A Filmmaker's take on 'Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull'

la_russe

New member
Time Travel

montana i think you're making similar shortened leaps like the blogger. their argument may be more fantastical but your explanation is every bit as subjective. the IDBs clearly travel through a human future, collecting artifacts first then land in the far past and build their temple. again: their vehicle is surrounded by artifacts buried in the far past collected from the future. clearly they don't travel through space-time again until the skull is returned, a simple detail you're overlooking. and i think you might want to look into Quatermass and the Pit, which has and equal share of the sourcing of KOTCS
 

Montana Smith

Active member
la_russe said:
montana i think you're making similar shortened leaps like the blogger. their argument may be more fantastical but your explanation is every bit as subjective. the IDBs clearly travel through a human future, collecting artifacts first then land in the far past and build their temple. again: their vehicle is surrounded by artifacts buried in the far past collected from the future. clearly they don't travel through space-time again until the skull is returned, a simple detail you're overlooking. and i think you might want to look into Quatermass and the Pit, which has and equal share of the sourcing of KOTCS

I took the back story from Lucas's own description of events, as found in Rinzler's The Complete Making of Indiana Jones book. I didn't invent it.

Here is the quote from George Lucas:

“This is all backstory, but originally the Roswell aliens had come back to find the missing crystal skull that the conquistadores had taken from the original aliens, because they can’t get back to their dimension without the skull. The Roswell aliens are like emergency vehicle guys, but they crashed. The other part of it is that time in the other dimension is different from ours, so an hour to them is like a hundred or a thousand years to us. From their point of view in the other dimension, the conquistador invasion and their return to Roswell all happened rather quickly.”

There are certainly definite relationships between images and ideas in KOTCS, but the problem arises when you try to make them all fit into a single theory.
 

la_russe

New member
Spalko's other skull

Montana Agreed the creator has the ultimate license yet Lucas's statement doesn't resolve questions in KOTCS, in fact, it might make more. Spalko doesn't just claim there are other skulls besides the Roswell discovery, she actually possesses one, the IDB's seem to have been in Peru where Orellana was buried (the diagrams don't just show a skull) and cannot have left Akator unless they passed through Peru on their way etc. Lucas is offering what appears to be a linear backstory answer when the results are a non-linear question.
 

Montana Smith

Active member
la_russe said:
Montana Agreed the creator has the ultimate license yet Lucas's statement doesn't resolve questions in KOTCS, in fact, it might make more. Spalko doesn't just claim there are other skulls besides the Roswell discovery, she actually possesses one, the IDB's seem to have been in Peru where Orellana was buried (the diagrams don't just show a skull) and cannot have left Akator unless they passed through Peru on their way etc. Lucas is offering what appears to be a linear backstory answer when the results are a non-linear question.

This is my take on it:

The thirteen beings were travelling the earth, collecting artifacts from different cultures as and when they developed. I don't see them travelling back and forth in time as they do this, though they may have travelled back and forth to their own dimension to speed things up. A quick trip home and back would allow earth time to move forward at an exponentially faster rate.

Indy says in the treasure house: "There are artifacts from every era of early history." That is, there was nothing present depicting a time after the 1500s, so they at least hadn't gone forward in time to collect anything from, say, the 1600s.

At some point, in their dormant state in the 1500s the skull was stolen, and they either decided not to, or physically couldn't return as twelve. So they waited while rescue parties of their smaller cousins searched for the skull.

I don't think Lucas envisaged anything more complicated than that, as he doesn't give us any more to work with. He gives us about as much as he did with the Ark, the Sankara Stones and the Grail.

The thing is that we needn't assume that the portal in the temple was their only means of travel: it's the way back to their own dimension, but it obviously isn't the only way. The smaller creatures who crashed at Roswell came to earth somehow, and they were using a smaller craft, something similar to which the thirteen may have used to travel across the surface of earth.
 
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StoneTriple

New member
la_russe said:
...both examples you cite specifically, the mushroom cloud and the end shots of both Raiders and KOTCS are far from coincidental or random. ....Raiders and KOTCS, shot by different cinematographers different designers, shot over 20 years apart, have ending shots that are identical in many ways, an observation you yourself have posited.

There's no doubt the Atomic Cafe sign is foreshadowing, I already said I agree with that. However, I don't think it was thought out at the level the blogger claims. The sign is a mushroom cloud - outside of a military base where they test nuclear bombs - we're about to see a mushroom cloud. That's not something that needs a Dan Brown type of explanation. It's just foreshadowing.

As far as the end shots are concerned - when I posted those two screen grabs, I did it because I thought it was a very interesting similarity. It may very well have been intentional, but I hardly think they sat around story-boarding the thing to send a message. It may be something as simple as Spielberg & Lucas digging that composition. It's a wide shot that works well with titles.
 

StoneTriple

New member
Montana Smith said:
This is my take on it:

The thirteen beings were travelling the earth, collecting artifacts from different cultures as and when they developed. I don't see them travelling back and forth in time as they do this, though they may have travelled back and forth to their own dimension to speed things up. A quick trip home and back would allow earth time to move forward at an exponentially faster rate.

....there was nothing present depicting a time after the 1500s, so they at least hadn't gone forward in time to collect anything

That was my thought when I first saw it as well. They were building a collection of pieces, but it appears linear. I don't think they were randomly time-traveling to eras of their choice, so much as they were just on a different linear time line. A speed of light = age slower type of different, not time machine different. Whatever it was that happened to them, it appears that they stopped when the historians and archeologists believed they stopped.
 

Montana Smith

Active member
StoneTriple said:
That was my thought when I first saw it as well. They were building a collection of pieces, but it appears linear. I don't think they were randomly time-traveling to eras of their choice, so much as they were just on a different linear time line. A speed of light = age slower type of different, not time machine different. Whatever it was that happened to them, it appears that they stopped when the historians and archeologists believed they stopped.

Yes, and apart from that, time travel implies all kinds of messy ifs and buts, including 'why didn't they just go back to the time before Orellana took the skull and prevent him?' (as in a Back to the Future kind of messing with time).
 
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