Of the many complaints levied at Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, one of the most persistent was that Indiana Jones shouldn’t be interacting with aliens. It became a shorthand way to describe the fourth film’s failings, emblematic of the lazy and/or foolish creative choices that made it such a bummer. It’s also a narrative element that has been largely attributed to George Lucas, whose cachet was at an all-time low in 2008, and as Crystal Skull was disappointing in much the same way as his prequel trilogy, he got the lion’s share of the blame (Steven Spielberg has somewhat tacitly encouraged this, by ‘crediting’ Lucas with most of the hated story points, especially those damn aliens). And while we’ll never know exactly what the creative process on that film was, there does exist an earlier version of Indiana Jones IV, written way back in 1995, that showcases Lucas’s alien pitch in purer, undiluted fashion.
That would be Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars, a proposed fourth entry, and one of the many unproduced Indy screenplays out in the wild. It is credited to Jeb Stuart, one of the writers of Die Hard and The Fugitive (and a handful of less impressive titles), and represents, reportedly, everything George Lucas wanted in a followup to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. All the aliens you could ever want. Sort of. This article will break down the plot in detail, but you can read it yourself, if you’d prefer. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that, as of all the Indy scripts out there, this is easily the worst. Try the Monkey King instead, or City of the Gods, both far better efforts. But as an amateur Indy historian, this does have the benefit of being the least ‘Indy-ish’ proposed film I’ve seen from the franchise, so that’s something. Ultimately, what’s most interesting about Saucer Men is how uninteresting it is, and how little it even attempts. Believe it or not, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a far superior adventure yarn.
The opening action sequence, a mainstay of the franchise, is likely the most familiar, Indy-like sequence in the script, although in this case, that could also be taken to mean the most generic. The year is 1949, representing a biggish jump forward in time for the characters (Last Crusade, released in 1989, was set in 1936). This places us post-war (so no more Nazis), and according to the official Indiana Jones wiki, would make Indy himself fifty years young, bringing the character up to Harrison Ford’s actual age. We find him on a steamer boat traveling downriver in Borneo. Pirates and crocodiles are attacking before the end of page one, and a couple of stock characters appear as well: Kabul (local guide and Indy’s old friend) and Baldassare (a wealthy rival explorer looking to kill Indy and abscond with some artifact). These guys are nonentities, and disappear by page twenty.
The more substantial character to be introduced in Borneo is Elaine MacGregor, a sexy linguistics professor, and Indy’s romantic foil for this adventure. Picked up as a favor to the late Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott had passed three years prior), she wants Indy to take her to some ancient temple, and along the way, they fall in love (off screen, during a time jump). Elaine is easily the second lead in this script, and her fraught romance with Indy is what passes for a central relationship. Unfortunately, she’s dreadfully boring, and I don’t think I could give you a single adjective to describe her, other than maybe ‘smart’. Indeed, this film, more than any other in the series, foregrounds the romance, and even posits Elaine to be Indy’s ultimate love match, but there’s just nothing here on the page. Even later, when we find out she’s a spy who knows about alien landings, and may even have betrayed Indy, practically no dramatic tension comes of it, and I don’t think they even talk about it for more than half a page. Anyway, the Borneo sequence continues for a bit, featuring several jungle bits that eventually made their way into Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (killer ants, killer waterfalls), before everything is ultimately dropped, and we cut directly to a wedding chapel in North America, on the day of Indy and Elaine’s wedding.
This wedding sequence fills the ‘brief visit with Indy at college’ section of the story, and involves some unimportant Elaine backstory (meeting her parents, talk of the fiancé she abandoned to marry Indy, a Dr. Ben Morgenthal, who never makes an appearance), but much more prominently, features a cavalcade of guest appearance cameos. Any surviving Indy friend from the previous movies shows up for his wedding, so you get Sallah, Short Round, Marion and Willie, and most prominently, Henry Jones Sr. Henry comes off the best, I suppose, seeming stodgy, aloof, but ultimately warm (although never funny, I’m afraid. Nothing in this script is ever funny, and it rarely tries to be). The rest either don’t have lines or they debase themselves a little bit. Marion and Willie in particular come off horribly, in what I can only imagine were placeholder scenes. They’re just sort of a bitter peanut gallery, kind of written like Patty and Selma from The Simpsons. Of all the disappointments in Saucer Men, there’s probably none that sting as hard as these portrayals. As I say, placeholders for sure.
