In fairness, the whole creepy-animal part of the Indy movie formula hasn’t been that great, or relevant to everyone’s favourite fedora friend, since the first movie. It’s not like ideas from old drafts haven’t been successfully recycled in the past. One of the better sequences of Temple of Doom, the minecart chase, was also reportedly a cut sequence from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Speaking of earlier drafts, the divisive “big damn ants” sequence was from an abandoned draft for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. At least for Crystal Skull’s earliest moment of epic cheese, the admittedly terrible idea of a protagonist surviving a nuclear explosion inside a lead-lined fridge was reportedly taken from an early draft of Back to the Future. Crusade has Indy as a tapestry aficionado. Doom has that bizarre opening musical number (among other cheesy moments). Cheese has always been part of this series. That is, right up until Jurassic World swung in and stole that with ‘tame the raptor’. “If you’re searching for the silver lining, it’s this: that epic mountain of nuclear cheese introduced the world to a contemporary equivalent of ‘jump the shark’ in ‘nuke the fridge’. Face it, practical effects can't do everything.

And if you think the CG special effects are terrible, you really should go back and watch Toht’s face-melting moment at the end of Raiders. On top of this, despite some notably bad instances of CG – gophers and monkeys being the worst offenders – Crystal Skull was reportedly 70% practical effects, which is a stark contrast to the soulless computer-generated Star Wars prequels. To nail this visual aesthetic, Steven Spielberg’s go-to cinematographer (since Schindler’s List) Janusz Kaminski had to eat humble pie and diligently study retired cinematographer Douglas Slocombe’s work on the original Indy trilogy so Crystal Skull looked and felt right to audiences. The idea was that it should actually look like it was shot a couple of decades after The Last Crusade. For starters, it was shot on film, rather than the then (and still) popular push for shooting movies on digital cameras. Despite murmurings about Lucas meddling and an abandoned Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption) screenplay, there were steps to ensure that Crystal Skull had the right look, at the very least.

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