YMMV / Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

• Aluminium Christmas Trees:
  • The Crystal Skull and the story about returning all 13 of them to some place for... something. They even mention Mitchell-Hedges. What they don't mention is that the four well-known Real Life skulls are now proven hoaxes, as is the story of the 13 skulls. Though the first examination to prove this happened in 1967, a decade after the film's setting.
  • Artificial cranial deformation was actually practiced by ancient Native Americans.
  • The Soviets did have an interest in parapsychology, although it was more popular before Stalin's death in 1953.
  • The derided "Kung Fu Aztecs" guarding the Andean graveyard has a sort of precedent. There is a purportedly Pre-hispanic Andean martial art called rumi maki (Quechua for "stone hand") which focuses on combinations of hand strikes supplemented by rapid kicks, just as portrayed in the film. As with the crystal skulls, however, many believe it to be a modern hoax in the vein of the supposedly Basque martial art of zipota (rumi maki is a real idiom, but the art itself was virtually unknown before its modern promoter claimed to have learned it from an ancient secret lineage during The '60s).
  • Not only does dry sand of the type Indy and Marion get caught in exist, it's depicted relatively accurately; the different formation between quicksand and dry sand means that they follow different principles.
• Americans Hate Tingle: You'd be hard pressed to find any hardcore fans of this entry in most latin countries, particularly with Peruvian audiences as the movie doubles down on the geographical inaccuracies commonly found with Mayincatec tropes, with most people finding the presence of Maya structures too ignorant for a 21st century film.
• Awesome Music: About the only thing fans have agreed on about the movie is that John Williams’ music is as majestic, epic, and awesome as the early entries.
• Base-Breaking Character: Mutt Williams is either one of the better aspects of the movie or part of the problem depending on who you ask. Some argue his father-son dynamic with Indiana strengthens the movie and his eventual growth into adventurer is an interesting development. His detractors find him annoying in part because his actor, Shia LaBeouf, behaves too similarly to his role in equally controversial Transformers Film Series. It doesn't help he's tied to some of the worst received scenes, including the CGI monkeys.
• Common Knowledge: Contrary to popular belief, the beings in this movie are not aliens; they are inter-dimensional beings. This distinction is reinforced by Harold Oxley crucially mentioning the "space between spaces," highlighting their existence beyond conventional dimensions. However, they are not from Earth.
• Contested Sequel: Some people say it is total crap, others say it was fun but not up to Indiana Jones standards, some liked the acting and characters but not the writing, some liked it all except for the Gainax Ending. Shia LaBeouf blames himself and his monkey-swinging Tarzan act. And then there are those that hold it as being better than Temple of Doom for having less Mood Whiplash and Values Dissonance issues, but not up to the standards of the "Nazi" movies. With the release of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Crystal Skull's defenders argued that this movie allowed the Indiana Jones series to end on a happy note, with Indy and Marion marrying, while the later film turned to a Happy Ending Override with Mutt's offscreen death driving Indy and Marion apart again.
• Critical Dissonance: Critics generally enjoyed it, while fans seem to loathe it. On Rotten Tomatoes, the audience score is lower than the critics score.
• Delusion Conclusion:
  • Owing to the contentious reputation of the film, a common theory is that the adventure is just Indy's Dying Dream after the infamous 'nuking the fridge' scene.
  • A far less bitter take is to pretend that Indy and Marion's wedding is the only thing that truly happens, while everything prior is Mutt imagining a silly adventure about ancient aliens during the ceremony.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Irina Spalko. In her defense, she does have some genuine Anti-Villain-ish character traits but not enough to fully qualify for the trope.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Violently Protective Girlfriend of the jock Mutt decks is one of the film's most popular Bit Characters despite only having less than twenty seconds of screen time.
  • The two Bit Part Bad Guys in the opening scene who get into a drag race with some teenagers (and the teenagers themselves, for some) make the scene pretty entertaining for most fans, whether they like the movie as a whole or not.
