Dorinda is sick and tired of watching Pete court death and gives him an ultimatum: take asafe teaching post at a flight academy or else give her up for good. Pete, seeing how serious she is, caves. He will be less so that Dorinda can have more.

But, in the manner of movies, first there is One Last Job to do, a big fire that breaks out and requires Pete’s attention. In this fire, Pete’s best friend Al finds himself in danger and Pete executes some daring moves to save Al’s life. Al’s life is indeed saved, but Pete’s plane explodes in mid-air.

ACT II (37:50-1:23:00) Pete finds himself dead, and in the company of Hap, a Mr. Jordan-like angel whose job is to coach Pete through his understanding of his life and his post-life duties. The job of a recently-dead person, it seems, is to inspire the next generation, to find an enthusiastic amateur and turn him into a genius.

Pete is assigned Ted, an affable hunk of beefcake who operates an air-delivery service. Ted, tired of his job, wants to be a fire-fighter like Pete, and is training at the same flight academy that Dorinda wanted Pete to teach at. And so Dorinda, in a way, gets her wish: Pete does become a teacher in a safe job, he just doesn’t do it until after he’s dead.

Pete doesn’t just coach Ted in piloting, he also tries to coach him in love — and fails miserably, which makes sense, as that was his problem in life as well.

Also at the flight academy is Al, who has retired from piloting (due, no doubt, to his brush with death) and is, yes, an instructor at the flight academy. As Pete could not reconcile his need to fly with his love of Dorinda, Al has given up flying altogether, lost his fire, so to speak, and lives in a state of docile ease, relaxing in a lawn chair as he instructs his charges, sipping the cream filling from Twinkies with a straw.

Al finds Dorinda working in what looks like the air-traffic-control room from Close Encounters. She has moved to an empty house in the flight-path of an airport — even in her hollowed-out state of grief, she must be near airplanes. Obviously, she is not yet over the loss of Pete. Al scoops her up and takes her to the flight academy with him.

Pete, meanwhile, has an episode with young Ted where they are forced down by a storm to an abandoned airport, where a crazy hobo who can hear Pete’s words but cannot repeat them clearly, instructs Ted to pursue Dorinda.

Ted comes back to the flight academy and, in a bit of improbable physical comedy, literally flies his plane into Dorinda’s front yard. It’s love at first sight and Dorinda starts to come out of her shell. This is, of course, not what Pete wants. His need is to inspire Ted to fly, not inspire him to fall in love with Dorinda. And yet, once Ted manages to bring a dead school-bus driver back to life, the deal is sealed and Dorinda is hooked.

ACT III (1:23:00-1:53:00) Dorinda and Ted have a big date as Pete glowers in the corner. Helpless to stop the romance, he instead contrives to have the tape deck play his and Dorinda’s song, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” This brings back memories of Pete and successfully cock-blocks Ted.

Pete complains to Hap that Ted’s romance with Dorinda was not part of the deal — he was supposed to inspire Ted to fly, not to screw his girlfriend. Hap explains that in order to gain his freedom from the world he must give freedom to Dorinda — that is, let go of his obsessions.

Pete re-applies himself to training Ted and turns him into an ace pilot, but soon there is another fire-fighting crisis. We think this is going to be the big sequence where Pete coaches Ted through the dangerous situation that killed him, but Spielberg turns the situation on its head and sends Dorinda out in a stolen plane instead. Pete now finds himself in the position of having to inspire ultra-green pilot Dorinda instead of Ted. He coaches her through the dangerous mission but the plane malfunctions and crashes in a lake.Dorinda drowns momentarily and finally sees Pete with her in the submerged plane cockpit. Pete finally tells her he loves her and sends her back to the surface and to life. She walks back to the flight academy and into Ted’s arms as Pete looks on with approval.

SOME THOUGHTS: As in The Sugarland Express, Spielberg here mixes a love story with an action story. As in The Color Purple, the scenes of simple human interaction are shot as carefully choreographed physical comedy, even slapstick. This makes the love scenes goofy, even juvenile, and detracts from their emotional impact.

As in Sugarland, the action beats are another story. They work like gangbusters. They kick ass. Spielberg puts the camera on the outside of the airplanes as they hurtle through burning forests, as though shooting from another airplane a few feet away from the cockpit of the plane in the shot, and it all looks shockingly real. The movie takes off whenever an airplane does.

Always is based on 1943’s A Guy Named Joe, which was about a WWII bomber pilot who dies and must coach a younger pilot (and is referenced in Poltergeist). Spielberg works hard to convince us the experience of being a fire-fighter pilot in 1989 is analogous to being a WWII bomber pilot, but it doesn’t stick. Everyone in the world had an opinion of bomber pilots in 1943, while I’m guessing few even knew there were fire-fighting pilots in 1989. The script even tries to acknowledge the disconnect, saying that Pete is risking his life for nothing, which is an interesting point but doesn’t help the movie’s argument.

