Movie Review – Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
Written by George Lucas, Jeff Nathanson, and David Koepp
Directed by Steven Spielberg

Once upon a time, there was a man named Indiana Jones. He had many adventures in his day. Then one day, he stopped. That would have been a perfect place to end things. Indy rides off into the sunset with his friends as the end credits of The Last Crusade roll across the screen. For nineteen years, it was the end. In the background, treatments, and drafts of scripts were hammered out as the creatives and executives hemmed and hawed over how much more money they could squeeze out of this one. I was okay with no Indiana Jones movies in the 1990s and most of the 2000s. We didn’t need any more stories anymore because we could always revisit the ones we had. But more was required by the money machine. So we got Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, a medley of scenes from many scripts that are made worse by the development of computer-generated imagery. Poor Indy was forced to put the hat back on and dance for the audience again.

Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) finds himself in a dire situation in 1957. A group of Soviet agents led by Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) kidnapped Indy and his sidekick Mac (Ray Winstone) and brought them to a hangar in the legendary Area 51. They want Indy to show them where an alien corpse from the Roswell incident is being held, and they find it. However, Indy goes through a wild set piece that is capped by the explosion of a nuclear bomb. Back in his civilian life as a professor of archaeology, Indy is approached by a young greaser, Mutt Williams (Shia LeBeouf), who wants help finding his missing mother, who Indy knew? The movie tries to be cute, but we all know who it is between spoilers on the movie poster and trailer and just having a functioning brain. Mutt and Indy travel to Peru, where they find the trail and clash with Spalko and her soldiers before discovering an ancient lost city home to the titular crystal skull.

I won’t nitpick minutiae here; that has been done to death over the last fifteen years. I want to discuss why this is a weird and tonally off-putting attempt to reboot a beloved character. I will point out that the portrayal of the Soviets is comical and utterly fitting with anti-communist American propaganda. It’s also lazy writing because they are cut and pasted from the Nazis in previous pictures. There’s nothing that makes the Soviets feel different than the Nazis, especially the part where they are hunting for esoteric artifacts. That was very much a Nazi thing, Henrich Himmler was a faithful occultist, and the Thule Society was a perfect example of the entanglement of fascism & mysticism. The Soviets were far more interested in the sciences, and the script tried to sidetrack this contradiction by framing this as some sort of alien story. It just doesn’t work for me, and the antagonists are bland and lacking in personality.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having Indy do silly & implausible things. That’s the bread and butter of the franchise. The film goes wrong in not establishing clear character motivations and arcs. Take Mac, for instance. The character is a mess of confusion. He betrays Indy but then says he’s a double agent against the Soviets, but then helps them find the lost city. What’s worse is his final scene, being sucked away by the interdimensional portal, where he just lets go of the tether between him and Indy and says, “I’ll be okay.” Huh? Why would he say that when moments earlier he was gathering up as much treasure as he could with plans of leaving them all behind. Mac makes zero sense from start to finish in this picture and should have just been cut out. He’s a plot device that makes the movie worse.

I also hate the intangibility of the settings. In the film’s first half, most of the locations are real sets that the actors are actually in. When we get to Peru, and the vehicle chase begins, it becomes evident nothing around the actors and automobiles is really there. Return to The Last Crusade and the excellent tank in the valley set piece where the characters fight their way around the vehicle. Indy is hanging off a turret and slowly being pushed towards the cliff to be smashed. I’d even settle for the miniature work in Temple of Doom, which is obviously unreal but has historical roots in the film serials the movies are inspired by. This blue/green screen bullshit is so disposable and takes me out of the story. There’s also a big difference between Willie Scott reaching into a hole to pull a lever and seeing actual bugs crawl on her arm and then digital ants swarming over a Soviet. One really makes you squirm, the other makes you yawn.

The motivations are a big problem. I’ll focus on Indy and the return of the skull. Why does he do this? The most the film gives us is him saying, “Because it told me too.” That’s weak and isn’t the motivator to make the audience invested. Why should we care what the skull asked him to do? For all its flaws, Temple of Doom shows us a similar situation. Indy has escaped the thrall of Mola Ram and is about to leave the temple. Then he is reminded of the child slaves toiling and feels a moral duty to free them. Why not do the same things with the beings behind the skulls? Maybe they are caught in some limbo state over centuries and must return to their own world lest they die. Show us that, and now we can be on Indy’s side. We see him as an empathic person looking beyond fortune and glory. That was the point of Temple, Indy growing beyond treasure hunting and caring about people. 

Crystal Skull doesn’t capture its period as well as the other films. Some moments feel like the 1950s, especially in the first half. When we get to the jungle, all that falls away, and other than the actors being old, this could be taking place at any time. The technology used doesn’t seem far from what we saw in the old films. The diner fight with Mutt was a great 1950s moment, and even though the nuke scene is very silly, it at least feels of the period. I wanted more of that feeling and to see Indy interact with the 1950s if they set the film there. But it ends up being meaningless other than justifying why we have Soviets (essentially just acting like Nazis from the 1930s & 40s).

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is not the worst film in the world, but it may be one of the most unnecessary. I don’t think it adds much to the characters that weren’t done better in the older movies. If you like this movie, it’s not making the world worse because you do. It feels like such a sloppy affair, unable to decide how silly or serious it wants to be and never really delivering character moments that I look back at with fondness. The three previous ones, for their flaws, at least feel like a clear vision of a movie. 2008 was the same year Iron Man was released, showing us the direction Hollywood was headed for the next couple of decades, and this Indiana Jones feels like it’s caught between that period and where it came from. It’s a shame. I hope they finally let Indy retire in peace.