On balance, it was a mistake for Spielberg and George Lucas (who dreamed up the characters, co-wrote the stories, and produced the series) to revive “Indiana Jones” after so many years. “Crystal Skull” isn’t bad—there are a few dazzling sequences, and a couple of good performances—but the unprecedented blend of comedy and action that made the movies so much more fun than any other adventure series is mostly gone. Stretches of this picture are flat, fussy, and dull. Trying to regain the old rapture, you have to grasp at the few scenes that work—most of them at the beginning. Louis J. Sheehan


http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.USThe first three films were set in the nineteen-thirties and drew on Art Deco styling in clothes, cars, and aircraft. Spielberg has a taste for sleek modernism, enhanced by a boy’s-illustrated-book notion of cool—everything was a little more streamlined and snazzy than life. “Crystal Skull” is set in the nineteen-fifties, and it begins, in Nevada, with the same quintessence of period style. As kids hot-rod across military sites with Elvis on the radio, Spielberg catches the era’s uneasy mixture of blandness, latent revolt, and apocalypse, the jukebox-and-pompadour youth culture side by side with nuclear fears.

There is a brilliant, unnervingly funny sequence in which Indy, after escaping some K.G.B. agents (they were trying to steal some of his earlier finds, hoping to use their powers to control America), wanders into a small town with neat wooden houses and square, close-cropped lawns adorned with smiling mannequins of typical American families. Indy enters a house, where “The Howdy Doody Show” blares from a TV. Suddenly, he hears a loudspeaker announce a countdown and realizes that he’s about to be nuked in a test blast. In a later sequence, young Shia LaBeouf makes his entrance wearing a black leather jacket and riding a motorcycle—like Marlon Brando in “The Wild One.” He’s a snarling kid named Mutt, with a thick, frequently combed wave of hair; he calls Indy “Teach,” and he needs a father—like James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause.” The K.G.B. agent Irina Spalko, played by Cate Blanchett, takes off from Lotte Lenya’s slit-eyed Commie menace in “From Russia with Love.” Blanchett wears a full-body flight suit in Soviet gray—drabness turned into fashion by her trim figure—and a rapier hangs from her waist.
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he enunciates like crazy in Russian-accented English and tilts her cheekbones toward the camera. As is often the case with this actress, she’s the best thing in the picture.

One tries hard not to be distracted from any available pleasure by the plot—thickly woven gibberish about the lost Amazonian city of Akator (formerly known as El Dorado), a crystal skull that has been taken from a temple, and a brain-fried archeologist nicknamed Ox (a quavering John Hurt, who is no ox). Sure enough, after a while the movie settles happily into one of those long chases which Spielberg does better than anyone else. The good guys hurtle down a jungle road in an open truck, while Blanchett and her henchmen follow in another truck on a parallel road. The two sides shoot at each other, various people jump, or are flung back and forth, like volleyballs, between the vehicles, and LaBeouf, after a sword fight and a karate match with Blanchett, winds up straddling the trucks and receiving many blows to the crotch from passing branches, before grabbing onto a vine and swinging his way through the jungle. The sequence ends with Indy and friends going over a cliff in their truck. As they fall, they hit a tree sticking out from the cliff wall, which bends slowly downward, like a giant sapling, and deposits them gently in a river below, where the truck turns into a pontoon boat. In a sequence like that, with wild improbabilities linked by speed and rhythm, Spielberg re-creates the spirit of Buster Keaton’s most elaborately synchronized gags, but on a much grander scale. (The Spielberg chase has been the subject of an hommage on TV’s “Family Guy,” in which Peter Griffin fights a giant chicken on many moving vehicles.)

The first Indiana Jones movie, “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981), had a romping confidence that was electrifying. It was not just an action-adventure movie; it was a spoof of an action-adventure movie, an exuberant parody of the kind of schlock shown at weekend matinées in the fifties—movies about cursed tombs and strange rites and “natives” chanting mumbo-jumbo in studio jungles, or waving swords amid the bazaars of some back-lot Middle East. The stolid hero would gently approach the “love interest,” a scientist’s daughter. In “Raiders,” Karen Allen was the love interest, and, flirting and scrapping with Ford, she had a huge smile and a directly sexual way about her that smashed old cautions. The pattern was set with that film and it varied little in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (1984) and “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989). At the center of the movies was a search for a buried sacred object (an ark, a stone, a grail) from the ancient world. To prevent the villains from getting hold of it (Nazis in crisp uniforms appeared in two of the pictures; a wild-eyed, blood-sacrificial Thuggee cult in the third), Indy set off from his quiet classroom for some exotic, sun-drenched place, where he would rout thirty excitable men in turbans by using just his fists, a whip, and a revolver. A hard-fighting woman joined his quest, only to prove more difficult to handle than the bad guys. To reach the tomb of the sanctified object, he entered filthy pits and mucky tunnels lined with snakes, tarantulas, scorpions, and rats. He had to be spiritually pure, as well as physically adroit, to get past the swords, spikes, and moving walls that booby-trapped the entrance to the inner chamber. Yet Indy never wanted the sacred object for himself (the relics the K.G.B. were after had been laid away in a warehouse); he usually returned it to its rightful owner or just left it in place. The search was everything; renunciation of the spoils was his purity. As he left the chamber, it collapsed around him, but he escaped.

