December 31, 2023 — Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
11 min readJan 2, 2024
- (Intro to this series)
- (Previous notes: Munich)
- (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on IMDb)
- Here we go. There is no one in the entire Solar System that doesn’t think this is the worst Indiana Jones movie, but I tend to be a bit forgiving of it compared to most. You always had to be of the right mindset to enjoy an Indiana Jones movie but it seems like people refused to do that for this one. “Chuh, ALIENS” people said about this, but they were perfectly tolerant of all the stupid magic in the other ones. All that said, I’m probably about to roast the holy bejeezus out of this movie, but maybe, dear reader, you will come across a potential forgotten virtue or two? Hope so, let’s go for it…
- The Paramount logo matching that had become this series’ trademark is pretty jokey here, it matches to a molehill with a mole coming out of it. Teenagers on a joyride speed past playing Elvis and taunting a military convoy that happens by. The drivers of the army vehicles are surprisingly playful about it until they turn off to their base. It’s 1957.
- Except, ope, it’s some kind of heist. These are Russians in disguise, breaking into the army base. And they have Indy in the trunk, along with a new character played by Ray Winstone that is a colleague of Indy.
- Cate Blanchett shows up as maybe the boss of all these bad guys that are basically somehow now totally in charge of this whole army base. Indy says he figures she’s from Eastern Ukraine on account of “the way you’re sinking your teeth into those wubble-yous”, hee!
- 0:07:40 — a huge warehouse with the number 51 is revealed strikingly, with the awesome map room theme from the first movie. They’re making him find something in the warehouse, and he scatters gunpowder around so they can follow the magnetic trail they reveal, cool.
- They open the box they find and it’s probably a mummified alien, we see the hand and the body shape. Then when Indy seems to have foiled them with his whip, it turns out that Mack, the colleague, has double-crossed him. A chase happens. A cool stunt happens when he jumps from a car onto a hanging lamp before the car crashes.
- The chase turns into a fight in a chamber with a rocket on a track, and they accidentally bump a button that makes the rocket count down and then ignite, incinerating a bunch of bad guys! Indy and the Russianest looking bad guy ride the rocket down its long track, then Indy sneaks away.
- But that rocket ride took him deep into the desert and now he has to hike all night to find a way back. He sees a village, yay, but as he gets close he sees it’s a model village where they’re going to test an atom bomb and it turns out the test is a minute away! How will Indy escape this jam? Tune in next week to find out! No, it happens now. He gets into a refrigerator in a model house, clearly labeled LEAD-LINED, and gets sent through the air a long distance by the nuclear explosion, but he’s safe because lead! A car with Russians is not so lucky.
- After getting any lingering radiation scrubbed off him, he gets interrogated and it is revealed that he became a colonel and fought in the war and won medals, it seems strange and bad-writing-y.
- Jim Broadbent comes to Indy’s archaeology class to tell him he’s on indefinite paid leave because the FBI had a warrant to search his stuff. Indy wistfully looks at a picture of Sean Connery as his dad from the previous Indy movie before getting on a train…
- 0:28:07 — First sighting of Shia LaBeouf chasing the train on a motorcycle dressed like Marlon Brando from that one fifties Marlon Brando movie where he looks like that, you know the one. Anyway, his name is Mutt and he says an old colleague of Indy’s is going to be killed. He was looking for a crystal skull in a place that Indy thought was the mythical El Dorado in South America. Whoever returns the crystal skull to its temple will be rewarded with power.
- Mutt says his mom is Marion and Indy doesn’t put it together but we all do. We all probably saw Karen Allen in the trailer.
- Some KGB tuffs show up to abduct Indy and Mutt, but they’re in a fifties diner so they start a fight with local letter-jacket dudes and create a brawl to escape through. What follows is a chase, Indy and Mutt on the motorcycle & the KGB tuffs, it’s not a very memorable chase, they go through the college campus and we see campus imagery.
