It’s not the years, Honey. It’s the mileage.

I was just very opposed to this whole thing. Not like hunger-strike opposed, but a little more than just annoyed. The new “Rocky” installment last year annoyed me. “The Land Before Time 17” annoyed me. “Basic Instinct 2”—well, that was just comedy gold. But this? Did they really have to? Indiana Jones?

The third one was called “The Last Crusade.”

“LAST.”

I took that to mean that there weren’t to be any more Indiana Jones adventures.

And I was fine with that. The existing three were beautiful and timeless things.

But I get it now—that “crusade” was used in the narrower, historical sense of the word. Middle ages. Grail. Nazis are bad. I get it. The fourth is here. I blame semantics.

I had to blame something. It has been nineteen years since “The Last Crusade.” In movieland, it’s the 50’s. Dr. Marcus Brody is dead. Professor Henry Jones the First is dead. (Wait: didn’t he sip from the Holy Grail? Whatever.) The atomic bomb has been invented. Suburbia has risen. Preppies hate Greasers. Communism looms. And the Soviets want an ancient crystal skull—Mayan—which happens to be curiously elongated and severely magnetic. Allegedly, its possessor wields unknown powers! So the stiff-chinned Soviets abduct none other than Dr. ‘Indiana’ Jones to help them find it.

You can probably guess at what happens from here. Indy escapes. He discovers that his old friend—who has been raving incoherently about Akator (also known as El Dorado) and some mysterious skull—is being held captive in South America. He sets out to free him (and to, of course, find the damn artifact). He’s followed. He’s captured. He’s followed again. Then he’s captured again just after a major discovery. Et cetera. People with guns and accents. It’s the Raiders formula—not that we’re complaining. It’s very predictable, is all. And it used to be very endearing.

Somehow, though, the charm is lost with this new installment. I found it more difficult to suspend my disbelief. Especially when young Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf, “Transformers”) starts swinging on vines through the jungle and manages to head off a pair of speeding vehicles. Or when Indiana gets caught in a nuclear test-blast but survives by locking himself in a lead-lined refrigerator.

But the other films had scenes like this too. Why didn’t it work as well this time?

It may just be the prevailing aesthetic of the “right now.” Recently, Hollywood’s revamped James Bond by making it more realistic. Before that, they revamped Batman by making it more realistic. But, at the same time, we’ve seen a rise in popularity of the outrageously unreal—300, Beowulf, Kingdom of Heaven, Wanted. Just like in politics, there’s a move toward polarity, extremes. A plotting of the “realism” points might look like cellular mitosis. Maybe there’s no room in the middle anymore for a dusty, ophidiophobic hero whose lips bleed right alongside magical crystal skulls and twenty-something Tarzans.

Then again, maybe the whole “alien” thing threw me off. Among the things Harrison Ford is not, there’s Will Smith.

All this is not to say that the movie was completely without merit. A few well placed one-liners were enough to show that Indiana hasn’t lost his wit. And Spielberg, in general, knows how to direct. The movie runs almost seamlessly, bounding along to the timeless John Williams score, and is packed with the razzle-dazzle action sequences we’ve come to expect.

Comparisons are inevitable. The guy in front of me was really upset. The girl next to me was pleasantly surprised. In the end, neither was reacting to “Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull.” They were reacting to “Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull” vs. its predecessors. The fairness in this is questionable, but they must have known what they were facing. It’s a tall order to dust off something so colossal as Indiana Jones and present it anew. Antiques don’t always function so well. But if we’ve learned anything, they’ve got some monetary value.