Twenty-six years ago, “Raiders of the Lost Ark” was promoted as the first collaboration from the makers of “Jaws” and “Star Wars,” an experiment mounted by a pair of Hollywood outsider wunderkinds on the upswing. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas made the movie specifically out of a self-centered desire to recapture the breathless exhilaration of the silver screen serial adventures they’d grown up with as kids. These were fabulously pulpy thrill rides populated by quick-thinking, fist-fighting, hard-jawed heroes in funny hats combating the nefarious forces of villainy roughshod with pistols, swords, ingenuity and often, yes, bullwhips. Miraculously, they pulled it off.

The flick was an absolute sucker-punch to the system. The highest grossing movie of its time, it catapulted the stock of both Lucas and Spielberg into the stratosphere, ensuring them a lifetime of green lights to do just about any project they’d ever care to undertake. Spielberg seems to have made the most of it, developing a career that tap dances brilliantly between the kind of light juvenile action he so clearly adores (“Jurassic Park”) and solidly mature historical epics he feels responsible to produce (“Schindler’s List,” “Munich”). Lucas—not so much, and though the less said about that the better (cough, “Howard the Duck,” cough), it could be exactly that divergence of professional experience over the intermediate years that so unfortunately corrupts the success of their previous partnership.

Much like the team that made it, the latest in the “Raiders” legacy is a confounding study in dualities. Its meandering and slapdash Franken-script was infamously stitched together from the corpses of a dozen previously rejected drafts, (even lifting an early atomic blast survival scene from a discarded element of the original “Back to the Future”), and the seams really show. Where “Raiders” may have been a little self-serving, the filmmakers say they made “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” for the fans. One has to wonder if this kind of self-imposed accountability may be in the best interest of anyone involved. “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” sorrowfully comes off as convoluted, diluted textbook study-group filmmaking. They carelessly, even condescendingly, endeavor to incorporate some degree of every element they think the audience might want to see—pitting knowledge against experience, youth versus maturity, action against submission, loyalty against treachery, planning versus improvisation—without ever bothering to satisfactorily resolve any of the conflicts they present.

A fatal, if necessary (due to the lead actor’s advancing years), jump from the pre-war grit of the 1930s and the movies thereof to which “Raiders” so warmly cleaves, to the plastic gloss of the atomic ’50s also serves only to confuse the formula. Echoing the cheapie sci-fi schlock-fests of that era may have seemed in keeping with the original concept, but hotrod racing, leather-clad bad-boys, psychic Russians, sneaky double agents and saucer men from mars seem jarringly misplaced in the universe we expect from Dr. Jones. There was a simple, inarguable purity to Indy’s hatred for the Nazis and his unapologetic mercenary drive for fortune and glory that’s sorely absent in his greyer incarnation.

None of us are getting any younger, and that’s a fact, and it turns out the chasm between breathless and out of breath can be a tough one to hurdle. Lucas and Spielberg might both take a note from the sub-text of their new picture and just accept that adventure may be a business better left to the young.