- Indy & Mutt regroup and Indy goes over the endangered colleague’s notes, whose name is Ox. It’s a riddle but Indy figures out it’s about the Nazca lines, those crop shapes in Peru. They go to Peru, they bring Mutt’s wheels.
- They follow Ox’s trail to a church jail where he’d been held for some reason. He was apparently talking crazy in his cell but some armed people took him away. His cell has skull glyphs and language clues, and a map to a conquistador’s grave.
- They go to a dungeon-y ruin and start poking around, but some curiously made-up and masked characters with blowguns attack them. Indy kills one of them by blowing in the wrong end of the blowgun super hard, and flashes a gun at another one and Mutt is like “you’re a teacher?” Indy is all, “part-time,” and they keep spelunking.
- They pass skeletons with long, non-human-looking skulls, and Indy says something like “they used to bind babies’ skulls to elongate them for religious reasons,” and that doesn’t quite track for me. Maybe I’m wrong, though.
- They come to a room with mummies. Someone else had been there but didn’t take a bunch of obviously valuable stuff. Including the crystal skull that’s behind the conquistador’s body. It has mystical powers, or at least super cool magnetic properties. Indy figures that Ox is who had been there and he had taken the skull but then put it back later for some reason. As they emerge, Mack shows up with gun-toting goons.
- Indy is tied up and of course CB is there. She basically says that the crystal skull is an actual alien skull, and there used to be an alien city and they could do neat things. Also present is Ox, played by John Hurt, who seems like he’s on drugs. CB has an idea about Indy and the skull communicating somehow telepathically like. The movie gets us wondering if something supernatural is happening. Ox is outside the room but seems to have a psychic connection. At this point it is worth pointing out that this is a perfectly intriguing, reasonably suspenseful story and I simply don’t mind it at all.
- Marion is there too. In this compound of Russian villains in Peru which is near where they were spelunking, they have also captured Marion, Mutt’s mother and the charming heroine from the first movie. I didn’t catch why she is there.
- Ox does mind-magic symbol drawing and Indy is helping figure it out but Mutt just starts a fight and busts them all out, making them be chased into the jungle. As Indy and Marion are sinking in a sand pit, she tells him Mutt is his son. The movie doesn’t expect us to be very surprised by that, good.
- 1:13:30 — The Russians caught up and re-abducted them so now the three heroes are squabbling in the back of a truck, and it’s supposed to be funny how suddenly these three are a dysfunctional family but that’s not my idea of an Indiana Jones movie. The Russian that was the Russianest from the beginning is guarding them but they trick him into being kicked in the face by all three of them. Mutt’s knife is useful but there’s an “oh shit” moment that isn’t explained? With the knife? Like maybe he cut himself but then there’s no problem, hmmmmm…
- Neat thing where Indy bazookas the deforesting blade truck at the front of the convoy and a whirring blade wrecks lots of vehicles behind it, looks cool.
- What follows is the obligatory convoy chase and brawl. A weird twist is that Mutt finds a sword and CB has a sword so they do a sword fight from two moving cars. Marion is like “riposte, honey”. You gotta wonder why they don’t just stop droving these trucks until the brawl is complete, what is their hurry.
- Mutt gets trapped in some tree branches and learns how to swing from them like Tarzan to catch up to the convoy-brawl. Monkeys are doing it, is how he learns the trick. Do you see, dear audience, what a fine action hero character this son-of-Indiana could be in another sequel do you see.
- That chase ends in a field of monster ant hills. An ant bites CB and swarms of them start ominously making their way toward the Russians. Ox has the skull and holds it at the army of ants, who obey his tacit wish to go around them because of the powers of the skull. They also avoid Indy and Russianest who are fist fighting. Another Russian gets covered in ants, seemingly fatally, and CB is cowering from them up a tree. Russianest falls into the ants and they swarm him and pull him into an anthill!
