Orbs Spoilers herein. I'll leave it to others to write about female Indiana Joneses and whether a gimmickless Bond formula works. I actually remember the first with some fondness. It did two things intelligently: -- It worked on the game-within-the-movie layer by having consummate programmers at Lara's disposal to create the "game" and be in it. At some points in the film, she was controlling the program and elsewhere controlled by it. Independent of the story, it was quite clever. -- Computer programs, and games in particular, are a matter of making models. The history of modeling has as a keystone the creation of a model of the solar system, commissioned by the Duke of Orrery in the 17th century. Known as orreries, they are an icon of representation. The first film's climax literally revolved around an orrery that (like the layers of the movie) was a representation of the world, was in the world, and could control the world. Also clever -- intelligent. So it was with some anticipation I walked into the sequel. There is no layering here. The programmers still exist, but only as boy Fridays. The game is gone -- along with the cartoonish but appealing sexuality of the first. But we do have a simple orrery, in the form of an orb. Activated by music, it might have originally been conceived as the kind of projective map familiar to us from sci-fi films. But along the way, it inexplicably mutated into a projector of scenes (from Africa), as if that would serve. We have two cosmologies here. One is extraterrestrial and is responsible for the creation of the box and possibly the environment surrounding the "cradle." The other was commissioned by Alexander's magician/scientists, presumably Persian. They were the creators of the orb, the model. Oh, and we have some framing: the film begins and ends with weddings. Every major stunt involves parachutes. There are four action sets: an underwater temple, a quaint square (was it in Shanghai), a lab hidden within a shopping center, and the cavern of the Cradle. None of these showed any imagination. Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life