• Fanfic Fuel: This installment definitively establishes that Indy was an active OSS agent for the entirety of World War II proper ^note  The main trilogy takes place in the years just prior to the war, and that he spent around a decade spying against the Soviets with the CIA during the Cold War. That's around seventeen years of undocumented high-stakes adventures.
• Fanon Discontinuity: As this is the most divisive entry in the franchise to date, there's a good number of Indy fans who like to pretend this film doesn't exist.
• Harsher in Hindsight: However you feel about Mutt's character, his presence at least brought his parents, the most popular pairing in the franchise, back together. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, taking place 12 years later, reveals Mutt has since died in Vietnam, causing his parents endless grief that eventually lead to their separation.
  Charles: We seem to have reached the age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.
  • Indiana Jones picking up his hat in the final scene before Mutt can grab it and turn Indy into a Legacy Character also seems to uncomfortably foreshadow Mutt's abrupt absence due to his death preceding the following film.
• He's Just Hiding: A theory about Henry that grew at the time was that the next movie would reveal he was never dead and an article also said they were trying to convince Sean Connery to return for the fifth one as well and that Henry would indeed have been Faking the Dead if he did agree to return. Unfortunately, Connery's passing in 2020 at age 90 now has everyone thinking the character did indeed die here after all.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Jim Broadbent had a very small role in the 1980 film The Dogs of War, which had among its cast Paul Freeman (Belloq) and George Harris (Katanga).
  • This won't be the last time that John Hurt would portray a doctor involved with aliens.
  • At one point, Mutt makes a crack about Indy's advancing age, snidely asking "What are you, like, 80?" (Harrison Ford was actually 65 at the time). The fifth Indiana Jones film, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, would eventually be released in June 2023—when Ford actually was 80.
  • Indy is defended by a General Ross against accusations of being a Soviet collaborator. Harrison Ford would later be chosen as the recast General Thunderbolt Ross for the Marvel Cinematic Universe following the passing of William Hurt.
• Inferred Holocaust: The tribe that lived near the temple most likely were killed by the departing spacecraft or drowned by the river flooding the valley, had any members survived the massacre from the Russians.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: While many were miffed at the whole reveal that the MacGuffin was more sci-fi than supernatural and feeling it was a pull away from the original films, some criticism levied against the movie was that it was too similar and pretty much follow the same beats as Raiders and Last Crusade (even Fate of Atlantis) i.e.: Indy and his small group against a bigger military organization, the race to get to the target place before the bad guys and the bad guys being done in by what they were seeking. Yes it's traditional and likely a throwback, but many felt like it was just a copy and paste of those stories, only moving the timeline to the 50s and dealing with Soviets, with really the only original thing being Indy learning he has a son and reuniting with Marion. Heck, some reviews even praised the sci-fi twist because it at least tried to shake up the formula, and only argued there wasn't much explanation about the creatures and the sudden reveal being the reason why it leaves such a bad taste in a lot of fan's mouths, whereas in the previous films we get to learn about the MacGuffins in question during the adventure.
• Jerkass Woobie: Francisco de Orellana becomes this in the movie novelization, which expands on his backstory and motivations. He's a notorious greedy conquistador who loots Akator of its treasures. However, the further he takes the Crystal Skull from the city, the more guilt and madness he experiences, which makes him feel compelled to take the skull back. His companions don't share his feelings, and he is fine with letting them go until they try to take the skull, which causes him to murder all six of them. The killings leave him guilt-ridden and praying for forgiveness. Then, right as he's about to begin his journey back to Akator to return the skull, he's attacked and killed by the cemetery guardians, who he mistakes for demons out to take him to Hell. The guy didn't exactly start out with good intentions, but it's not hard to feel a little sorry for him.
• Mis-blamed: Thanks to already being in a bad spot due to the polarizing reception of the Star Wars prequels, many fans blamed George Lucas for a lot of problems in the film.
  • Lucas gets blamed for the decision to make Soviets the villains rather than Nazis like in the previous films. In reality, due to the harrowing experience of making Schindler's List, Spielberg felt he could no longer make movies featuring Nazis as simply stock villains, although Harrison Ford's advanced age since the previous film and the fact that the Nazis had been defeated in World War II also accounted for it.
