Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

I wasn't a huge fan of the first two Indy movies. I mean they were okay for me, but not fab. It took the third one, INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE to turn me into a huge one. It still is one of my all-time favorites.

Seeing the late River Phoenix as the young Indy was just awesome. He carried the right amount of swagger and derring-do in portraying the adventurer-archaeologist. Sean Connery as Professor Henry Jones Sr. nearly stole the show with his bumbling witty character.

I thought that the film had the best action sequences of the three and the backstory such as the origin of the nickname "Indiana," the fedora, the scar, and how he got into all these adventures made it such an interesting film. It was a plus for me because it was about the search for the Holy Grail. Knight lore and medieval stuff have always been one of my favorite reading materials. In fact, I'm currently reading THE LAST LEGION by Valerio Massimo Manfredi. In case you're all wondering, the book is way different from the film adaptation.

But now, the adventure series fast forwards to the "future" that involves an older Indy with his son to be played by Shia LaBeouf.

Not much is currently known about the film save for the stars (Cate Blanchett and Karen Allen -- wooo!) so I googled instead "Crystal Skull" and this is what I found:

Skulls are humanity's foremost symbol of death, and a powerful icon in the visual vocabularies of cultures all over the globe. Thirteen crystal skulls of apparently ancient origin have been found in parts of Mexico, Central America and South America, comprising one of the most fascinating subjects of 20th Century archaeology.



These skulls, found near the ancient ruins of Mayan and Aztec civilizations (with some evidence linking the skulls with past civilization in Peru) are a mystery as profound as the Pyramids of Egypt, the Nazca Lines of Peru, or Stonehenge. Some of the skulls are believed to be between 5,000 and 36,000 years old.

Many indigenous people speak of their remarkable magical and healing properties, but nobody really knows where they came from or what they were used for.
Were they left behind after the destruction of a previous world, such as Atlantis? Are they simply ingenious modern fakes or can they really enable us to see deeply into the past and predict the future?

Much research is currently being done on the skulls. However, their origin is still a baffling mystery. They seem to defy logic. Everything that is known about lapidary work indicates that the skulls should have been shattered fractured, or fallen apart when carved.