I will only pose the questions not already written here by other observant fans

I just saw this last night…Did i miss something? Did he not have his whip the entire time? I guess so because that would’ve been a better tool to use to escape that sand pit than a snake.

What was all that “treasure” doing down in the alien tomb? Was it mentioned HOW it got there and WHO put it there? Was it implied that the Aliens went booty collecting all over the world and throughout time before they were sealed in there somehow? So confused!

Also…the relationship between Marion & Indy was so strange. I mean she was REALLY pissed in the first movie about him leaving and that’s before she was engadged and pregnant. But then I remember Lucas has had something to do with this script and then I remember the love scene dialog and chemistry between Padma & Anakin. It makes me wonder what Lucas’s home life is like.

I haven’t seen this movie so I have a serious question: Is it really worse than “Temple of Doom”? As I recall that movie had (1) a ridiculously cheesy opening sequence, (2) an infinitely annoying (not even slightly cute) kid sidekick, (3) the ridiculous nonsense about pulling peoples hearts out and (4) some really unpleasantly racist undertones. Not to mention a script that seemed like they just decided to throw everything at the screen and see what sticks.

So I think the rule here is, “odd-numbered Indiana Jones movies = Win, even-numbered movies = Suck”. I’m holding out for Indiana Jones and the Retirement Home of the Raiders of the Temple of the Crusade of Did I Ever Tell You About That Time In The Jungle?

“Neither do CGI killer ants that can make ant-trees out of their bodies to reach victims.”

yeah, ants actually do that. they can span cracks in the ground to get from their hills to food. They also gather into balls of ants and float across water. Ants are ka-razy.

Another unanswered question is what was the point in trying to beat the Russians to return the skull? Spalko returned it and she was killed. What was the point?

To answer the person’s question above, Indy’s father died even after drinking from the grail because the grail gave eternal life to everyone who drank from it so long as they never crossed the great seal in the temple. Crossing that seal was the price of immortality as the Knight said.

Ken F.: the “point” was that Indy realized the ‘mission’ was to return the skull to its circle of bretheren; that would be the only way to discover the ‘power of the crystal skull’ – after learning *that*, they would know whether such power was ‘controllable’ for their own purposes. The exact same silly question could be transposed to the first & third films in the series:

“what was the point in trying to beat the Germans to unearth the Ark? Belloq opened it and he was killed. What was the point?”

“what was the point in trying to beat the Germans to find the Grail? Donovan drank from it and he was killed. What was the point?”

I don’t mean to pick on Ken F. – I mean, he was spot on about the ‘eternal life/great seal’ explanation, which so many of the above posters don’t understand… from a film that’s been around since 1989!

But there would have been exactly the same hue & cry from netizens over the movie-logic and great feats in this adventure serial over the first 3 films… had the Internet been in existence during their release. In fact, I notice that there are a ton of misremembering of details from posters, which is the natural symptom of so many seeing the film once, wanting to join in on the ‘net-bound bashing to be ‘tre cool’, and then coming up with ‘plot-holes’ and half-remembered points, which AREN’T actually FROM THE FILM.

Look at the original questions – they’re not really relevant or thought-out questions or they are easily answered:

1. Happy ending: although not-at-all required by the film experience, it can pretty easily be assumed that after fighting with a Russian secret police/army contingent (which did exist in RL in the 50s-60s) and preventing them from achieving their imperialist goal (with three witnesses. including one who had been a US gov. consultant,) Indy was cleared, reinstated and given a better title. Because it is made clear and stated that he had been a trusted US agent in WWII, this would be relatively easy – the ‘doubts’ over his loyalty came from particular FBI agents early in the film, and it is no stretch that by the end of the events in the film, saner heads at the FBI prevailed. This happened in RL, and it happens today. How in the world is THIS any sort of big issue?

2. – That lock was shown being rigged and blown, not ‘psychic-ly opened in a shower of sparks.’ Irina is described and shown as a mind-reader, not a user of ‘powers’. She is a succubus of knowledge as a mind-reader. Its pretty clear (if you’re smarter than a mold-spore) that she is ‘mind-reading’ the alien, and the vast amounts of knowledge overwhelm her human capacity, and she is destroyed – undone by the sheer amount of ‘knowledge’ of the alien being, like a flood when she was expecting to drink a glass of water. Really not complicated, kids.

