Those producers of the world, who wish to do whatever the hell they like with their money, and what George Lucas likes to do, is entertain middle classed boy children of about 9 to 15.  No matter how great you think the Star Wars output is, with its translation of American values to the other side of time and space, you should maybe think of Young Indiana Jones as a more accurate measure of the man; certainly it reveals something consistent about what he feels to be entertainment.

Why otherwise would he be making featureless feature films, with casts of extras running to several hundred, recreating the type of epic war scenes that one would expect from cinema on a bigger screen?

As with so many things, the subject is dominated by its rather clunky set up; in fact this at times would have made a much better stand alone, just simply called Jungle Adventure you could have changed Indy’s name to Jungle Adventure Smith. There really is no need to keep flogging the same franchise, though that's not what the money obviously says.

It is hard to like Indy in this, so one has to think about those for whom he’s drawn; this type of guy must surely appeal to someone? Thing is, no special effort is made to make him act the younger version of the Harrison Ford character; instead the drama is lightly littered with speeches that are supposed to in the weird ways of Lucas’ mind presage or prefigure later and greater canonical happenings. Who knows?

Isolde Barth is a soft focus character in soft focus and could not be considered to be doing that well to appear here, although she is still fine. It’s work, I expect?