May
27
I watched “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” a second time last weekend. It holds up well. I picked up a few new things, like how they name-drop two of the alternate titles for the film (”Saucer Men From Mars” and “Destroyer of Worlds”) during the interrogation scene and how the titular crystal skull is more than just a plot device to drive the story forward. It’s also a high-powered magnet, a repellent for “big damn ants” and a key for opening temple doors and gateways to parallel dimensions. This got me thinking about the other relics Indy’s dug up over the years — the Ark of the Covenant, the Sankara Stones, the Holy Grail — and about their awesome Nazi-melting capabilities or their various degrees of uselessness, like the cup of Christ that cures bullet wounds but isn’t as effective at granting eternal life as advertised.
Let’s start with “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” The golden idol that Indy nabs at the top of that film, the one that brings a Peruvian temple crashing down all around him, is immediately taken from him by his rival, Belloq. The sneering MacGuffin doesn’t possess any otherworldly powers, though it is sacred to the Hovitos, who quickly fall to their knees and give Indy enough pause for him to escape. Beyond that, it’s just another trinket and not terribly earth-shattering. It’s once the government recruits Indy to find the Ark of the Covenant, that his friend and mentor Marcus Brody reflects that the object is “unlike anything you’ve gone after before.” Here we realize that the Ark is a game-changer. And at the film’s climax, when the Nazis pop the lid and are promptly liquefied, it’s clear that Indy’s found the ultimate WMD.
The Sankara stones in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” don’t exactly trump the Ark of the Covenant in terms of leveling mountains and such. The film’s chief villain, Mola Ram, seems to be convinced that possessing all five stones will give him the power to not only kidney-punch the Hebrew God, but the Christian one as well. Indy’s less than convinced. A bit of a mercenary in this installment (a prequel to “Raiders”), he’s after the stones for “fortune and glory.” What power the stones truly possess — three of them anyway — is the ability to glow when in close proximity to one another and to singe the baddie’s hand during the suspension bridge climax. Simply put, the MacGuffin in “Temple of Doom” is the most inconsequential of the lot. Indy ultimately returns the one stone he didn’t lose along the way to the village from which it was stolen, remarking cynically that “[i]t’d be another rock collecting dust” in a museum.
“Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” begins with an emo-haired young Indy snatching the Cross of Coronado from a gang of treasure hunters. The misadventure shoehorns in the origins of his fear of snakes, the scar on his chin, his bullwhip, his distant father, and his fedora. The opening sequence of the film is an expository checklist, hinging on self-parody as it becomes more and more comprehensive. Again, the relic he’s chasing after is nothing more than a bright, shiny object, not something that makes people’s heads explode. Adult Indy, however, embarks on a dual quest to find his long-lost father and the Holy Grail. Legend tells that the Grail grants eternal life to whomever drinks from it, making it the more sought-after of the two MacGuffins; but, the other is James Bond, so that in and of itself is somewhat significant. At the climax, Indy races to retrieve the Grail to save the mortally-wounded Henry Jones, Sr. Then both he and his father drink from the Grail at film’s end, presumably achieving immortality…or not.
We learn in movie four that Indy’s father has since passed away. This sort of diminishes the value of the MacGuffin in “The Last Crusade.” But, in “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” the cranium in the film’s title — once reattached to the skeleton it was taken from — unlocks a gateway to “the space between spaces” that, when opened, rearranges the topography of an ancient city. It also vacuums up some Communists and turns one female KGB agent with a black Prince Valiant haircut into powder. Given the sheer magnitude of destruction at the end of the fourth film, it’s obvious that the crystal skull possess the most bang for the buck of all of Indy’s finds.
Of all the MacGuffins in the Indiana Jones films, none of them really worked out as planned, especially for the villains, like the poor schmuck who drank from the wrong Grail in movie three and turned into John McCain in a matter of seconds. But what’s important to remember about these films is that they’re not actually about the mystical WMD Indy’s looking for. No, it’s the journey, not the destination, that makes the Indiana Jones movies worth watching.
-Brad Lohan
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