aliens are not ok but the supernatural powers of the ark of the covenant and holy grail are?
Ark of the Covenant… Hindu Sankara Stones… the Holy Grail… I’m seeing a pattern…
… Ark, Grail, Sankara, Aliens. Which doesn’t belong?
Agree with Melon.
Aliens don’t fit the mythos and style established by the three prior movies.
The McGuffin in each of the original movies is firmly rooted in earth-bound mystcism and leaves the viewer to decide what really happened, or what caused the apparent ‘magical’ effects.
Whereas, Aliens are funnily enough more mundane, there is no question left unanswered, just “Oh it was the Aliens and their super-duper technology”.
Perhaps partly to me as well, is the Ark, the stones and the Grail fit within a ‘Fantasy’ setting, while Aliens, to me at least, equals ‘Science Fiction’
Well, there’s a lot of reasons, really. Part of it is that it just wasn’t a very good movie, and the aliens are a pretty big diversion for the franchise, so it’s easy to latch on to that as being what’s “wrong” with the film.
Of course, there’s other problems. One is the dilution of what made the original film cool. I mean, it was a great movie in pretty much all respects, but the supernatural element really pushed it over the top for me. The movie’s largely set in the real world, where there’s not really a lot of direct, supernatural action. But here’s this one artifact that’s proof that there’s some larger force moving in the world, something rare and strange and far beyond human comprehension. Remember that scene where the swastika burns off of the crate? Still gives me chills. Problem is, the longer you stretch out the franchise, the more you dilute that sense of the strange and unearthly. Even by the third movie, you’ve got one dude who’s encountered three separate artifacts that prove there’s some larger force moving in the world, all within a span of ten years or so. You start to get the impression that an archaeologist can’t walk ten feet through a dig site without tripping over the majesty of the divine made manifest in the mortal world. It starts to feel a bit cheap. This is compounded that Crystal Skull suddenly throws aliens into the mix. It’s easy to accept the premise that there’s real, supernatural powers at work in the world that are incredibly rare. It’s harder to accept the premise that there’s real, supernatural powers at work in the world that are kind of common. In the fourth film, we’re asked to accept that there’s real, supernatural powers at work in the world, and also hey, look, it’s ET! At this point, the entire premise that Indy exists in “our” world in any sense is stretched to the breaking point. If there’s this many non-terrestrial powers active in the world, the world shouldn’t look anything like the one we live in.
Lastly, there’s the emotional power of the myths themselves. The Ark is part of a myth system that’s survived thousands of years. Same with the Holy Grail. (I’m not so sure about the Sankara Stones. Do those come from a legitimate Hindu myth, or were they an invention of the films?) These are stories that have embedded themselves in the human consciousness through constant repetition. They’ve been refined by history, leaving us their most powerful and resonant versions. Crystal Skull, on the other hand, is based on the books by Erich von Daniken, which were first published in 1968. They lack a certain… gravitas. Frankly, they’re kind of dumb. Now, I’m not a religious man, so I don’t put much more stock in the Bible than I do in Chariots of the Gods. But I can at least respect the stories in the Bible as legitimate attempts by the ancients to comprehend the world around them. Von Daniken, on the other hand, is pure huckster. He takes stuff that we already understand, lies about it, and uses that to sell books. It’s simply not as cool as the older, established myths. And by including it in this particular franchise, it cheapens the use of those myths in the earlier films. If the “magic” in Crystal Skull was just space aliens, what does that tell us about the supernatural elements from the previous films? Was that Yahweh who burned the swastika off that cross, or Klaatu? Did the Holy Grail catch the blood of Christ, or Chewbacca?
And even that’s not insurmountable. Lots of people have done some pretty cool things with Van Daniken, from Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles to Herge’s Flight 714. But Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was simply a crappy movie. It was a bad treatment of a bad idea. And it’s a lot easier to recognize and articulate why an idea is bad than it is to recognize and articulate why a treatment is bad.
+1, 2, and 3.