Also problematic is Pete’s acquiescence to Dorinda’s requests, and then to Hap’s requests. He doesn’t find a way to reconcile his own conflicts, he only capitulates to the demands of the women in his life (and death). This turns him into not an inspiration but a martyr, and a smug one at that. “That’s my girl, and that’s my boy” Pete says at the curtain, as though uniting them were his plan all along, and I was reminded of Mr. Bloom in “Kick the Can,” Spielberg’s contribution to Twilight Zone. Like Mr. Bloom, Pete delights in manipulating the thoughts and feelings of his charges, giggling when his manipulations work, cursing when they backfire. The point is, Always has a protagonist whose desire is to inspire, but whose action is to manipulate, which makes Pete a Spielberg stand-in in ways I doubt he intends.

I also feel that a love story that must include a crazy hobo, a dying school-bus driver and an airplane crashing into a lake in order to justify the principles’ emotional shifts is probably working too hard.

The answer is, of course, that the screenplay needs to have Indy and Marion alone for a moment so that Marion can tell Indy that Mutt is his son. The path to the scene may be hastily constructed, but the resulting moment is sweet, comic and thematically important. Indy, headstrong master of improvised action, suddenly finds himself stuck in encroaching old age, with an old girlfriend, no less, and now, out of nowhere, a new son, new responsibilities and a whole new set of priorities. What better way to express the protagonist’s new situation than putting him in a pit of quicksand? And what do he and Marion discuss? Mutt’s education, of course, tying the scene to the theme of knowledge and experience. This is the scene the whole movie pivots on: in the second half of Kingdom, Indy finds himself shifting in his role from lone adventurer to responsible patriarch.

Spielberg has explored this notion before, that in a world where nothing makes sense any more, people turn to the family unit for answers about how to live one’s life. It is the opposite of the young Spielberg, where his protagonists could not wait to get out of the family unit in order to pursue their various obsessions.

In any case, Mutt returns to help his mother and father out of the quicksand — an example, perhaps, of the child bringing the parents together, and Oxley returns with Spalko and her goons, creating a situation rare in Spielberg, where the characters, after a set piece, find themselves in the same position they were in before. What makes this dramaturgical no-no permissible is that Indy is, literally, not the same person he was when he entered the quicksand. Now a father with a wife and a child and a friend, he can no longer afford to tell the bad guys to piss off — he has to play ball or else his family will be destroyed. What father could not identify with this situation? Mostly a father these days just needs to worry about pleasing an unqualified boss, not capitulating to the demands of a wild-eyed Soviet dominatrix.

What is Indy thinking at this point? Well, speaking as a Hollywood screenwriter, I would say that Indy’s thinking: a) I must protect my family, b) I must help my friend recover his sanity, c) maybe the way to do those things is by doing the thing I’m good at, and d) maybe that means that I can pull it all together — gain knowledge and protect my family and friend at the same time.

Which catapults the narrative into the “drive through the jungle” sequence. Indy and Mutt stage a family fight (about, what else, the acquisition of knowledge) in the back of a truck carrying them to their final destination. (The rather fantastical jungle-cutting vehicle at the front of the procession prompted Sam to exclaim “Hey! Just like Speed Racer!”) Indy, working with Mutt and, eventually, Marion (who does not seem to have been in on the plan, but is certainly up for improvising) turns the dynamic of the drive through the jungle, hijacking both the antagonist’s agenda and the artifact driving the pursuit — the crystal skull. So, while Indy and Mutt pretend to debate education, they are, in fact, creating education’s antithesis, experience. No college course could instruct Mutt how to swordfight with a psychic Russian in a Lulu bob during a high-speed pursuit through the Amazonian jungle.

During the sequence, of course, Mac reveals himself to be a “good guy” after all, another reminder that, if you need to have an expository speech, the middle of a dynamic chase scene is a good place to put it.

(And let’s remember that Mac, like Oxley, are not really “characters” at all — they are reflections of the protagonist. Oxley is the pure academic, who has gone crazy from his pursuit of knowledge, Mac is the wayfaring capitalist whose virtue can be bought for a sack of gold. Mutt, in addition to being Indy’s son, is also Indy’s reckless, driving intuition. People have been complaining that Indy doesn’t have enough to “do” during the last half of Kingdom, but overlook the fact that Indy is, dramatically, the bulk of the cast at this point.)

(The drive through the jungle pauses for a fight among some Army Ants. I would like to say that this sequence is a reference to Antz, but that is probably in my imagination. Although let me also add that, in the one Antz story meeting Spielberg attended, he interrupted a conversation between myself, Nina Jacobson and Jeffrey Katzenberg to pitch a “battle with the army ants” scene — so apparently army ants have been on his mind for quite a while. Army ants, of course, owe their success as a species to their possession of a hive-mind, which becomes important later in Kingdom.)

