Hate ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’? Don’t Blame the Aliens!

At the top of the new year, Netflix gave all of us a belated Christmas present by adding the entire Indiana Jones franchise. Okay, just the film franchise; you’ll find no Young Indiana Jones Chronicles on the streaming service. Considering how big of a pop culture impact Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom, and The Last Crusade had on generation after generation, this is a big binge-worthy deal. And then… there’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Regarded as an unwelcome add-on to the beloved trilogy, 2008’s Kingdom of the Crystal Skull isn’t the first Indy adventure anyone’s gonna rush to stream–unless you’re me. While I’m not a huge Indiana Jones fan, I’m a child of the ’80s and ’90s; Indiana Jones was hella present, either via VHS tapes, TV airings, the aforementioned Young Indy, or Kermit the Frog swinging around in a fedora on Muppet Babies. Still, I didn’t see Kingdom of the Crystal Skull when it was released a decade ago, and its notorious rep made me keep my distance while I watched movies I actually liked as well as other sad, way-too-late attempts to restart franchises I hold closer to my heart (ugh, Prometheus). Crystal Skull streaming on Netflix is a game-changer, though. Watch some much-maligned dreck for basically free? That’s what Netflix is for, says the guy who spent the last month streaming every questionable Christmas romcom in sight.

Watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for the first time in 2019 puts it in a whole new context. Hype was replaced with dread, and I really only knew three things about the whole debacle: peak Shia LaBeouf, nuking the fridge, and aliens.

Regarding LaBeouf, the ensuing years and his consistently perplexing journey into an eye roll-inducing hipster art provocateur has not done this movie any favors. The movie wants you to see Shia LaBeouf, up-and-coming action leading man, the Alden Ehrenreich/Ansel Elgort/Taron Egerton of his day. What you see now is Shia LaBeouf, guy who wears a paper bag over his head and binges all of his movies in a row in an attempt to Say Something. Also at one point, LaBeouf’s mini-Indy combs his hair with Coca-Cola, which is far and away the most nauseating thing in this entire movie–a movie with mummified alien remains in it.

On that infamous middle thing, I’ve spent the last 10 years assuming that Indy taking shelter from a nuclear bomb in a lead-lined fridge was the culmination of two hours of shoddy spectacle. I had no idea, I was not prepared for, it being essentially how the movie starts.

Nuking the fridge is the ground floor of an entire skyscraper of crazy.

And on the third thing, the aliens, I think my hottest take is that the aliens, the beings with the titular crystal skulls in their noggins, are actually not the worst thing about this film. They aren’t the main reason why Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is such a snoozer in 2019, not by a long shot. Yeah, I actually think it makes total sense that Indiana Jones spends a not insignificant chunk of this movie cradling an alien skull like a football.

The real problems with Crystal Skull have nothing to do with aliens; the problems are the film’s look and script.

Crystal Skull is an ugly movie, and I mean that literally. It is not pleasant to look at, at all, and that’s saying something considering this comes from award-winning legends Steven Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński. There’s a really distracting mid-’00s CG sheen over the entire movie, one that makes shots of people just standing look as fake as the Star Wars prequels.

From my Wiki research, Spielberg and Kamiński talked a big game about recapturing the look of the originals so that Crystal Skull would look in line with the work of Douglas Slocombe, the cinematographer of the original trilogy. They… they really didn’t succeed. Just compare a shot of Hot Tweed Stud Indy from 1989’s Last Crusade and elder Hot Tweed Stud Indy from 2008’s Crystal Skull.

To paraphrase Alyssa Edwards, “Girl, look how green you [bleep]ing look, girl!”

