2. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
How The Original's Magic Was Stripped Away: Introduction Of An Alien Plotline As a huge fan of the Indiana Jones series, I was originally optimistic when I heard that the long-awaited fourth installment would take our iconic hero into the '50s. Given that the first set of movies were based around the kind of pulp-inspired serials that were popular in the '30s, it made sense that
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull would try to encompass the '50s equivalent: science-fiction B-movies. Alas, actually putting aliens in the movie? Awful idea. It might not have been so bad if, as with the other Indy installments, Spielberg and Lucas had merely opted to make subtle references to extra-terrestrial life, but the decision to show us a dead alien zipped up in a bag during the
Skull's opening ten minutes really felt like too much too soon. To then show us a living, breathing alien in the movie's climax, then, was total overkill. The Indy movies just feel totally at odds with such hard sci-fi themes - even when the series was dealing with religion, it still left most of it to the imagination.