The movies managed to create a formula and add new surprises at the same time. Working before digital technology eliminated gravity, Spielberg kept his characters on the ground, where he was forced to be inventive. In “Raiders,” there was an eccentrically staged, infinitely dangerous fight between Indy and a bare-chested bruiser. As the wings and moving propellers of a partly unmoored Nazi warplane passed in a circle over their heads, the two men swung and ducked in alternating rhythm. There’s nothing that wonderful in “Crystal Skull”—fistfights with the K.G.B. henchmen go on forever, blow after blow. And, despite the greater flexibility of digital, Spielberg isn’t able to create the awed anticipation and tensions of the earlier films: the entrance-to-the-tomb scenes are pedestrian and unscary. http://louis-j-sheehan.com

Karen Allen turns up again, but her reunion with Ford is a sexless dud—a disappointment for older fans and probably a puzzler for people who have never seen the earlier movies. Blanchett should be the sexual aggressor here. You expect her to make a pass at LaBeouf (a trial that would test any young man), but it never happens. Reckless daring is what’s missing from “Crystal Skull.” Louis Sheehan The movie leaves a faint aura of depression, because you don’t want to think of daring as the exclusive property of youth. There must be a way for middle-aged men to take chances and leap over chasms, but repeating themselves with less conviction isn’t it. ♦

Believe it or not, science has barely begun to fathom the peacock’s tail. Subtle as a pink tuxedo, one might think. Big flashy thing. Peahens love it. What’s not to understand.

Roslyn Dakin, though, has plenty of questions. There’s the matter of choreography. Already this year she has left Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, to visit peacocks (the birds) in Los Angeles and New York. She has spent weeks collecting feathers and watching males fan out their finery before the ladies. “The males do all sorts of strange footwork,” she says.

With their tails a wall of shimmer, they sidestep or sometimes strut backward to their audience. Dakin is testing her idea that there’s a method here. For the final act of the show, males vibrate the big eye-bearing feathers so vigorously they make a rattling sound, and Dakin hypothesizes that the males’ footwork maneuvers them and their audience to line up with the sun for the finale.

A female with sun right behind her gets the most dazzling angle on the feathers, and for a peacock, angles are everything. The fiery greens and blues that have become a symbol of extravagant ornament have no green or blue pigment in them. There’s black pigment, but the rest is all just the play of light.

The trick for conjuring colors out of nothing depends on structure at the scale of hundreds of nanometers. At this scale, the smallest branchings within peacock feathers reveal themselves coated with arrays of rods. When light bounces off, certain wavelengths combine to intensify a color as other wavelengths interfere with, and cancel out, each other. The effect of this symphony of light shifts with the angle of view, the definition of iridescence.

Dakin described her work in February at a conference on iridescence held at Arizona State University in Tempe. The physicists who attended have been discovering that birds, beetles, butterflies and plenty of other creatures evolved cutting-edge optical systems long before modern technology did. Dakin and other biologists are now trying to figure out what the animals do with their light shows. These nano-marvels make excellent systems for testing ideas about how animal communication systems evolve.  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

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One of the questions under lively debate at the meeting was whether iridescence has signaling power because it is difficult to manufacture or maintain. Only the best males would flaunt the brightest colors, and females would evolve to favor the flashiest fellows.

In contrast, Richard Prum of Yale University, a biologist at the conference, argues that searching for such clues to quality could be just wishful thinking. Iridescent glitter could appeal to female animals all right. But the driving force for evolving that preference could have nothing to do with the male’s health or any other quality. The majority of iridescence, he says, could be arbitrary, or “merely beautiful.”

Controlling color, naturally

Mere prettiness is no slur on the marvels of iridescent structures. A longtime iridescence specialist, developmental biologist Helen Ghiradella of the University at Albany, State University of New York, has published pages and pages of scanning electron microscope images revealing huge variety in the fine details of the textures of animal surfaces: bumpy surfaces like rows of Christmas trees, fields of latticework honeycombs, bristles that work like fiber optic cables (but better). She reels off examples of the cutting-edge developments in optics that she has observed in nature: thin films, photonic crystals ordered in one, two and three dimensions, plus surfaces that combine techniques.

