Spielberg Finally Admits it…”Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” Sucks

It’s been five years since we saw the theatrical release of Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and after all that time Steven Spielberg has finally revealed his true feelings about the film…and he thinks it kinda sucked.

While making the rounds on the international press tour for The Adventures of Tintin, the director was able to sit for a moment and reflect on a few of his past films.  Inevitably, his most recent Indiana Jones adventure flick popped up in conversation and instead of avoiding the question, which he’s been known to do, Spielberg chose to candidly address the film.  Here’s what he said:

I’m very happy with the movie. I always have been… I sympathise with people who didn’t like the MacGuffin because I never liked the MacGuffin. George and I had big arguments about the MacGuffin. I didn’t want these things to be either aliens or inter-dimensional beings. But I am loyal to my best friend. When he writes a story he believes in – even if I don’t believe in it – I’m going to shoot the movie the way George envisaged it. I’ll add my own touches, I’ll bring my own cast in, I’ll shoot the way I want to shoot it, but I will always defer to George as the storyteller of the Indy series. I will never fight him on that.

Well, it looks like Spielberg decided to be the bigger man in that situation…and pass the blame. I guess he really wants to preserve his reputation as a great storyteller (let’s just pretend A.I. and Minority Report never happened). But let’s be honest, how can Lucas’s reputation get any worse? No matter how great of a writer he was in the past, everyone now knows George Lucas as that evil tinkerer and destroyer of classic, charming film franchises. Is there anyone who hasn’t seen the travesty known as The New Trilogy?

When conversation went further, Spielberg was asked about the nuclear bomb scene that particularly disgruntled fans, and he had this to say:

The gopher was good. I have the stand-in one at home. What people really jumped at was Indy climbing into a refrigerator and getting blown into the sky by an atom-bomb blast. Blame me. Don’t blame George. That was my silly idea. People stopped saying “jump the shark”. They now say, “nuked the fridge”. I’m proud of that. I’m glad I was able to bring that into popular culture.

Eventually the conversation turns towards the prospects of another Indiana Jones sequel, to which Spielberg responded:

You have to ask George Lucas. George is in charge of breaking the stories. He’s done it on all four movies. Whether I like the stories or not, George has broken all the stories. He is working on Indy V. We haven’t gone to screenplay yet, but he’s working on the story. I’ll leave it to George to come up with a good story.

Finally, we got a straight answer out of him! It was pretty well known that Spielberg was unhappy with the final version of Crystal Skull, but because he never wanted to publicly betray George Lucas, he kept most of his thoughts to himself. Let’s just hope that Spielberg’s a little wiser when it comes to vetting the script for the inevitable Indy 5.