Yeah, the previous movies had mystical elements too, but not all mystical elements are equally silly. Santa Claus is mystical too, but you wouldn’t expect him in an Indiana Jones movie. I don’t think aliens as a concept is unworkable, but if you’re gonna do something like that you need to do an extra good job selling it. Can’t just tack on a bunch of goofy translucent dudes and a flying saucer at the end for no reason and with no real foreshadowing.
I can see that we have someone here who doesn’t watch Warehouse 13. 
I’m just sick of deadly MacGuffins. The characters spend the whole movie chasing the whatchacallit, finally open it up, and it kills them. It works in the first film because of the foreshadowing of the burning swastika, but why would a nongrail kill somebody, and how does “I want to know everything” translate into an instant case of exploding head syndrome (EHS)?
The Loc-Nar in Heavy Metal bugged me for the same reason.
Mostly, it’s that the movie kind of sucked. Aliens in and of themselves aren’t inherently bad, but frankly by the time we got there I didn’t give a rat’s ass about the movie anymore. They lost any emotional investment for me with that incredibly retarded chase scene. (By the way, once they blew up the Video Game Road-Making Machine, who had made the road they were still driving on?) When they fell down two extra waterfalls for absolutely no reason whatsoever I wasn’t just “meh” about the whole thing, I was actively disgusted. They would have really had to wow me after that to get me on board again.
Remember in Raiders of the Lost Ark in the map room, where the “amazing wonders” music swells up and the light hits the staff and throws the beam to the Well of Souls? Remember how awesome that was? And Indy’s awestruck by it too? Yeah, there wasn’t none of that in the fourth movie.
Indiana Jones and the Sleigh of Doom
I know you’re winking, but Warehouse 13 is exactly the point. In that universe, to certain people, those kind of artifacts ARE mundane. They’re stored in a big warehouse, after all. The heroes are equipped with all sorts of futuristic technology, and it quickly becomes commonplace for them. This is the opposite of how the Indiana Jones series treats magical artifacts.
Back to the OP: My short answer is “What if they blew up the mothership at the end of Independence Day and Nazis rained out?” That would be equally as bad as the end of Crystal Skull.
To add to what people have already said, the first problem with the film is not the aliens, but the movie itself. It’s just a flatly terrible movie in its basic components:
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The story doesn’t make sense, even within its own logic. Just sketch out on paper what happened; it just isn’t logical.
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The action is not integrated into the story, a critical part of any action movie. Almost everything about the (illogical) story is explaine through expository dialogue. Expository dialogue is a part of all action movies, even good ones; there are a few key scenes in “Raiders” with this, like the scene in the college with the CIA guys, or Indy’s conversations with Sullah. But a lot s also revealed through action. In Crystal Skull, almost everything is explained through dialogue, and in between there are action scenes that often don’t TELL you anything That makes both the action scenes and dialogue scenes boring.
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The movie’s characters don’t behave any more logically than the story. Indy’s hatred of Communists is out of character and never adequately explained. Hisline “Nazis… I hate these guys” in the third film is funny because you’ve already seen WHY he hates Nazis; they keep trying to kill him. Otherwise, Indy’s only interest houghout the films is archaeology. His sudden conversion into an associate member of the John Birch Society is just heaved at the viewer to create conflict, rather than allowing the villains to create the conflict. Indy himself is the biggest problem, but the other characters are largely uninteresting, too.
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CGI. I don’t mean to sound like a Luddite here, but the CGI in the movie was in many cases VERY poorly done, and it’s also not consistent with the established look and feel of Indiana Jones films, the first three of which were famous in part for outstanding stunt work. CGI can look and feel really fricking awesome when it’s done right; for a recent example, consider “District 9,” which is a visually sensational movie. Crystal Skull’s CGI work looked cheap and fake. I’m sure it cost a lot to do but it LOOKED phony as hell, as opposed to a movie like District 9, or hell, even “Wall-E.”
Since the movie in general sucks, you just can’t take to the aliens thing. I agree with Miller that jumping from religious myth to alien stories is a jarring switch, but I’d argue that had the movie been otherwise competent, we’d all be okay with the alien angle - it still would not have been a good choice, but it would have worked okay with a good movie and would also have been thematically consistent with the switch of the franchise from a 1930s setting to a 1950s setting. I’m an atheist and I don’t find aliens any more or less believable than Christianity, but the myth of the Ark of the Convenant worked in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” because the MOVIE worked.
