Shia LaBeouf and Harrison Ford in the latest ‘‘Indiana Jones’’ film.

By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

“This is a recreational activity for me” is surely among the last things you’d expect to hear from the director of a huge, costly, dauntingly complex summer action movie as it nears completion, with its release date just a few weeks away.
But that is what Steven Spielberg said not long ago, speaking by phone during the sound mixing of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” the first new installment in 19 years of the crowd-pleasing adventure-movie franchise that began in 1981 with “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
“In 1989,” Mr. Spielberg said, referring to the year “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” came out, “I thought the curtain was lowering on the series, which is why I had all the characters literally ride off into the sunset at the end. But ever since then the most common question I get asked, all over the world, is, ‘When are you going to make another Indiana Jones?”
The three Indy pictures - “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (1984) was the second - have raked in well over a billion dollars worldwide from their theatrical releases alone. For most filmmakers the high level of expectation might appear in their dreams as a giant boulder bearing down on them and picking up speed.
“I’m having a great time,” Mr. Spielberg said. And, unlikely though this may seem, you can’t help believing him; he certainly sounds excited, and the secret of the Indiana Jones movies’ success has always been their free-spirited inventiveness, a quality that can’t (or shouldn’t) be faked, even on a gigantic budget.
Weirdly, authenticity is very much on his mind when he makes one of these unabashedly preposterous movies, whose hero (still played by Harrison Ford) is a two-fisted, bullwhipwielding academic archaeologist zipping around the globe in search of rare mystical artifacts and in the process running afoul of Nazis, creepy human- sacrifice cults and other exemplars of unambiguous, unadulterated evil.
The tone and style of the films derive from the movie serials of the 1930s and ‘40s, which Mr. Spielberg, growing up in the ‘50s, used to see on Saturday mornings at a revival theater in Scottsdale, Arizona.
“They made a great impression on me, both because of how exciting they were and because of how cheesy they were,” he said. “I’d kind of be involved in the stories and be ridiculing them at the same time. One week they’d give us a cliffhanger with the good guy going off the cliff, the car crashing on the rocks below and blowing up, and then the next week he’s fine. They forgot to show us the cut of the guy jumping out of the car- We weren’t going to do in the Indiana Jones series.”
In fact, Mr. Spielberg said, he tries to cut as little as possible in these movies’ action sequences, because “every time the camera changes dynamic angles, you feel there’s something wrong, that there’s some cheating going on.”
He went on: “The idea is, there’s no illusion; what you see is what you get. My movies have never been frenetically cut, the way a lot of action is done today. That’s not a put-down; some of that quick cutting, like in ‘The Bourne Ultimatum,’ is fantastic, just takes my breath away. But to get the comedy I want in the Indy films, you have to be old-fashioned. ”
And in 1981, in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” that approach was so old-fashioned it looked new. In the 27 years since, practically every action filmmaker has tried to tap into the movie’s quasi-mystical kinetic (and commercial) power: the pace had to be blindingly fast; the stunts insanely elaborate, the villainy extra-villainous; the hero’s attitude blithe, insouciant, almost sociopathically cool. Mr. Spielberg and George Lucas - who produces the movies and who dreamed up the basic idea of the series - have had enormous influence.
The sad truth is that the impact of the Indiana Jones films has not been all positive. Action movies are, over all, a good deal snappier than they were 30 years ago, but they also tend to be a good deal less intelligible. They skimp on the exposition and go straight for sensation.
But movies truly are a form of recreation for Mr. Spielberg, and he’s the kind of artist who reveals himself fully in the intensity of his play. In the Indiana Jones movies he revives the spirit of silent comedy in the adventures of an intellectual with a bullwhip. And that’s a feat that, whether you think it’s worth doing or not, at least deserves high marks for degree of difficulty.