The latest Indiana Jones movie a disturbing reflection on being incapacitated by age, self abasement and coming to some sort of a tempestuous, bitter truce with people you used to love.

Indiana Jones is a boring professor of medieval south american history, who is growing dreadfully aware of how irrelevant his specialty is in a post-modern world in the throes of the cold war.

Over two decades have passed since the time his students considered him an object of lust; and those women, now old cantankerous hags embittered by the excesses of World War II, please him not.
Now, not even the promise of a generous grading can get any of his current set of female students to give him time of day. The classrooms where he's spent so many of his years lend themselves to an easy metaphor for his life - a multiple failure, stuck in the same class as the decades roll on and the people around him and the clothes they wear and things they say change. Leaving him trapped, incapable of finding the right answers that will let him move on to the next grade of life.

He finds himself increasingly taking refuge in a perhaps imaginary world of old school adventuring but realises the hollowness at its core - unless someone else believes in these stories, they didn't happen. It doesn't help that the tales are extremely improbable - built around ludicrous premises like him having escaped an atom bomb by hiding in a lead refrigerator while fleeing from Russian agents on the hunt for mummified aliens.

In a last attempt at asserting his masculinity, he embarks on a disastrous sexual liaison with one of his young students; one where he takes the girl's consent for granted. The FBI instantly puts him on its most wanted list and he's brutally interrogated and indicted as a child abuser. One of the films most poignant and heartbreaking moments finds Jones unwilling or unable to comprehend the magnitude of his crime. Even as he's being tortured by the overzealous Feds, Jones believes this is a consequence of his run-in with the Russians and extra-terrestrial artifacts; believing his sexual transgressions are too 'silly' to merit such serious punishment.

Fired from his university job, due to his lack of a formal apology and his persistent delusions about the Red Peril, Jones is at a loose end, planning on spending the rest of his days in pastoral Africa or South America, the sites of his greatest imagined triumphs when he's kidnapped by a young aggressive homosexual.

After several scenes of torture involving spiders, monkeys, and improbably enough, spider monkeys, Jones, now in a state of almost total insanity is taken to the young man's hovel where his brain flickers back to life and he comes to a horrifying realisation. That the hideous white trash CHUD of a mother of the boy is an ex-flame and that his rapist and captor could possibly be his own son!

The rest of the film lapses into a weird almost parodic take on the sentimental family drama where the various characters come to terms with each other's failings and misgivings and learn to accept one another, though the bleak subtext is that the only option is suicide or an orgy of murder. Towards the end, Jones stuck in a deadbeat job caring for terminally ill animals muses on his long slippery slide down from the comforting womb of middle class respectability, even as UFOs manifest on the horizon, casting a shadow on all the viewer's conclusions and preconceptions about the film, its enigmatic central character and his experiences.