Fans often complain about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’s use of aliens as a plot device, but the otherworldly visitors seen in the movie aren’t technically aliens in the traditional sense. From Indy surviving a nuclear blast by hiding in a fridge to Shia LaBeouf swinging through the jungle with a band of CG monkeys, there are many sequences in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that Indiana Jones fans rejected. A notorious South Park episode used a shocking metaphor to describe what Crystal Skull did to the franchise. But the scene that really lost the audience is toward the end when Indy encounters what seems to be a cabal of aliens. This is the moment that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull switches its genre from the kind of pulpy, old-school action-adventure that its predecessors were and veers into science fiction.
There had been supernatural elements in the previous Indiana Jones movies. At the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the opening of the Ark of the Covenant unleashes the wrath of God to melt the faces of the Nazis. In Temple of Doom, the Thuggee cult sacrifices humans to their own god by ripping their hearts out of their chests and lowering them into the fires of Hell. In The Last Crusade, Indy finds the ghostly knight guarding the Holy Grail and uses the magical cup to save his dad’s life. But aliens and spaceships felt like a step too far. It left behind the mysticism of those early entries in favor of hard sci-fi.
George Lucas conceived the story for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as a nod to the sci-fi B-movies of the 1950s. According to WhatCulture, an early draft of the script was called Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars. Lucas was intent on including little green men in the fourth Indiana Jones movie since early in its development. But the creatures that appear in the final film aren’t technically aliens. In order to appease director Steven Spielberg, Lucas tweaked their backstory so that they wouldn’t actually be aliens.
Does Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull Actually Feature Aliens?
Technically, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull does not feature aliens. In the climactic sequence, Indy infiltrates an ancient temple and finds a group of alien-like creatures that leave Earth in a UFO. But the characters are careful to make the distinction that they’re not aliens; they’re interdimensional beings. The reason why the crystal-skulled creatures were depicted as interdimensional beings instead of aliens was mainly to ease Spielberg’s hesitance to work on the project. Spielberg was reluctant to do another alien movie after exploring the subject matter in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (about peaceful aliens making contact with Earth), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (about a peaceful alien who wants to get home), and War of the Worlds (about vicious Martian tripods attacking Earth). According to the DVD extra “The Return of a Legend,” Lucas convinced Spielberg to get on board with the idea by using the word “interdimensional” instead of “extraterrestrial.” That technicality was enough for Spielberg to get over the similarity to his other projects and sign up for a fourth Indiana Jones adventure.
The design of these beings is based on the traditional image of a spaceman: gray skin, widely spaced eyes, elongated heads. They even travel in a flying saucer. But these creatures are from another dimension, not another planet. The interdimensional beings (who don’t have an official name besides “interdimensional beings”) are humanoids that stand at five feet tall. They have skeletons made of a magnetic crystalline property, hence the mystical crystal skull that the whole movie revolves around. These multiversal travelers are said to have influenced early human civilizations. The South American Ugha tribe worshipped them like gods. The same themes and ideas were later explored in more depth in Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel Prometheus, which introduced the “Engineers” that created intelligent life. The beings in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull are aliens in the sense that they’re not of this world, but they didn’t come from outer space.
Where Did The Beings Come From?
According to crystal skull expert Harold Oxley, these beings aren’t from space; they’re from the “space between spaces.” In the book The Complete Making of Indiana Jones, Lucas provided more details about the interdimensional beings from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. He explained that time moves differently in the space between spaces. An hour in their world is like a thousand years in Indy’s world. The period between Francisco de Orellana’s invasion in the 16th century and the interdimensional beings’ stint at Area 51 in 1947 didn’t feel all that long to them. Based on that information, this space between spaces sounds an awful lot like the Quantum Realm.