3. – “Un-mapped” does not mean “Unexplored” or “Un-traversed”. The Russians were cutting a more direct route through the jungle with the RL jungle-brush-cutter, which would be desirable to prepare a direct path for a motored convoy, which the Russians would want to create in case they were to decide to excavate or transport whatever they found in the alien ruins (which, at that point in the film, they knew was the destination). The path that the dueling trucks took after the cutting craft was destroyed was a narrow and winding dirt road that followed the bend of the river and the crest of the mountains, which are what almost all ancient-civilizations’ roads did. The temple was a place where the aliens ‘landed’ and rested, but the natives built the edifice further *around* the alien craft, and lived there for generations afterwards, watching over the ‘resting’ craft. I would have assumed that there would have been ancient-style dirt roads approaching the grounds where these natives lived – and there was never any indication to the contrary in the film. In fact, the explanation is clear when we actually see that there *are* still native living there…. which makes Question #5 pretty silly too.

#5. – As if there weren’t old tribes of natives guarding their sacred treasures in the 3 previous films. Heck, in “Crusade”, there were even 2 groups – the Order of the Grail (which was only slightly more effectual than the natives in ‘Skull’) and the 900-year-old Knights (2 of them had perished before). At least in “Skull”, they were portrayed as actively hiding, lying in wait as part of the ‘danger’ of the chamber itself, distinguishing them from the ‘natives’ in the previous films.

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All in all, its a damn good thing that the Internet wasn’t around from 81-89. We’d *still* be bitching about: “God-powered lightning, melting, exploding and electrocuting all those that He found ‘evil’”, “reaching an island via tying one’s self to a submarine”, “Heil Hitler-saluting Monkeys”, “anthropomorphic rats that go “Uh-Oh!” when the “power of God” causes a Nazi symbol to self-burn”, “An entire tribe of over a hundred Hovito Indians chase him with spears, bows and arrows, and blow-darts —- and *not one* hits him?!?”, “a man is dragged for at least a mile behind a speeding truck – and he *survives*?!?”.

These, and more, are from the first film only. And that one’s unquestionably the best one – there are even more examples in the next two, but there’s only so much time.

Unless, of course, there’s thousands of sour nitpickers, with *lots* of time on their hands, who want to be kewl and bash away, and – these days – a way to do it. Then there’s plenty of time.

But it certainly does miss the point! Good luck with all that!

4. – As many have noted correctly above already, dumb question. Such theories were being expounded upon by the 40′s, and any brilliant researcher into the paranormal and religious beliefs of ancient civilizations would be quite familiar with them. [Also pretty sweet is that the "spaces in-between" is the popular way to describe the very-modern "string theory", of other, unseen dimensions co-existing in our plane, but that we are too limited by human capacity to observe and/or describe.] It is also not odd in the least that a ‘spaceship’ would be required to ‘visit’ such ‘space between spaces’: its entirely speculative to describe or show what type of craft or mechanism one would need to use to get to this ‘other dimension’. We never actually see this “spaceship” go into space – it vanishes between edits. For all we know, the implication is that this craft/machine is what is required to travel between dimensions, and earthlings have just been assuming that “UFO sightings” were from outer-space and not ‘between-space’. Either way, there’s nothing at all “wrong” about the theory or the ‘spacecraft’.

Am I the only one who was bothered by the most glaringly anachronistic thing I’ve seen in a movie recently? There was an LED matrix display board for the countdown on the rocket sled at Area 51. A friend I went to see the film with said, “It’s Area 51 so it has better technology.” Well it doesn’t quite work that way. LED’s were not manufactured until the early 1960′s and I don’t recall ever seeing them arranged in matrix display boards until the mid 1980′s. What would have looked very cool, very high tech and very accurate for the period would have been a display board with Nixie tubes. They are a type of display that used a filament to form the entire digit. Ten filaments (0-9) are stacked in what looks like a vacuum tube. Current passing through the filament makes it glow and the number is now displayed. Since they’re stacked a change in the number, like in a countdown, makes the number in a tube appear to move forward or back. A nice side effect from this is it would make a countdown look even more menacing. They were invented in 1954 so they easily fit the time period. They are also not that hard to come by as they continued to be used and manufactured in the Soviet Union after LED displays made them obsolete in the US and western Europe. One can easily find them for sale on eBay and some people have used them to build decorative clocks. Maybe when Speilberg digitally removes the guns and replaces them with walkie talkies he can have a CGI Nixie display put in instead :)

Part of question 1 can be answered. The people that were chasing Indy and his kid on the motorcycle weren’t FBI. They explicitly said they were KGB.