The REEL Addict 

You’re probably wondering at this point what could possibly be written about the ending and MacGuffin of CRYSTAL SKULL that hasn’t been covered already. It sucked. You know. Well, I thought I’d put down pen to paper (well, not quite) a more serious consideration of why they’re no good, and address/counter what some of the defenses of it have been.

Needless to say, if you haven’t seen the film yet there are SPOILERS (!!!) ahead.

First off, I think we need to get clear who is really at fault here. A lot of people seem to be assigning Steven Spielberg the blame, largely because it obviously elicits his many other alien-based films, most notably CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. Though Spielberg’s hands are far from clean (the prairie dogs and vine-swinging Mutt had his fingerprints all over it), George Lucas is 100% accountable. I highly doubt that even the small percentage of blindly loyal people who always emerge when their great master is criticized can dispute that at this point. Just look up any interview with Spielberg, Ford, and Lucas in the last while, and you’ll find the aliens were not only Lucas’ concoction, but that neither Spielberg nor Ford were thrilled about it. Not to be deterred, Lucas nobly pulled rank and said: “[Spielberg and Ford] wanted to go off on some other tangent. I said, ‘I’m not going to do that. I’m going to stick with [my idea] no matter what, so we either do this or we don’t. That’s it.’”

The internet also seems to offer scattered defenses of the ending, and the general alien theme. So let’s move on to address those.

Many have posed the legitimate question of whether extraterrestrial beings are really so much more unbelievable (to an atheist anyway) than the supernatural imbued Christian/Jewish based objects of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and THE LAST CRSUADE, or mystical sacrificial voodoo in TEMPLE OF DOOM. It’s not an illogical argument to make really. Here’s the thing though. Tales of these religious objects – or heck, Christianity and Judaism – have been around for a long, long time. Long enough to become believed in or at least indulged as a common and consistent element of our world. Theories about aliens are less than a century old, and I’d argue far less people believe in or would tolerate the idea of a technologically advanced extraterrestrial race (let alone one that purportedly has been to our planet and influenced our own ancient civilizations) than they would religions mythologies. I think there’s enough proof of this theory in the fact that the MacGuffin and ending of CRYSTAL SKULL seems to be almost unanimously loathed by everyone, while those same people (especially the atheist ones) are more than okay with the MacGuffins and endings of the other films. As crazy as it sounds, aliens just require more suspension of disbelief.

That, and aliens just don’t belong in the archaic, analog, archeologist adventure (alliteration!) world of Indiana Jones. Now, the defense to that has been to elicit George Lucas’ intentions. He’s openly said that just as the original INDIANA JONES films were call backs to past film genres and times, then too should the leap to the 50s in CRYSTAL SKULL result in allusions to genre films and social issues from that era. Hence, communism, the Cold War, and little green men. It’s not off-base then to have someone like Indy who works in a profession (kind of) that deals exclusively in the past, to be forcefully yanked into the future as many people in that time were. It’s no accident we get a lingering shot of Indy watching the massive nuclear mushroom cloud bloom. Indy – in that moment – finds himself in a brand new world, as did the people inhabiting it at the time.

I’ll give Lucas credit. It’s an interesting idea and experiment of sorts. I just don’t want Indy as the guinea pig. Also, there’s a difference between introducing the atomic age, and then taking that extra step to aliens. As my friend pointed out, it’s barely tolerable as it is that we saw the aliens, but then to show us the bloody goofy looking space ship right out of MARS ATTACKS (which was the point)? It just doesn’t belong in an Indy film. The fact that it is there, proves once again that Lucas has become completely oblivious and has totally lost touch with what his fans want and what made the franchises he produced so special. His grander ambitions (though I can’t really claim those were present in the new STAR WARS trilogy) are fine and dandy, but we just wanted Indiana Jones. I’m aware though continuing down this path will inevitability lead me into the argument of ownership and authorship that popped up with the whole “Han shoots first” debacle a few years back. In other words, though we would hope Lucas would respect us fans, in the end it’s his property and he can do whatever the hell he wants. And he will, as he’s proven. Sometimes he’ll even rub it in our face.

Ownership debate aside, I think it does just come down to the fact that in his ambitions, Lucas lost track of what he and Spielberg originally meant Indiana Jones to be: a love letter to the adventure serials of old, and well, just to the old. The magic of the first three films was that they reveled in the analog. The world around Indy, and the objects he relentlessly pursued mirrored Indy himself: dusty, worn out, rough around the edges, beat-up, but special precisely because of that. It’s like when Indy yells at that guy at the beginning of LAST CRUSADE that the objects in question “belong in a museum” and the guy responds: “So do you!” I never saw that as an insult to Indy, but rather a perfect and succinct summation of what made him so appealing.

We didn’t want Indy re-imagined into something new, nor wanted him thrown into the new. We wanted the old Indy we remembered, we wanted him dealing with the old. We wanted the Indy that belonged in a museum, not in a space ship. We didn’t get that. Instead we got a flying saucer that told us with almost absolute finality that Indy – both the character and the film series – will never be the same again. Perhaps the reason so many of us deride the ending of CRYSTAL SKULL is because on an unconscious level we could sense that.