Anyway, just moments before the wedding, Elaine is apparently abducted by some dude, and Indy gives chase in the ‘Just Married’ car, dragging tin cans. This is the scene that ultimately turned into the college car chase in Crystal Skull, although it’s more fleshed out there, with some better Spielberg action gags. Anyway, it’s a mediocre sequence, and in the end, it turns out Elaine left willingly. Indy is sad, Marion and Willie cackle at him like witches, and Henry consoles him. Upon inspecting her office, he discovers Elaine was/is a spy for the US, and the guy who she left with is Bob Bolander, Elaine’s ex husband, and they’re going to White Sands, New Mexico. Right near Roswell. And we’re off.
So, here’s the big conceit for Saucer Men. George Lucas, as he explained during the lead up to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, thought that since the original Indy films emulated the pulp cinema of the 1930s, the logical place to take Indy as he aged would be the pulp cinema of the 1950s, AKA the atomic age exploitation horror films. Earth Vs the Flying Saucers, War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and a thousand other cheap-o alien monster flicks, shot in the Nevada desert and featuring draconic military forces, Russian spies and crackpot conspiracy theories (not the modern racist ones, the fun 1950s silly ones). And you can see some of that in Crystal Skull, to be sure. But here, they are very much the whole show. Personally, I think the idea is not inherently bad, and that it’s completely possible for Indiana Jones to work in that template, but as a proof of concept, it’s hard to argue Saucer Men succeeds. The reason this script fails isn’t simply the presence of aliens and UFO subculture. If anything, they’re the only parts of the script that have any personality at all.
The rest of the script takes place in New Mexico. No more globe-trotting, no more archeology, just 50s era atomic fears and UFO conspiracies. The 90s was a high water mark for the popularity of this particular brand of SciFi, and Saucer Men covers a lot of ground you might recognize from The X-Files, or everyone’s favorite part of Independence Day, the lengthy midsection. Indy, playing detective, finds out where they’re keeping all the secret military stuff (he asks the waitress at a local diner), and simply rides out in the desert towards it, where government agents scoop him up. Indy, and the audience, meet the bulk of this film’s characters here, such as they are. We’ve got Bolander, Elaine’s ex-hubsand, who I guess is a bad guy? He doesn’t like Indy trying to marry his ex, that’s for sure. There's General MacIntyre (I think that’s his name. He’s just referred to as ‘GENERAL’ in the dialogue), who’s got very little personality, but seems to think Indy is alright. And Dr. Bernard, who is a scientist. In a franchise known for its beloved supporting characters, these guys don’t even come close to measuring up, and it’s impossible to care what they do, or what happens to them. There’s a few overt villains, a pair of Russian spies, who don’t really have much more going on, but are at least disguised as cowboys. That juxtaposition, these Russkies dressed as iconic American folk characters, is about as clever as it gets here, and it’s kind of alright, I suppose. Oh, and Indy knows them personally, having worked with them as a spy to fight Hitler during the war, but this comes to absolutely nothing. Elaine persuades the government to get Indy involved, everyone’s got an opinion about this, and there’s a lot of talking, but very little is said.
This is also where the script’s McGuffin arrives (that would be the important object everyone is chasing, a requirement for Indiana Jones films). In this case, it’s a weird alien cylinder, covered with dozens of different world languages, most of them dead. The languages seem to be indicating that the cylinder should be taken to a nearby mountain, one of several similar sites located across the globe. Is it a power source, or a weapon? I don’t think that ever gets explicitly answered, or do any of the other questions you might have regarding the cylinder. Yep, another thing Crystal Skull has over this one is that the titular Crystal Skull is a better McGuffin. The hell, you say. No, really, it’s more interesting. It telepathically communicates with people sometimes. You might recall that being vague and never really explored or capitalized on, but it’s far more than this cylinder has. Also, it’s a crystal skull, which is inherently better than a rock with some writing on it.
The bad guy Russians kidnap Elaine, and there’s a car chase through the government compound. This sequence is big action set piece of the film, and if you remember the opening of Crystal Skull, you’ve seen a (better) version of it. There’s some shooting, some driving, and Indy ends up on a rocket sled, power blasting him miles away and into the proximity of Doom Town, a 50s era small town set up by the military for bomb testing. This is the infamous Nuke the Fridge scene, reportedly something Spielberg and Lucas felt any version of Indy IV required. It’s mostly the same, except a bit more ‘believable’ in this version, as instead of riding the refrigerator through the air and crash landing safely, Indy falls in a ditch and pulls the lead-lined fridge on top of him, emerging unscathed after the fact (and fortunately, suffers from no radiation poisoning). This is far and away the most memorable action sequence in Saucer Men, truly the signature set piece of the whole film, and, well, you know. You’ve seen it. It’s not that good. Making it bear the weight of the headliner sequence does it no favors, especially in a franchise known for all time classic action.
