"How much of human life is lost in waiting," John Hurt's professor Oxley muses aloud as he stands in the audience for a sentiment-rich ceremony late in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of The Crystal Skull, and he spoke for many of the crowd that thronged into the Palais des Festival at Cannes for this worldwide debut of Steven Spielberg's long-awaited film.

Call it the debut rather than the premiere, which will take place later tonight amidst music, screaming fans, and the usual human and vehicular gridlock on Cannes' Croisette. This unveiling was less for the civilian film fans--if there really is such a thing this week in this place--than for the world's critics, and the initial and at this stage incomplete reaction was generally positive with this quick take from Variety's Todd McCarthy (his full review was in process) probably a bellwether of a consensus that it isn't your father's classic 1981 Raiders of the Lost Ark, but it's a popcorn movie that's a bit more freshly popped than the interceding second (Temple of Doom) and third (Last Crusade) installments. Said McCarthy:

"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" begins with an actual big bang, then gradually slides toward a ho-hum midsection before literally taking off for an uplifting finish.

The British press reviews emerged sooner than most, with London's Times saying this one is "worth the wait"

...the film returns to 1957 - the height of the cold war - for another round of heart-pounding chases through tunnels and across cliff tops as a motley gang of intrepid treasure hunters span the globe in their quest for the usual nonsense.

The real pleasure for series fans may lie not so much in the madcap action, the carnivorous bugs and the familiar perils of quicksand, but the restored romance between Ford and Allen, and the fatherly relationship that develops between Ford and LaBeouf, who is clearly the new pretender to his whip.

It's not that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, exhumed after 19 years to be the fourth in this series, is bad, exactly. But it's undeniably creaky.

It had its world premiere in Cannes before an audience who cheered it in advance but ended up laughing at moments that were not intentionally funny...It's time to entomb this elderly franchise once and for all.

One of the first posted reviews with a cineaste's take was from Glenn Kenny's recently started Some Came Running blog:

...the most fun and least irritating installment of the series since the first one..although it starts out pretty unpromisingly...the waves of references and cultural signifiers come at you in strengths from coy to borderline repulsive, as Indy is kidnapped by post-Stalinists, caught in the middle of a nuclear test sight, falls victim to a HUAC-esque blacklist, and is waylaid by Shia La Beouf dressed up to look like Brando in The Wild One. Ugh. The one bright spot of this section is Cate Blanchett's superb Natasha Fatale impersonation as a Russkie-psychic-military-commander or something.

I gave up on even trying to resist the movie when its centerpiece, a furious chase through the Amazon jungle punctuated with fistfights, gunshots, and swordplay, climaxed with an over-the-top homage to The Naked Jungle.

This correspondent had a few minutes with Ford, Winstone and Hurt at a cocktail party Paramount Pictures hosted yesterday on a terrace at the Carlton Hotel overlooking the Croisette.

Hurt smilingly said, "I don't often get to do a film of this size", and had a variant on the almost inevitable actor's story of disbelievingly getting a call from Spielberg--he was incredulous, "But thinking, `Well he certainly sounds like him.'"

In fact, Spielberg would tell a jammed press conference after the film was splayed, the producers didn't share the script around with the actors' various agents and managers, and when a theft of some 3,000 still threatened to reveal the film's secrets, worked with authorities to pull a sting and arrest the unlucky idiot who'd tried to sell the images to a web site.

Braced somewhat by a Russian journalist who wondered why the Commies had to be the bad guys, Spielberg explained that he simply "did the math" that brought Indy forward from the 30's to account for the 19 years of age on the leading man. (It was Ford who lobbied Spielberg and co-creator George Lucas to dust off the Indy fedora).

When a Japanese reported wondered if the filmmakers had taken into account that showing an atomic bomb is still a "sensitive" topic for his countrymen, Spielberg gave a thoughtful response about being raised in the "duck and cover" era of the cold war, and a certain sensitivity on the part of American youngsters of his age who spent years "under the threat of thermonuclear annihilation". He added that the image of Indiana Jones in front of a mushroom cloud seemed iconic to him, and Ford, with due gravitas, said the cloud represented the most powerful "graphic image of evil" possible.

None of that is to say that the film isn't determinedly an entertainment, from the time the Paramount mountain logo resolves into a comically employed pile of dirt--a Spielberg insiration, producr Frank Marshal told me. (We open deep in the Fifties, with "Hound Dog" playing and some crazy teenagers speeding down the highway hear ever-spooky Roswell, New Mexico). The revisiting of the Indy-Marion love affair is played with warmth and amusingly snarky dialog. (The French subtitles for Indy's head-shaking "Same old, same old" line about her feisty behavior was rendered in French subtitles as "Toujours la meme chanson".

There's some added depth to this edition of the franchise that means it's not the same old song throughout. Not only standard adventure films are referenced in Spielberg's visuals--there ase shades of other lost-in-the jungle classics from Leningen Versus the Ants to Apocalypto to Aguirre The Wrath of God.

As much as it may behoove Ford to do his best to boost this costly movie into major blockbuster status in marketplace where films like Narnia will soon be along to compete, his liking for it is clearly sincere, and in a televised interview conducted with his colleagues right after the well-applauded screening, he was moved nearly to tears as he thanked Spielberg for the chance to reinvigorate Indy. As he said on the terracue of the Carlton after having a committed hug with screen buddy Winstone, "There's no way to control other peoples' expectations. The best thing you can do is the best thing you can do, using whatever skills you've got." After seeing just dailies and parches of film in loping sessions, he said, he hadn't realized what they had: "Those disconnected elements don't really give you enough of a clue as to what Steven's gonna do with this yarn. But then you recognize the power of Steven's filmmaking. It knocked my socks off."