Quartz crystal, colloquially called Crystal (it's "mountain crystal" in German, for example).

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[Foot mouth in put]
Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

Interesting... they avoided the "the crystal skulls are fakes" issue by making this movie be about a completely different crystal skull, not the ones we've all heard of before. (And the lost city in the Amazon is not Mayan.)

I can't resist quoting Stargate:
Col. O'Neill: What kind of archaeologist carries a weapon?
Dr. Jackson: Uh, I do.
[pause]
Col. O'Neill: Bad example.

"I've never met an archeologist who used explosives before." -Dinotopia.

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Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song
'Evolution and science are one thing, but you don’t mess with Yoko Ono. Everybody knows that. ' - 386sx

I saw it today. Great movie.
I would call it a worthy sequel. It fits into the other movies just fine.
I wasn't sure if Indy would work in a fifties setting, with Commies instead of Nazis, but it does. I had a big goofy grin on my face everytime something impossible happened.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

Whereas I had the opposite reaction. I felt that it moved too far away from the genre of the other movies, though admittedly it sort of works for the time setting. I also cringed a little at the number of impossible things, many even too impossible for Indy. I actually felt a little let down after the others.

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Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

I liked the movie, though I wouldn't put it at the same level as the first three (I liked Last Crusade best by far). I was pleasantly surprised that the CGI didn't detract from most of the movie for me, and I thought Ford was pretty good. The story was relatively weak, but more coherent than I expected given 14 years of rewrites and George Lucas. The actor playing Mutt did a good job with an annoying character (why is every young male in a Lucas/Spielberg movie an arrogant little snot these days?).

Yeah, suspension of disbelief was pretty tough in this one. I mean, nobody expects using a life raft as a parachute to actually work, but it was at least worth testing on Mythbusters. I don't see many of the new movie's stunts as being worth that much consideration.

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Do try not to take me too seriously.

C'mon, there's lots of impossible stuff in the earlier movies too - you just don't notice them because they're classics that you've seen a billion times.

How did Indy survive for days hanging on to the outside of a U-boat, for instance? Answer: Because he's Indiana Jones.

When Indy says "siafu - really big ants" the proper response is not "but siafu are African army ants, and South American army ants don't build ant hills, and humans can outrun them pretty easily, and that's way too many ants for any one colony" - no, the proper response is "Indy is fighting a commie henchman in the middle of a sea of man-eating ants. This movie is frickin' awesome!"

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

Lol!

Soviet-Nazis + nuclear bomb + El Dorado +Aliens = WTF!!

I bet the next movie Indy will fight against the Osamas granpa in middle of an Aliens vs Predator battle

Where is Indy's gun when the "native assassin" performs sword dance this time?

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

I just got home from seeing it. I didn't think I could be more disappointed than I was after "The Temple of Doom", but they found a way to make it happen.

This is an unexpected thing for me to say considering I'm not religious and I do believe that there could be aliens elsewhere in the universe, but it should have been about a religious artifact not an alien skull. Aliens do not belong in an Indiana Jones movie, the two go together about as well as a sports car in an old west movie (but even that at least worked in the third "Back to the Future" movie).

There were some things I liked about the movie though. I'm glad Marion Ravenwood was back, and I liked the references to the other movies and the Young Indiana Jones television show. Although I'm not a fan of Shia LeBeouf I thought it was cool that Indy and Marion had a son together. And the Soviets were worthy successors to the Nazi's as the movies main antagonists.

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" We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard..." - John F. Kennedy
TheSpaceRace.com

I am religious and I had no problem with it. In fact I thought it fit particularly well with the move to the '50s setting. Some people seem to think that the movie is saying that since this one has a non-religious explanation that the Ark, Sankara stones, and Holy Grail from the earlier movies must all have some non-religious explanation too. I don't see it. Just because there are extra-dimensional beings in the fourth movie doesn't mean it wasn't really the wrath of Yahweh destroying the Nazi's in the first film.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

Most of the "Impossible" things in the old movies were more realistic because they had to do the stunts somehow and that meant obeying Real World Physics on some level. Many of the "Impossible" things in this movie were done via CGI and had no such limits making them cheesey and detracting from the movie itself.

Of course the answer could also be that he didn't, he got inside and stowed away where they didn't find him.

I didn't have an issue with the ants actually (probably because I know as much about ants as Lucas does) but rather the obviously ridiculous parts such as the fridge, using a snake to pull some one out of sand, and the Tazan bit. In essence none of these really added to the over all story and could have been done other ways (heck Indy carries a whip for Pete's sake, why didn't he use that to help get them out of the sand?) The minor issues, like ants, magnetic gunpower, steel shot, and so forth just lead to me rolling my eyes for the most part.

Glad I'm not the only one.

I have to agree, Indy was always about Magic, it was a type of fantasy based about Religous Artifacts (The Ark, The Stones, and the Holy Grail.) Switching to Sci-Fi and Aliens.... to me that just didn't work.

I agree with this too, a lot of the film was great, but some parts just really let it down for me.

__________________
Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

What I meant was that despite being non-religious I actually wanted the movie to have a religious theme like the others. I don't believe the scientific explanation in this movie means the other stories had scientific explanations... I just plain didn't think this movie should have been scientific. I like alien movies and I find it more likely that aliens exist than that God does, but I still would have preferred a religious storyline for this movie.

I can see where Lucas is coming from... it's a new antagonist with a new object of interest. Where the Nazi's (or Hitler specifically) had an interest in the occult, the Soviets would have had a different interest. In this case it was an interest in alien technology or knowledge. I get that... I just didn't think it suited Indiana Jones. If it had been "Montana Smith and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" I probably wouldn't have had a problem with the story at all.

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" We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard..." - John F. Kennedy
TheSpaceRace.com

This is my feeling too. If it had been a Tomb Raider movie it'd have fitted in well with the "Sci-Fi" style of TR, but Indy has always been Religous Fantasy, not Sci-Fi.

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Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

Well, in the Fate of Atlantis comics, it was hinted that the "horned ones" were aliens.

__________________
Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song
'Evolution and science are one thing, but you don’t mess with Yoko Ono. Everybody knows that. ' - 386sx

So?

I mean, seriously, they should keep making the same movie over and over?

Btw, just to be pedantic, I thought archeology was a science!

A few did. And a number of them did arm themselves. Plus, in the 1800s, as scientists scoured the American West for dinosaur bones, tempers flared and shots were exchanged.