Written by Old Bluffer 30th May 2008

Irina Spalko is the KGB's leading psychic operative, and commands a small, extremely well equipped army which she can seemingly transport anywhere on the globe without fear of recriminations by the local militia.
Her psychic powers are right up there with the likes of modern day superhumans such as Silvia Browne, Uri Geller, Mystic Meg and the like. In other words, she can't actually do anything practical whatsoever, although she does have rather piercing eyes.

Despite this utter absence of talent, she dreams of nothing short of world domination through the power of her mind alone, and the Crystal Skull artifact that she chases for the entire film is the key to how she believes she can achieve it.
And chase it she does, in endless action scene afer action scene. If anyone plays a drinking game where they have to down a shot each time this damn skull either changes hands or is dropped then they should have a stomach pump on standby. I'd even go as far as to say that the head gets passed around more than C3PO's noggin in the inferior Star Wars trilogy.

The Crystal Skull (which incidentally has all the heft of a hollow piece of polystyrene) is of alien origin, and the legend that forms the contrived and ill-considered plot states that it was stolen from a Mayan temple, and if returned it will grant you great power.

Prior to getting to this temple, and amidst the two hour chase, we get to see the many facets of Irina's villainous personality. These are as follows:

- She has a penchant for rapiers (which given Indy's new sidekick studied fencing means she is guaranteed at least one swordfight)
- a severe yet sexy-in-a-dominatrix-like way haircut
- a Russian accent thicker than George Lucas' merchandising portfolio.

She is also not even slightly scary, which is a shame as she is the only real baddie in the film.

Despite capturing Indy repeatedly, he escapes with ease every time and eludes her for long enough to get to the hidden temple with the skull. This isn't really a problem for her though, as Indy is travelling with Mac, who is working with her and sneakily dropping tracking beacons along the way.
So, at the critical point when the skull is about to be put back, Irina appears, pistol in hand, to steal the moment of glory for herself.

The temple they are in has thirteen crystal alien skeletons, all with skulls apart from one. It doesn't take a genius therefore to deduce that she needs to pop the skull she has onto the spare neck. Once she does this, the CGI skeleton starts animating and speaks through the voice of mad professor "Ox" (John Hurt). The language is Mayan, so Indy helpfully translates that basically, the thirteen quartz bone-people are terribly grateful at the return of their missing head, and they'd love to give a reward. Indy wisely steps well away at this point, and lets Irina make the foolish request of "I want to know everything!". This triggers an abundance of special effects, with all of the crystal beings morphing into one that looks like a malicious cross betwixt E.T. and the aliens from Close Encounters (there is a lot of self-referential masturbation in this film from the two gazillionaires that made it).

Everyone else cowers back, but like a simpleton, Irina just waits for infinite knowledge to flow into her, fill up her being and then overflow out of her eyeballs, before she explodes in a cloud of psychic dust (much the same as normal dust, but it can guess that you are attracted to or will be attracted to a man or woman whose first name begins with a really common letter)

Later on, the point is belaboured to the point of farce, when Indy declaims something like "The Mayan for 'treasure' wasn't gold, it was knowledge. Knowledge... was... their... treasure..." (he says this as if he were Gandalf solving a particularly difficult Dwarvish riddle).

If at this point you are thinking "What the hell are aliens doing in an Indiana Jones movie?" then I completely sympathise. Things are going to get even sillier soon though...




Review Note

The Wrath of the Gods category was added as in the context of this film the Crystal aliens were very much worshipped as gods, and indeed there is evidence in the temple carvings that they "uplifted" primitive humans to learn about practical and advanced technologies. So they were more worthy of the title "god" than many deities...