Directed by Steven Spielberg. Starring Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, and Shia LaBeouf. Rated PG.

All of Steven Spielberg’s work has, to some extent, been heavily coloured by nostalgia. The Indiana Jones franchise—cooked up by the director with producers George Lucas and Frank Marshall, writer Philip Kaufman, and others almost three decades ago—was always the purest pulp, designed to emulate the cliffhanging serials that predated the filmmakers’ own childhoods.

By moving the fourth, presumably final, installment to 1957, Spielberg has set the action during his own youth, and the Cold War background allows the director to make some amusing comments about Dwight D. Eisenhower–era conformism and antiforeigner hysteria. Oh, and there’s a really big explosion in the first half-hour.

In this exhilarating adventure, nods are given to characters past and there are new players, including Ray Winstone as an unreliable ally, John Hurt as a gaga academic with precious secrets, a beefed-up Shia LaBeouf as Indy’s juvenile-delinquent sidekick, and Cate Blanchett as a Natasha-like Russian agent with super mind powers—although, frankly, this part of the story is given pretty cursory treatment.

Of course, here you also have to accept the notion that an entire company of Soviet soldiers, in full battle uniform with heavy vehicles, can operate in the New Mexico desert or the jungles of Peru (actually Hawaii) without being noticed. Such jaw-dropping conceits were normal for the E C–comics ethos of the ’50s, and sections of the film play, as you would hope, like live-action Tales From the Crypt. The filmmakers relied more on elaborate stunts and set design than on computer effects, and the pastels and sepias keep the whole thing pleasingly retro throughout. (Gotta say, however, that the fabled crystal skull, when we get to it, looks like it’s made out of cellophane and bubble wrap.)

The biggest weakness here, with a script that David Koepp cobbled together from earlier drafts by other writers, comes with Karen Allen’s fourth-quarter arrival as Indy’s long-lost love, leading to some curiously stiff moments in both staging and acting. Her Marion Ravenwood does, however, get one of the fun film’s best lines. When, in the midst of a running fight with guns, knives, and swords, the kid asks what our hero—now a tenured archaeology professor—will do to survive, she answers: “Oh, he never plans that far ahead.”

Spielberg does, though, doesn’t he?