History Film / IndianaJonesAndTheKingdomOfTheCrystalSkull

* GenreSavvy: [[spoiler:Mac]] after Indy and Mutt are taken captive in Peru. [[spoiler:Having worked with Indy since the Second World War, Mac knows his old friend quite well. This means Mac knows that sooner or later, Indy's inevitably going to get loose from Soviet captivity and that he might reach Akator before Spalko. So, Mac intentionally drops "clues" to Indy that he's actually a double agent for the CIA on the off chance he needs to "switch sides". It works.]]

* GenreSavvy: [[spoiler:Mac]] after Indy and Mutt are taken captive in Peru. [[Having worked with Indy since the Second World War, Mac knows his old friend quite well. This means Mac knows that sooner or later, Indy's inevitably going to get loose from Soviet captivity and that he might reach Akator before Spalko. So, Mac intentionally drops "clues" to Indy that he's actually a double agent for the CIA on the off chance he needs to "switch sides". It works.]]

''Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull'' is a 2008 {{adventure}} film and the fourth entry in the ''Franchise/IndianaJones'' series. It is directed by Creator/StevenSpielberg, with the screenplay written by David Koepp and the story written by franchise creator Creator/GeorgeLucas and Jeff Nathanson. It was released on May 22, 2008.

''Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull'' is the fourth film in the ''Franchise/IndianaJones'' series. It is directed by Creator/StevenSpielberg, with the screenplay written by David Koepp and the story written by franchise creator Creator/GeorgeLucas and Jeff Nathanson. It was released on May 22, 2008.

* ShoutOut: Mutt's BadassBiker image is lifted from Creator/MarlonBrando in the ''Film/TheWildOne''.

The film's story is followed by ''Film/IndianaJonesAndTheDialOfDestiny'' (which takes place 12 years later), set to be released in 2023.

* EndOfAnEra: ''Kingdom'' was the final ''Indiana Jones'' film made prior to Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012. As a result, it's the final Indy film directed by Steven Spielberg and with a story credit by George Lucas (as both creators would take a backseat as Executive Producers for ''Dial of Destiny''). This is also the final Indy film with sound design by Ben Burtt (who'd left Lucasfilm after the completion of the ''Star Wars'' Prequels in 2005, but returned to ''Indiana Jones'' for this film).

* ArtisticLicensePhysics: No, not [[ArtisticLicenseNuclearPhysics nuclear physics]] for the infamous fridge. Explosions are funny things where even a little cover can make a huge difference, though an explosion that destroys everything else may or may not leave a refrigerator intact--those old ones ''are'' amazingly tough. Nor is radiation an automatic death sentence -- it can take days to succumb to radiation poisoning after exposure to a lethal dose, and the exposure can be mitigated if you get decontaminated fairly soon (hence Indy being stripped naked and scrubbed down), depending on the type of radiation you've been exposed to. However, hurling a man in a metal box into the air several hundred yards [[NotTheFallThatKillsYou is problematic for entirely different but more mundane reasons.]]

* MeaningfulName: "Mutt" Williams' nickname is [[spoiler:an early hint that he's related to Indiana, who took his own nickname from his dog's name.]]
** [[spoiler:Of course, Mutt claimed that he made the nickname up himself, and he had never known that Indy was his father until TheReveal (or even who he was until the beginning of the film) so it was probably just a coincidence, at least in-story.]]

** In the opening scene, Indy identifies Spalko as being from "Eastern Ukraine" based on her hard pronunciation of the "w" sound. In fact, Ukrainian (like most Slavic languages) doesn't ''have'' a "w" sound, which is why people from Eastern Europe often [[VampireVords pronounce "w" as "v"]]. While people of Slavic descent ''do'' have a tendency to "over-pronounce" that sound when learning English (since they often need to concentrate extra hard to pronounce it correctly), this wouldn't give someone away as being from Ukraine, let alone from ''Eastern'' Ukraine specifically.

* ArtisticLicenseLinguistics: Indy claims at one point that he learned to speak Quechua during his time with Pancho Villa in UsefulNotes/{{Mexico}} as a young man (as seen in ''Series/TheYoungIndianaJonesChronicles''). While not ''impossible'', this is highly improbable: Quechua is predominantly spoken in the highlands of South America (particularly UsefulNotes/{{Peru}}), as it was historically the primary language family of the Incan Empire. It's seldom spoken in UsefulNotes/{{Mexico}}--which is located in North America, and was historically the domain of the Aztec Empire. The most widely spoken pre-Colombian language in Mexico is Nahuatl.

The film also stars Creator/JimBroadbent as Charles Stanforth and Igor Jijikine as Antonin Dovchenko.

The film also stars Creator/JimBroadbent as Charles Stanforth.

* WilhelmScream: By a student with glasses when Indy and Mutt crash through the library on a motorcycle.

ETGaveUsWiFi: According to a wall painting Indy finds, the aliens came down and taught humans agriculture and irrigation.

* NoodleIncident: What Indiana did as an OSS intelligence officer DuringTheWar implies the existence of a full noodle warehouse. Many medal-worthy actions are alluded to and a Berlin cover mission is invoked by Mac. Plus his involvement in the RoswellIncident.

* ETGaveUsWiFi: According to a wall painting Indy finds, the aliens came down and taught humans agriculture and irrigation.

The FBI, paranoid of Russian infiltration, accuse Indy of being a collaborator with the Russians, and the allegations force out of his long-term teaching career. Just when he thinks his time as a teacher and archaeologist is done, Indy meets a leather-jacket-wearing young man named "Mutt" Williams (Creator/ShiaLaBeouf), who convinces Jones to go with him to South America and help him find an old friend.

* MeaninglessMeaningfulWords:
-->'''Indy:''' Where did they go? Space?\\
'''Oxley:''' Not into space, into the space between spaces.[[note]] [[Film/{{Inception}} A space ''within'' the space]]; however, George Lucas explained that given the aliens are "interdimensional beings", it is whatever exists between our universe and theirs.[[/note]]

* {{Bowdlerise}}: In the Russian dub, all mentions of "Russians" and "Russia" were replaced with "Communists" and "USSR". It's not much of a change because the American characters use "Russian" in the original dialogue out of convenience to begin with: Spalko is from eastern Ukraine, and her right hand man Dovchenko is from Siberia in the [[AllThereInTheManual suplementary material]] (and judging by his surname, of Ukrainian descent).

** Also the "siafu". First things first: siafu are real ants, but come from Africa, not South America. Of course, Indy might simply have misidentified them (he's not a zoologist, after all). But no matter where they came from, the idea that an ant colony could drag a struggling adult human being into their hill and strip him to the bone is a bit far-fetched.

* DanBrowned: [[http://www.businessinsider.com/george-lucas-is-wrong-you-cant-survive-a-nuclear-bomb-by-hiding-in-a-fridge-2012-2 In an interview with The New York Times Magazine]], George Lucas took credit for the infamous scene in ''Crystal Skull'' in which Indy survives a nuclear blast in a lead-lined refrigerator, and insisted that his odds of surviving were about 50-50. This claim has been thoroughly debunked, and [[https://www.overthinkingit.com/2012/02/22/fridge-nuking-scientific-peer-review/?page=all a scientific peer review]] concluded he could have not survived.