(Mutt gets cut off from the main chase and employs a Tarzan move to rejoin the group, a reference that even my 5-year-old daughter got, although she probably did not also stop to consider Tarzan’s innocence/experience dichotomy. Mutt, lacking in education, is taught by a bunch of monkeys to swing on vines. The story of Tarzan, of course, hinges on the protagonist’s conflicting feelings on the “purity” of his animal innocence vs. the pull of civilization, “where he belongs.” Mutt feels a similar conflict, and the Tarzan moment, cheesy as it may seem to some, is thematically resonant.)

Once the maguffin is in Oxley’s hands, Marion drives their car-boat off a cliff and into a tree, a situation the protagonist of Jurassic Park would be familiar with, only this time, of course, Spielberg stands the stunt on its head, making it intentional and beneficial. The plunge into the river leads to some waterfalls and the final drive into Act IV.

Indy takes the skull from Oxley, prepared to take it to wherever it needs to go by himself. Why? “Because it told me to” : this is, apparently, what the skull imparted to Indy during their little tete-a-tete. This adds yet another wrinkle to Indy’s priorities: he must protect his family and friends, he must pursue his desire for knowledge, and now he must do what the higher power instructs. This last makes the elderly Indy a cousin to Close Encounters‘ Roy Neary, the implications of which will become clear shortly.

Indy and his family make it through the waterfall and to the temple-thing, pursued by Spalko and her surviving goons. Indy and his family are chased by Indians, whom they subdue with the power of the skull. Indy subdues the natives through religion, while Spalko subdues them the old-fashioned way — with sub-machine-gun fire.

(The subduing of the natives plot-point led to this after-movie exchange: KRIOTA WILLBERG: “So wait, the skull works on army ants — and natives?” JACKSON PUBLICK: “Well, but come on — the skull is central to the natives’ entire belief system!” Mr. Publick may have been disappointed with Kingdom, but he wasn’t going to stand by and let some choreographer needlessly nitpick over issues of logic — that would lead to questions about, like, how a carload of people survive plunges over three waterfalls, and don’t drop their skull-bag.)

We get to the “throne room,” where it becomes clear what needs to happen — the skull must be put back on the head of one of 13 alien skeletons arrayed in a circle of thrones. Indy, for the first time in his career, is hesitant to take this final step, and this is, in a way, his cumulative moment. Presented with the goal, he backs off, reluctant to take his journey to its logical conclusion. The reason being, he has experienced enough of the skull’s power and knows that pursuit of ultimate knowledge can only lead to insanity (that is, Oxley) and maybe something much worse.

And maybe it’s just a coincidence, but maybe the bulk of Kingdom takes place in a jungle in reference to the original jungle, the Garden of Eden. The reference is never explicit (ie, nobody reaches out and takes a big healthy bite from a juicy red apple), but the crystal skull is, essentially, the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. Gazing into the skull (that is, biting into the apple) will give you knowledge, but you will also become a different person because of it. The younger Indy may have taken the risk (as Oxley did) but the older Indy has too much to lose. On the other hand, Indy was wise enough in Raiders to close his eyes to the fury of the Ark — whether out of a sense of responsibility to Marion or for his own self-preservation.

Anyway, Mac is revealed to be a straight-up amoral capitalist, the “grave robber” Indy denied being in Act II. He brings Spalko to the throne room and takes the opportunity to go loot whatever he can out of the rest of the temple.

Spalko takes the skull from the reluctant Indy and replaces it on the alien-skeletons’s neck, setting a big whirling thing in motion. The temple, we find, is a huge, buried spacecraft — science interpreted by humans as God — and, like the aliens in Close Encounters, their only desire is to “go home,” which they apparently cannot do until their missing skull is returned.

An inter-dimensional portal opens in the ceiling, carrying debris and Soviets to who-knows-where. Roy Neary would have jumped at the chance to pursue this ultimate knowledge, that is, to know God, but the older, wiser, Indy knows that one does not, cannot come back from that particular undiscovered country. Seeing the portal open, Indy grabs his family and runs as fast as he can in the opposite direction. This direct, conscious repudiation of the thesis of Close Encounters is the most striking of Kingdom‘s conceits and the thing that puts it into a higher realm of “importance” in the Spielberg canon.

(I’ve seen several people complain that Kingdom steals its central plot-points from Stargate, but I put the theft much earlier: Eric Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods?.)

Spalko, of course, receives what she has come for, which is, essentially, what Dave Bowman gets at the end of 2001: all the knowledge in the universe. Dave survives the process of education, and returns to Earth to do who-know-what. Spalko does not survive, although perhaps she gains some measure of godhood in whatever plane of existence the acquisition of all knowledge she achieves.

Indy, on the other hand, would rather be a simple husband and father in this world than a maybe-god in another. Having been uprooted from his own life, he has re-discovered his identity. By replacing the thing that was stolen, he regains what was stolen from himself.

But that doesn’t mean he’s going to let Mutt wear his hat.