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The official Indiana Jones site has just released this poster for the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which apparently gives us a a view of said crystal skull.

Is this a great poster? No. Is it as good as the classic posters for the previous films? I don’t think so. The poster is a bit messy and confusing, mostly because it overlays several images in a way that doesn’t allow us to get much from any of them. I wish they had put the focus squarely on Indy, like the previous posters used to do, using perhaps the Crystal Skull in a more muted background.

But this still feels like a true Indiana Jones poster, and my goodwill towards this series is so great that it makes me giddy everytime I look at it.

They will release several other posters before the movie opens next year, hopefully one of them will truly hit the mark.

*Update*

I should have mentioned this before, but this poster features the artwork of the legendary Drew Struzan, which is a big part of why it feels like a true Indiana Jones poster. If you don’t know who Struzan is check out this site. You’ll definitely recognize much of his movie related work.

Alan over at Burbanked compares the way Indy’s face appears in the posters for previous films with the way it appears in the new one and notes a few differences. Those differences bug him, and they bug me too. I think that Alan is right that this is not a problem just of this poster, but of the movie in general: it’s hard not to think of all the stuff the previous movies did right. The comparisons aren’t always fair, but they are unavoidable.