See, I felt halfway deceived by the trailer, for that matter. A big chunk of the trailer is the fight/chase/ruckus in the warehouse. I saw that and said “holy shit, someone’s going after the ark!” Then nothing.
A better movie would have built on the interest in the ark. It’s the most powerful item, near as not, in the world. SOMEONE is going to make a play for it at some point. Then introduce some other McGuffin along with it that can drive the plot and bang, better movie.
I was really hoping that the aliens and the 50’s setting would be used to effect (not to mention the fun of getting good old Russian villains again) but noooo. How do you get a bunch of “get moose and squirrel” old fashioned Russian bad guys to be boring?
I think that’s the root of the problem. Indiana Jones is rooted in the adventure serials of the '30s. Place the character in a different context and you have a broken movie.
It might be possible to move the action forward in time, but it had better still take place in a coherent 1930s adventure universe, or it will be fundamentally wrong. These aliens had no place in that universe. Fail.
The problem is with putting both in the same narrative universe. Not that a universe containing one cannot logically contain the other, but that they are things appropriate to essentially different genres.
(I actually have more of a problem with a universe where the Ark and the Grail, of Judeo-Christian mythology, have real power, but so do a set of stones sacred to a Hindu god.)
Damn, now I have to see the movie.
I’m a little irritated. I’ve never seen this movie, but might have seen it one day. Now, I’ve been spoilered about aliens. Not sure why you had to put that in the thread title!
You should be thanking the OP then–he just gave you two hours of your life back.
I don’t think this is quite right. While the Ark of the Covenant is a legitimate mythological artifact and does (more or less) have the advertised capabilities represented in Raiders, the Holy Chalice or Grail is definitely a post-Roman (and post-Gnostic) invention, initially presented in Perceval and largely popularized by Robert de Boron’s apocryphal stories of Joseph of Arimathea, which were the first to make it a Christian myth. Mythologists widely place the origins of the grail in Celtic myth, and its advertised capabilities in the film are mostly a manufacture of the screenwriters. There are no Sankara stones or anything really like them in Hindu mythology; although Lingam stones (which are marked by runes or hieroglyphs) do serve as icons in the Hindu faith they aren’t anything like the Sankara stones in the film.
The real reason that KotKS flopped so badly is just that it was a ham-fisted attempt to recreate the first film, while at the same time back-referencing to it. Although it did go from a supernatural deus ex machina to an extraterrestrial source for its fantastic elements, this might have worked had it been handled in a less clumsy and obviously derivative fashion. The thing–the McGuffin–is really irrelevant, so long as it is presented in a fashion in which the characters in the film can take it seriously. The story would have been better served by excluding all of the Indiana Jones elements and making it a unique, Doc Savage-type story rather than shoehorning in Harrison Ford and everyone else in a weak attempt to appeal to nostalgia.
The aliens aren’t the problem, except insofar as it is difficult to do something with aliens that isn’t either tiresomely derivative or utterly laughable. Cameron’s otherwise terrific The Abyss was nearly sunk (no pun intended) by the inclusion of indistinguishable-from-magic aliens, while very similar aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind are used very effectively. 2001: A Space Odyssey succeeds because it never shows the aliens at all, and thus bypasses the problem of presenting “realistic” aliens in corporeal film.
Using aliens and their psychic computer as the McGuffin in Kingdom was a dubious choice at best, and when combined with copious callbacks, lampshading, and foolhardy attempts to wedge in previous characters and future spinoffs made for a top-heavy story that simply couldn’t survive on its own merits. Raiders carried none of this weight; Last Crusade struggles with it but manages to survive. Temple of Doom, minus Ms. Spielberg, Short-Round, and its most comedic elements, is actually not a bad film; it had the potential to be the Empire Strikes Back of the Indiana Jones franchise, being a much darker story that indicated a more pervasive supernatural world, and a ready segue into a sort of Cthulhu-esque universe.
Stranger