(From top) Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett and Steven Spielberg in Cannes on Sunday. (AP, AFP)

Cannes, May 18: Lest Americans don’t understand, the Bhagvad Gita is explained as “the Hindu Bible” in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the new IndianaJones movie which had its world premiere at Cannes today amid much excitement.

The film’s star, Harrison Ford, who plays action hero Henry Walton Jones, Jr,PhD, better known as Indiana Jones or simply Indy, is now 65.

This means there is hope yet for Amitabh Bachchan, who happens to be the same age, should he wish to go on cracking the whip.

There is a little joke about Ford’s advanced years when Indiana Jones says atthe start of the film: “This isn’t as easy as I remember.”

Ford was 38 when he was first introduced as Indiana Jones in the 1981 filmRaiders of the Lost Ark, set in 1936. The 1984 prequel Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was set in 1935. The third film, Indiana Jones and the LastCrusade, released in 1989, was set in 1938.

Now, after a 19-year gap, comes the $125-million movie set at the height of the Cold War in 1957. This is the context of a nuclear explosion, with a mushroom cloud and all the trimmings, which is shown pretty dramatically, it has to be said.

Indiana Jones is a professor of archaeology with an academic colleague who tries to show off by quoting J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist nicknamed the ‘Father of the Atomic Bomb’: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Indiana Jones corrects his colleague by pointing out that Oppenheimer had taken the saying from “the Hindu Bible”, presumably a reference to the Bhagvad Gita.

Along with Ford, the big names from the film were present today in Cannes where there wasn’t room at the post-premiere press conference for all the journalists who wished to attend.

Shekhar Kapur’s discovery in Elizabeth, actress Cate Blanchett, who plays a Russian villain, Irina Spalko, apologised to the entire population of Russia for caricaturing the way in which a Soviet female is supposed to behave.

In this movie, Indiana Jones finally marries Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), his girlfriend from Raiders of the Lost Ark. The young man who is the hero’s sidekick, Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf), turns out to be Indiana Jones’s son by Marion though Indiana Jones did not know this until the news was broken to him by her.

Now that Reliance and other folk in the Indian movie world are going to work closely with Hollywood, the way in which Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has been made and marketed will give Bollywood valuable lessons into how the Americans work.

In fact, today’s news conference, at which questions were directed at Ford, themain star, Steven Spielberg, the director who acknowledged he had taken some persuading before he would make the movie, and the writer-producer, George Lucas, provided a master class in the art of filmmaking. Between them the three probably define what is best of Hollywood.

Spielberg went to extraordinary lengths to keep the plot a secret, though the plot remained a secret even after The Telegraph had seen the movie. A crystal skull has to be returned to the living dead, providing an excuse for one adventure after another.

The critics may not like the movie but it is bound to be a worldwide hit. In fact, Ford appeared to anticipate some bad reviews: “It is not unusual for something that is popular to be disdained by some people and I fully expect it. I’m not really worried about it. I work for the people who pay to get in — they are my customers.”

He described the film as a “celebration of the movies”, which goes to show that perhaps more unites Hollywood and Bollywood than separates them.