There's an adage in the Star Trek fandom that, for the first six films, only the "even" numbered ones are good. Indiana Jones fans hope the opposite proves true in the fifth film, which has Indy doing what he does best: punching Nazis. Disney released images of Harrison Ford as the titular Doctor Jones and Mads Mikkelsen as the wicked Doctor Voller. The loose synopsis says former Nazis try to do something evil while working on the space program, and it's up to Indy to punch them until they stop.
See, for all the talk of Indiana Jones being an adventurer and an archeologist, Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade are favorites in the canon because he's fighting history's greatest villains. Temple of Doom and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull have their charms but veer too close to reinforcing cultural stereotypes rather than satirizing them. Beyond that, the movies lack the clear moral focus of the others. Indy is flawed, but viewers find it much easier to forgive those flaws when he's violently tossing bad guys out of blimps.
Indiana Jones Is a Terrible Archeologist - and That's the Point
In Temple of Doom, Jones isn't trying to preserve some ancient artifact for history. Rather, as he tells Ke Huy Quan's Short Round, his goal is "fortune and glory." At least, at the end of that film, he gives the Shankara stones back to the village rather than carting them off to some Western museum. Yet, the clearest example of Indiana Jones being a bad archeologist comes in Raiders when he finds himself in the Map Room at Tanis.
The purpose of this visit is to use a semi-magic staff and the sun's rays to find the Well of Souls. However, an archeologist worth their mountain of student debt would've pointed their allies in the right direction and spent the rest of their lives studying the ancient model. Again, it's a movie, but the Tanis Map Room was a to-scale recreation of the city as it was millennia ago. Among the profession, it would be the greatest archeological discovery of all time, no matter how many faces the Ark melted off. Yet, Indy can't get out of there fast enough.
That is not an oversight or a mistake. There is at least one moment in every film where Indiana Jones is, at least implicitly, accused of being a grave robber. He may no longer be searching for fortune and glory, but even his "pure" motives are distasteful. Even more so through a modern lens. Unless, of course, he's punching stormtroopers trying to steal some peoples' cultural artifacts for themselves.
Indiana Jones Deserves One Last Showdown with the Nazis
In the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the post-fridge scene revealed that Indy continued doing his best work during World War II, namely killing Nazis. He's a war hero, apparently. This film broke with the Indiana Jones tradition in more ways than just substituting Nazis for Soviet agents. A better movie than people remember, it's akin to Lucas and Spielberg getting together and playing with their favorite toy at the dawn of the age of modern visual effects. Director James Mangold, behind the camera for Indiana Jones 5, made the right choice of antagonists for this first non-Spielberg installment, if only for familiarity's sake.
The Soviets in Crystal Skull did not carry the same kind of familiar menace with them. The real-world conflict that inspired these characters is morally gray -- at least more so than the fight against the Axis powers. Add to that the strange inter-dimensional aliens' story, a nod to the sci-fi movies of the 1960s, and it makes sense that fan reaction was harsh. Mangold's film can avoid such criticism because, sadly, stories about fighting against hateful totalitarianism are as needed and relevant as ever.
Lucasfilm's current project, Andor, narratively deals with those themes in ways no Star Wars project ever has. Pitting Indiana Jones against the Nazis one last time with the man who directed Logan could tell the character's most important story. While fans are happy to see ol' Indy again, they also have a chance to redefine the character's legacy.