The entire movie has this greenish/yellow tint to it, which totally ignores how natural the original trilogy looked. Come to think of it, you could make the claim that the ’80s Indiana Jones trilogy represents the pinnacle of totally natural action/adventure filmmaking. It’s a sky-is-green, dirt-is-brown punch-fest with almost exclusively in-camera effects. It’s not like the original Star Wars trilogy, which pushed special effects well past their limit in order to attain an otherwordly vibe. The Indy films were–Nazi-face-melting and beating-heart-yanking aside–totally grounded romps. Not only did they take place in our world, they took place in a time when there was even less technology. The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull feels so weird because nothing in it looks natural (unless everyone in the 1950s had jaundice).

The excessive use of CG only increases the artificiality. There’s a real Looney Tunes quality to the big action sequences, like Shia LaBeouf swinging through the trees like the monkeys do or Shia LaBeouf engaging in some car-to-car fencing with Cate Blanchett.

Maybe the look of the movie would be fine if the script actually worked… but it doesn’t. And I’m not talking about the aliens (yet)! There’s puh-lenty of groan-worthy moments in this movie that are alien free. Like Indy telling Haggard John Hurt to go for help, despite Haggard John Hurt being clearly insane (he goes and gets help from the villainous Russians, duh, because he’s insane). Then there’s Indy telling Shia that he brought a knife to a gunfight–literally, as in, you see Shia’s knife and then you see two KGB agents’ guns. Was that term not as common in 2008? Was this not so clearly on-the-nose back then? But that’s what passes for snappy dialogue in this Indiana Jones movie, that… and this…

I’ve delayed long enough, daddy-o. Let’s talk about the aliens and why they aren’t the problem. If you look into the movie’s history, George Lucas and Spielberg envisioned the fourth Indy film to be a ’50s-style B-movie from the start. I totally get why they went that route, too! The original trilogy pulls from the pulpy jungle adventure and treasure-hunting genres that were all the rage in the 1930s. If you fast-forward to the ’50s, which Crystal Skull does, it makes total sense that the film would go all-in on spacemen. And while Indiana Jones was never a sci-fi series, it’s not like it was totally grounded in reality. The original trilogy had plenty of mystical, unexplainable, fantastical elements, usually in the form of a Biblical MacGuffin. Are alien skulls really so far-fetched when the Ark of the Covenant melted a Nazi’s face off in the franchise’s best movie? Add to the fact that there is a whole archaeological side-gig to Ufology (Ancient Aliens, baby!) and Indy going all Fox Mulder sorta makes sense. Imagine if this movie looked as warm and worn as the originals and had some crack Lawrence Kasdan quips in it. It could work!

Just a sidenote: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is definitely the best X-Files movie ever made.

The alien stuff feels wrong because viewers spend the entire movie being like, “Yeah, it’s aliens. The crystal skull belongs to an alien. Seriously, we’re literally in Area 51, we know it’s aliens. That’s obviously a mummified alien, we get it, oh my god, why are we smarter than Indiana Jones?!” And then at the very end, as if the movie knew how unsubtle they were being, they pull the rug out from the entire concept by claiming these are actually inter-dimensional beings!

No. This is where I called shenanigans. Not when Indy rolled out of a nuked fridge with just a few cuts. Not when Shia turned into Tarzan. Not when there was a prolonged bit about calling a giant snake a rope. This right here undercuts every single thing the movie was trying to do! These can’t all of a sudden be inter-dimensional beings! The whole movie is an homage to the outer-space pop culture moment of the 1950s! This last minute switcheroo undoes the movie’s entire premise!

The frustrating thing about The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is that the real crystal skulls are already interesting and could form the basis of a real Indiana Jones adventure. They’re all believed to have been carved in the 19th century and then pawned off to museums as phony ancient artifacts with supernatural powers to boot. Come on, spooky stories and 19th century con men and grand historical grifting is interesting enough for Indy!

Or Spielberg and Lucas could have just gone with Frank Darabont’s script which had Indy on the run from ex-Nazis hiding out in Argentina. Oh yeah, that was going on in the ’50s too. What could have been…! Instead we got…

Stream Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on Netflix