Indiana Jones And The Search For The Top-Secret Plot Involving Crystal Skulls
The unveiling of the name of the next Indy installment—Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull—may have rendered many a whip-flinging fanboy perplexed and mildly disappointed, but let's look at the bright side: For one, we can definitively eliminate Indiana Jones and the Pink Ladies of Rydell High from the running. Also, the title's over-specificity does offer us irresponsible internet rumormongers some tantalizing clues about its top-secret plot. MTV News asked a Harvard archeology professor schooled in ancient Mesoamerican cultures to speculate on how the movie's crystal skulls might manifest themselves into thrilling Nazi chases and the exploration of crypts containing a great many creepy-crawly things:
"It is said that when [High Priest of the Maya] willed death with the help of the skull, death invariably followed," [Harvard lecturer Marc] Zender said. "For anyone who believed this story, then, the crystal skull was a grim and deadly artifact, exactly the kind of thing that Indy would go searching for.
"But a funny thing happened on the way to the present New Age movement," Zender laughed, saying the artifact somehow morphed from a device of doom into "an airy-fairy vehicle for harmonic convergence," which can amplify and focus psychic abilities. "People are able to gaze into the eyes of the crystal skull and see these scenes — to either read the past with great clarity or predict the future."
"These things are big crystals, and people started thinking of them as these super computers of past civilizations. If a silicon chip can hold tons of information and data, imagine what a gigantic 11-pound crystal can hold," Zender said. "So maybe this skull has stored all of the lost knowledge of the Mayans or Atlantians, or ET."
Zender's description offers several insights as to why Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were attracted to them in the first place. Firstly, the mystical objects allow the team to revisit Temple of Doom's darker material using the latest visual effects, thus ensuring Apocalypto-caliber sanguinary realism to their beating-heart-removal sequences. But it's the skulls' use as alien-interfacing devices that we think got the sci-fi visionaries most enthused, and the endless array of interplanetary space-Nazi adventures they might open up to the geriatric adventurer and his pompadoured sidekick—concluding anticlimactically by the sealing of a spacecraft into a mammoth generic packing crate, where it would be forgotten forever in a U.S. Government storage hanger.