There’s a toy!
It’s also the first action sequence in about fifty pages. Fortunately, the remaining third of the script is a bit more lively, even if it’s not very good. Turns out there’s a Russian mole working against the government. He is identified about a page and a half after we learn about him, and it’s Dr. Bernard, the scientist. Elaine and Indy get kidnapped by Russians, again, and loaded onto a plane, flying the cylinder back to Moscow. But then UFOs show up, and there’s a desert canyon dogfight (much like in Independence Day). Bernard is killed, Indy and Elaine end up parachuting away, and they find themselves in an isolated 50s small town in the desert, straight out of several Atomic Age horror flicks, and it’s slowly becoming infested with creepy, seven-foot-tall spider aliens. This should be the best part of the script, because as an idea, it’s kinda cool. Spielberg paying homage to Invaders From Mars seems like a slow pitch right down the center of the plate, and it would be fun to imagine scenes along the lines of Poltergeist or Gremlins playing out in this setting. It is, in fact, a lot like the original horror movie version of E.T. that got pitched back in the day. I could get behind this sequence as the main thrust of the script, rather than the fifteen or so pages it gets here. But as it stands, this is also a disappointment. No memorable bits, we barely get any of the spiders, and the town has virtually no definition, with no characters of note and only one location worth mentioning, a Drive-In theater playing one of the selfsame 50s alien invasion pictures, which seems like it’s going to juxtapose against the actual invasion, and isn’t that fun, but it doesn’t really connect. Seems like an obvious place for a Spielberg/Indy sight gag, but there’s nothing of note on the page.
You wish I was in Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men!
The finale is a sinister, confusing Close Encounters of the Third Kind rip-off/reference. We discover the spider aliens are actually robots, and the real aliens are smaller and look kind of like bugs. Indy attempts to give them the cylinder, but they refuse it because they’re scared of it. Then the US military shows up and tries to attack their UFO, but it turns out that’s only the top of a much bigger UFO, which annihilates the soldiers. I’m not sure if we’re supposed to think of the Armed Forces in this as good guys or bad guys - they lack much definition either way - but they certainly all die horribly, much like the Nazis in Raiders. The General, who I think was friendly with Indy, gets buried alive in burning sand, so that’s kinda cool. In the end, the only ones left standing are Indy, Elaine, Bolander and the Russian Spy who has thus far had the most dialogue (‘Cheslav’). They race up the mountain, to take the cylinder to the spot its markings indicate. The long and the short is that Bolander and Cheslav are fighting over the cylinder and it kills them with science magic, in the manner of all Indy villains. It then just disappears. Indy and Elaine return to Princeton and resume their marriage, and Short Round chauffeurs them off.
This is a dry, boring script, and very much not what anyone would have wanted from a fourth Indiana Jones movie. The relationships are shallow, the dialogue is dull, and there seems to have been almost no effort put into making sense of the various elements at play. What do the aliens want? What does the cylinder do? Are the aliens trying to reclaim it? If so, why are they scared of it? If not, why are they here at all? Are they about to, like, invade us or something? The script has no answers, and doesn’t seem too curious. To be fair, no way was this a final draft, and it was indeed rejected by both Spielberg and Harrison Ford as not up to snuff. In part, this was due to the massive success of Independence Day, which this film frequently resembles, but it’s pretty clear this story pitch ain’t getting it done. Anything that worked at all, and few things that didn’t, were all removed and placed in the next iteration of this story, which ditched the New Mexico angle completely and took its Ancient Astronauts premise back to the semi-racist source, Pre-Colombian South America. And while that movie is famously disliked, I reiterate, it is undeniably a better effort than Saucer Men. It’s possible a good movie could have been crafted from this, but it would have required a page one rewrite.
There were several more drafts of the Indiana Jones meets aliens story, the most well-known of which is Frank Darabont’s Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods, which will be covered here at a later date. But I’d really like to see some of the other ones that fell by the wayside as well. M Night Shyamalan apparently took a swing at it, and who can say what that might have looked like? Maybe a bit like Signs? Timeline works out there. I’d love to get my hands on that one. Regardless, I believe the aliens idea ‘could’ have worked for an Indiana Jones film. But in the end, despite almost two decades or trying, they never quite cracked it. And Spielberg and Lucas tend to be able to crack ideas, down the stretch. Spielberg at least. I suppose in the end, it was never meant to be. So it goes.
