It took awhile, but the Star Wars prequels are now considered cool. Will Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull get the same critical re-evaluation? It hasn’t happened yet, and maybe it shouldn’t considering the film features a scene where Shia LaBeouf swings through the jungle with a bunch of CGI monkeys, but… what was I talking about again? Oh yeah, the Indiana Jones movie with the aliens.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull writer David Koepp recently appeared on the Script Apart podcast, where he discussed the decision to add extra-terrestrials to the Indy canon. “I was never happy with the idea [of the aliens]. When I came on, I tried to convince [Spielberg and co-writer George Lucas] to change it. I had this other idea. They didn’t want to change it,” he said.
Koepp, who also wrote Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, and Spider-Man, admits that his script might not have been better. But “I think that a lot of the pushback that movie got, in a larger sense aside from little things people might not have liked, that were too silly or whatever, the larger one was that, ‘We don’t feel like aliens should’ve been in an Indiana Jones movie.’ Fair enough, in retrospect, you’re probably right,” he said.
At least the Crystal Skull aliens didn’t travel to a planet that’s 71 percent water, even though they’re vulnerable to getting wet. That would be a real boneheaded move.
Indiana Jones 5 comes out on June 30, 2023.
(Via CBR)