As promised...
Udvarnoky said:
But that resonance was conjured by the storytellers, not the Grail itself. That different artifacts imply different storytelling possbilities doesn't change the fact that the possibilities are always there.
This is a pedantic road to go down, but I don't think that's quite true. You wouldn't choose the Crystal Skull of Akator to tell Last Crusade's story about a father-son relationship being more important than obsessive quests. And I don't know what stories you'd tell about Thor's toothbrush - the essentially human nature of the gods? <I>There's</I> an Indy V to bolster Montana's preoccupations...
Udvarnoky said:
To what use was the crystal skull's stature and notoriety put that it could not have been replaced? Whether the artifact has a real world equivalent or is product of someone's imagination (as the Sankara stones were), the mythology behind them is always a work of originality, so the relevance of it being familiar to the public doesn't really go beyond being a superficial hook. To be sure, real world history and legends are entwined with the make believe in constructing the artifact's backstory - that's one of the most enjoyable aspects of all the Indiana Jones films - but it's not like changing the crystal skull to the jade pectoral would have precluded that.
Obviously, I'm playing devil's advocate here - I would not have switched the crystal skull out with another artifact. It's a cool, somewhat well known diety carving that should have worked wonderfully with the movie's story. But I think it's pretty clear that whatever implicit merit that any given artifact supposedly packs is negligible against what the writers actually do with it. There's thematic relevance with the grail to the father/son story, but it still took a competent writer(s) to make it resonate.
As you suggest, the ark of the convenant itself probably wasn't important to a lot of people outside the context of the movie. The movie made it important and compelling. That's Kasdan, Spielberg and Lucas who summoned the intrigue - the golden box with the cherubs on it was nothing more than a tool. What's that expression about a poor carpenter?
It feels like there's a shift in the attitudes of Lucas, et al. towards the MacGuffin at some point following Temple of Doom. What I meant by the remark about the Ark's stature and notoriety is that the film relied on little more than that for its purposes. That is to say, it was a MacGuffin in the true sense of the term, as something of which the particular attributes are more or less irrelevant, so long as "importance" is one of those attributes. Not merely "importance," perhaps, but also "dangerous," as with, say, most Hitchcockian or James Bondian MacGuffins that have a role to play in war or secret destructive plots. The barely shaded in Sankara Stones are more or less the same, and we can probably argue that the story beat of Indy threatening to blow up the Ark and threatening to drop the Stones are more or less the same. (I'm stunned this has never occurred to me before, in fact, and am sadder for it.)
But then we get the Grail. The Grail has three primary attributes, as I see it: 1) It's associated with Christ and the story of the passion, 2) It's had heavy involvement in chivalric romances over the centuries, and 3) It's something that's been drunk from and can be again. Redemption and moral purity are thus themes irretrievably bound up in it, and father-son relationships aren't so far from it either. Yes, a lot of the Grail's properties were ported over from the Monkey King's immortal peaches, a myth I confess no familiarity with other, but what we get in Last Crusade is fairly organic to the Grail even if a number of its properties are newly created. Henry Sr's line about the quest for the Grail being "a race against evil" doesn't make much sense, and would be better suited for a more generic MacGuffin, but the healing power and the eternal life aspects are fairly compelling.
The crystal skull seems to have been planned to work similarly, and in this case Koepp's script is an improvement on Darabont's "choose your own adventure" climax, being more focused. I've
babbled on about this plenty in the past, and still stand by it. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is obsessed with knowledge, with people going crazy, with research and mind control and repositories of knowledge and collective action. However, unlike the Grail, the skull's "plot key" qualities aren't really well integrated into this thematic structure; the Grail healing Henry Sr.'s wound is a big moment with a lot of meaning, while the Skull opening doors or scaring off ants and natives aren't.
Udvarnoky said:
There were a number of intriguing ideas associated with the skull, but ideas are worthless if they're not corralled into something with more focus than Indy4 proffers. While I'm no fan of his attitude, replican't's underlying point that the skull became an all-purpose conflict resolver is valid. Yeah, you can get away with just deciding to let the crystal skull repel ants, scare away killer natives and open chambers, but in addition to such laziness robbing those problems of more inventive and character driven solutions, it also serves to devalue the skull as an interesting artifact, because it makes its "rules" feel improvised. There's a point where skull stops being nebulous in the sense of "This is cool and mysterious!" and becomes, "Wow, they never did actually figure out what they wanted to do with this, did they?" Darth, justifying that laziness by pointing out that no one raises believability issues with the ark's powers is a false premise - it is not an issue of suspending disbelief, and the ark is not put to comparable use.
And on this I must agree with you. It was far too much of a skeleton key, there to easily fill in any plot holes. I must further concede that my appreciation of the skull's more interesting attributes and relationship with the film's other concerns (obsessions?) is one that leaves aside its electromagnetic and crowd control abilities.
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I'm beginning to think what we really need is some sort of checklist so each of us can check off what we think worked in Crystal Skull, what didn't work in Crystal Skull, and what was irrelevant to it working or not.
