Technofiction Review:

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright May 2008

First off, the movie feels like an homage. There is a lot of old ground covered here: you can see bits and pieces from all the old Indy movies, and other Lucas and Spielburg movies, as well. It feels like a finale.

The action choreography is up to snuff, and again, covering familiar ground: fights in moving cars and trucks, traps in ancient temples, temple walls moving around as traps are sprung.

So, my overall impression is similar to what I have for the movie Independence Day: the movie is not showing me anything I haven't seen before, but the familiar is masterfully crafted, so I don't mind watching.

That said, there are many and big technofiction mistakes.

• If the government is about to run an important secret bomb test, which A-bomb tests were in the 50's, the security at the gate the bad guys crash is pretty lax.

• A warehouse of priceless and unknown artifacts is on a nuclear bombing range? Atomic bombs were not well understood in those days. The government was pretty good about not putting stuff close to nuclear testing points. Remember: those bomb tests took place just as Southern California was starting to become a popular place to live: it had less than a million people in it, compared to the over ten million it has today. In the 50's, that whole SW corner of the US was barren, barren, barren, so there was no reason to put a warehouse so close to a nuclear test that just riding a mile on a rocket sled is going to bring one to near the center of a test.

• The Roswell aliens showed up in the middle of the early atomic bomb tests. That body is only a year or two old. It would not have been in a warehouse storing archived pre-WWII artifacts that were ready to be forgotten. (That implication for the warehouse comes from the last scene of the first Indy movie.)

• Gunpowder is not magnetic, neither are lead shotgun pellets (steel shotgun pellets are a 90's phenomenon). And the magnetism that the movie revealed wasn't following the inverse square law of intensity. If it was, the people who stored the artifact in the first place would have complained when their shoelace eyes ripped out and stuck on the crate, not to mention watches, nails from all the surrounding crates, and the pry bars used to open the crate. Plus, those first workers wouldn't have been able to pull it off the truck that brought it in. So... the crate would have attracted notice, and been stored in a special place and a special way. Instead, the magnetism we saw displayed was pretty random.

• After the nuclear explosion, how does Indy get the refrigerator door open? In the 50's those doors were so famous for killing kids that you had to take the door off before sending one to the junkyard. (However, the lead-lined part was cute... not real, but cute.)

• These secret soviet agents move around so freely! They go into soda shops, into the middle of a US college campus, into the middle of an antiwar protest, and there are no policemen or FBI agents on their tail? The previous Indy movies took place on remote, neutral ground, such as Egypt, so the presence of so many bad guys versus good guys was only modestly uncomfortable. Having them invade top secret US military facilities and college campuses inside the US with such impunity makes me much more uncomfortable. In the US, these people should be sneaking a lot more, and a lot more worried about being found out. They should have had a, "Shh! Not so loud!" attitude that was completely missing.

• Not a complaint, but an example of some of the nostalgic depth of this movie, that jet engine sled he takes off on to escape the warehouse is modeled after a a rocket sled used for a famous series of high-acceleration tests done by the Air Force in the forties to test what kind of G's fighter jet pilots could withstand.

• After all his years of "archeology" in service of the US government, these government agents have no more feel for Indy's character than to harshly accuse him? This is strange... and sadly, pure Hollywood plot device. It's also strange that they interrupt his work at the university so violently.

• What happens in South America makes less and less sense as it goes along.

• This secret Soviet spy ring can pony up a jungle-muncher that would make 2000's jungle road builders envious?

• The road it makes is flat and wide enough for sword fights between two racing cars?

• Human natives, as in just average people, come popping out of fixtures in a long-lost temple? How long did you say they had been waiting in those fixtures?

• Tell me again: how did the skull get stolen away from the temple in the first place? What were the thirteen "skull people" waiting for that they didn't leave before the skull was stolen? Why did they leave immediately after it was returned? What had they gotten in the meantime, so that they were now ready to leave on a minute's notice? These questions come up only because the skull people did leave so quickly and dramatically after the skull and the body are reunited. Hollywood movies usually answer that question. In this case, Lucas/Spielburg didn't bother to.

Those are the main points I thought about during and as I walked out at the end of the movie.

My overall impression was that, as is so common in 2000's movies, Spielburg and Lucas were using the story to showcase the action scenes rather than vice versa. However, they did good enough job with the action scenes that I was entertained.

But, like the many James Bond movies, Jurassic Park Two, and the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, there's nothing in this movie I'm going to remember for long. It's all special effects eye candy, there's no story to remember.

-- The End --