  • Lucas only wrote the story draft (along with Jeff Nathanson), the one who wrote the screenplay was David Koepp. Indeed, most fans solely blame Lucas and Koepp for the story in spite of the fact that Koepp just wrote a screenplay based on the story that Lucas and Nathanson conceived, whereas Nathanson tends to not be criticized by fans.
  • Lucas was dead-set on having Indy survive a nuclear explosion by using a fridge as shelter, but he never said that the nuclear explosion had to be that close or that Indy should fly away in the fridge (one of the first scripts, Indiana Jones and the Saucermen from Mars, has Indy ducking in a foxhole and turning the fridge over his head as a cover). That belongs to Koepp and Spielberg.
  • Although Lucas had already eliminated the "Old Indy" bookends from the DVD version of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, which showed 93-year-old Indy being cared for by a daughter, it was Spielberg who vetoed Indy having a daughter in this film, feeling that it would be a retread of Kelly and Ian Malcolm from The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
• Older Than They Think:
  • The 1999 video-game Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine used Soviets as villains and featured Sufficiently Advanced Aliens from another dimension as a major plot point about nine years before this movie did.
  • Likewise the comic book adaptation of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis which revealed the Atlantian technology was given to them by aliens.
  • The 1996 video-game Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures had a possible random encounter with a friendly alien, and one of the scenarios ends with Indy summoning an UFO then meeting the alien piloting it.
  • The original script for Back to the Future from 1982 featured Marty McFly surviving a nuclear blast in a fridge-time machine, in order to return to the present. This was scrapped because it was too expensive to pull off, and there were concerns that kids who watched the movie might climb into abandoned refrigerators to "play Marty." If that sounds at all familiar, it's because Spielberg was also executive producer of that film, and also used the idea in an earlier version of the script in the earlier years of the franchise that was later adapted into this movie.
• One True Pairing: There is one aspect of this movie about which pretty much everyone can agree, and that is that Karen Allen's return (and spot-on performance) as Marion Ravenwood is AWESOME. And is made even better by having her and Indy married at the end, especially given they were by far the most popular pairing of the franchise.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: While most discussions on the film among fans center on the fridge and alien scenes, the film is hard to bring up in Latino communities without the wild inaccuracies being brought up into conversation too, as the film became controversial in those regions for the widely dated and ignorant depictions of Perú being too many to ignore for a movie made as recent as 2006.
• Questionable Casting: Shia LaBeouf's casting as Mutt wasn't well-received, as he hadn't exactly made a great name for himself among audiences in regards to his abilities or capability to be an Action Hero. The fact Mutt turned out to be Indy's son didn't help matters either.
• Signature Scene: For better or for worse, the atom bomb scene, which stuck with the public consciousness so much that the phrase "nuking the fridge" became a synonym for "Sequelitis meets Jumping the Shark."
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The prairie dogs, the monkeys, and the aliens have been derided for this.
  • The first (overhead, panning) shot of the graveyard shows what is very obviously a miniature set, and the chase scene in the final act uses a good deal of conspicuous green screen as well.
  • The truck chase through the jungle was real, but was layered with so much CGI the real footage ends up looking fake and greenscreen-like.
• Strawman Has a Point: Two government agents angrily interrogate Indy after Russian spies kidnap him and an old partner of his, murder several American soldiers at a top secret test facility and make off with an alien corpse. This doesn't seem that unnecessary, considering what just happened and that Indy's old partner was working with the Russians (the movie is set during the Cold War). That said, attempting to get him fired from his teaching position (and nearly succeeding) even after General Ross vouched for him was a bit beyond the pale.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: A common complaint of its disappointed viewers. Some long-term fans feel the shift away from supernatural/fantasy elements towards sci-fi and aliens was a move too far, as the 1950's sci-fi films being homaged in this film have aged very poorly in comparison to the two-fisted adventure serials referenced by the classic trilogy.