- We’ve seen all along that the vehicle the heroes were on is one of those “ducks” that’s a boat as well as a car. Marion is like, trust me you guys, and drives it off a cliff into the river. She’s super proud of herself but then some waterfalls that were foreshadowed earlier start happening to them. They survive them but I bet it hurts. After the third one we see that it’s the Iguazu Falls which are not in or near Peru but whatever. They are inadvertently, but now totally advertently, following the clues that Ox presented magically earlier, and they go to a cave by the waterfalls with some sweet artifacts in it. Indy says he is going to return the skull because “they told me to”. A shadow of the skull falls on a head in the tapestry and it’s the same shape, pretty cool.
- Ugh, a stone face they pass by looks at them. It turns out that an army of tomb protectors was conveniently stationed in this tomb, waiting in wall-mounted disguises for tomb raiders. A whole bunch of them chase them out of the cave into a large temple area with a pyramid and some other big structures.
- I should point out that during the convoy brawl, Mack persuaded Indy that he’s on his side after all, so this team of heroes is five of them: Indy, Marion, Mutt, Ox, and Mack. They figure out to whack some stones out of a thing, and that displaces sand and turns four stone beams into an obelisk in a cool way kind of. In further inspired-by-a-video-game news, they fall down a gap by that obelisk, and there is a new spiral staircase, but the steps slowly disappear and they have to go down before they are all gone. The first time you try it you die but you figure it out after one or two more attempts, you have to get the timing just right.
- Oh, okay so we’ve cut to CB a couple of times, trying to find Indy and the gang and observing some little red light things. We see now that Mack is dropping those to help her like a trail of breadcrumbs with Christmas lights on them.
- They come to a chamber with a bunch of crystal skeletons on thrones, but one of them is headless, so clearly they have to put the skull back on there. But CB shows up, grabs the skull, and puts it on herself anyway. It’s kind of an alive alien now, and there is some telepathy going on between the alien and Ox. Then Indy thinks Ox muttered something about a gift. Rumbling and crumbling happens a lot and the chamber they’re in gets all rotate-y. Ox is now sane and says they are inter-dimensional beings and above them is a portal to another dimension. Russians get sucked up into it, the heroes run away, CB stays in there saying “I want to know everything”. Mack, never easy to pin down, tries to loot stuff but then that loot room is getting destroyed, Indy tries to save him, but Mack just smirks and tolerates being sucked into someplace that will kill him probably.
- The crystal skeletons all kind of merge and it’s like they’re all one alien, and the alien scowls at CB for being a soulless Soviet, and vaporizes her and sends her powdered remains into that portal. Indy, Marion, Ox, and Mutt scramble upwards until they are at a spot with a vantage point that they can see all that rotate-y stuff becoming a rising flying saucer, which disappears. The big hole that’s left there gets filled in with water. It’s pretty cool looking.
- Denouement gives us cloying resolution with Indy apparently getting his job back with a promotion, and also apparently Jim Broadbent still works there, and then Indy and Marion get married and Mutt is into it, and a cinematic gust of wind blows Indy’s fedora at Mutt symbolically, except that Indy takes it back.
- Okay so as I suggested at the beginning, I really think that if you accept that aliens and lucky refrigerators are no dumber than the equivalent dumb plot points in the other movies, you’re not as likely to hate on this movie, at least not with a burning passion. But it’s definitely worse than the other ones. It’s just not as inspired. The action sequences were not exciting, they were scripted and by-the-book. I truly do think they consciously decided to take inspiration from video games, since “that’s what the kids like these days”. Like, the dungeons were filled with lurking enemies who only live to be ineffective thwarters of the progress of the protagonist. This movie didn’t need to be directed by Steven Spielberg, and even though there were some very professionally executed action shots, you would never have thought “this was clearly directed by a master”. Again, I don’t particularly mind the two things people complain the most about this: the refrigerator escape from a nuke, and the aliens. I think those things are fine for this kind of movie. But I don’t think we needed another father-son dynamic. It felt like they said “just do Indiana Jones things until we get to the spectacular flying saucer sequence at the end, people will be sufficiently blown away by what our modern technology can make that look like. And the movie felt way too much like a setup for a new generation Indy character. Which it turns out it was not.
- (Next: The Adventures of Tintin)
