamentally, race movies - Indy and the Nazis are both trying to acquire a priceless and powerful artifact, and the fate of the civilized world hangs in the balance. As Indy's father, Henry Jones Sr., says: "The quest for the grail is not archeology. It's a race against evil. If it is captured by the Nazis, the armies of darkness will march all over the face of the earth!"

When you're trying to get to something before the Nazis do, you don't exactly have time for a traditional archaeological dig. Indy realizes this and smashes through whatever he has to in order to prevent Hitler from having eternal life or the Ark (the Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction). The same goes for the Temple of Doom - I'm sure Dr. Jones would love to spend more time looking around at ancient artifacts, but there are several hundred child slaves in a subterranean forced labor camp, so forgive him if he doesn't take time to stake out a standard dig site.

Moreover, this article couldn't be more wrong when it says that Indiana Jones "rain[s] destruction down on historic sites and priceless artifacts"; it's the historic sites and priceless artifacts that are trying to rain down destruction on him! The Well of the Souls in Raiders, the Temple of the Crescent Moon in Last Crusade, the Temple of Doom, the South American temple mentioned above - all of these places are fraught with lethal traps and pitfalls, and it's all Indy can do to get out alive! If anything is over the top, it's the deadliness of the places themselves, not Indy's trying to escape them.

We know that most of the time, Dr. Jones is either teaching at a bucolic New England college or, indeed, doing traditional archaeological digs. But that doesn't make for good filmmaking. So lay off his methods in the movies: they're not supposed to be about archaeology. They're about "a race against evil"!