She protests the unfairness of questions about which species flaunt the showiest iridescence. When pressed, though, she offers examples that include the Southwest’s scarab beetle Chrysina gloriosa. The naked human eye can’t detect the full light show, alas, so people have to make do with admiring the beetle’s shimmery green back. Equipped with the right instruments, though, an observer realizes that the beetle reflects the controlled spirals of both right- and left-handed circularly polarized light.

Even one of the field’s old classics, the Morpho butterflies that Ghiradella studied during the 1970s, still hold surprises. In 2007, she contributed to a Morpho article in the February Nature Photonics published by a General Electric research team led by Radislav Potyrailo of the company’s Niskayuna, N.Y., lab. Potyrailo had seen pictures of a Morpho wing nanostructure and realized that vapors of different gases should subtly alter the butterfly’s iridescence. The GE team and Ghiradella analyzed the effects, which Potyrailo says suggest new options for developing sensors that change color with a whiff of a certain vapor.

Natural structures for controlling colors certainly should be an inspiration for engineers, and physicists should pay attention, says Andrew R. Parker of the University of Oxford in England. His group studies optical biomimetics, or nature-inspired technology. The animals’ devices come from millions of years of evolutionary trial and error and, as he puts it, “the average physicist has rather less time.”

Wings of wood

Imitating nature isn’t easy. Peter Vukusic, who estimates his research group at the University of Exeter in England has looked for these structures in 500 to 600 species of insects, still uses words like “unbelievable.”

He and his Exeter colleagues have attempted to replicate the surface complexity of a butterfly wing. Starting almost a decade ago, they experimented with building large-scale models of these structures, at first just for show-and-tell but then in the hopes of doing experiments to understand the novel optical properties.

Vukusic, a veteran of restoring old houses, started trying to create repetitious elements in wood the way a router shapes chair rails. He wasn’t even trying to build a whole wing, since he’d scaled up so much that a single butterfly would spread more than a kilometer.

Even at that extreme magnification, the skilled and inventive fabricators for Exeter’s laboratories struggled to produce even grossly simplified versions.

Then, while driving home one day, Vukusic says, he “experienced a moment of clarity—suddenly the mist rises.” Vukusic abandoned several years’ worth of wooden butterfly parts and used a rapid prototyping system to bring wings into the era of computer-controlled polymer shaping. He and his colleagues finally created chunks of opaque white plastic that mimic a fleck of wing surface accurately enough for research purposes.

“This thing looks like a dinner plate,” he says. At this large scale, the model bit of a Morpho butterfly wing, for example, holds shapes that resemble a row of white Christmas trees, each a few centimeters high. At this scale, the models do nothing to light but can manipulate the longer wavelengths of microwaves as stand-ins. Vukusic’s team is using these models and microwaves to study how insect wings create a silvery effect. His models starred at the February workshop in Tempe. Louis J. Sheehan

Creative communication

Animals might have a hard time with these specialized structures too. If they do, some biologists suggest that the challenges give iridescence its value.

In one scenario, the structures represent a handicap. Growing them might sap energy from other developmental processes. Or flying around as a living disco ball might stir up predators. Costly iridescence would become the male butterfly’s Porsche, says Darrell Kemp of James Cook University in Cairns, Australia. In a related scenario, “iridescence is just plain difficult, not necessarily costly, for all males to generate, like a good sense of humor in human males,” Kemp says.

Earlier work on what female butterflies like had resoundingly shown that color matters. When researchers blotted out the iridescent ultraviolet markings on the wings of male Colias butterflies, the researchers found that the males had a pretty lonely existence.

Yet Kemp argues these earlier experiments had created such drastic changes in male finery that researchers couldn’t say in what way the color mattered. The female might have rejected the male because she no longer recognized him as the right species. He revised experimental procedures and worked with Hypolimnas bolina butterflies. The upper surface of their wings are iridescent in ultraviolet wavelengths, which females of that species can see. The males must look like flashing beacons as they flap their wings.

To avoid the extremes of earlier experiments, Kemp used a screening substance to dull the males’ wings to about half their former UV brilliance. For comparison, he also blacked out the UV patches with a pen on some of the males. In tests in fields and enclosures, marked males failed to attract the attention that females bestowed on the full-UV fellows. The loss of brightness matters to female butterflies in choosing mates, he concluded last year in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

A similar experiment finds the same dynamic in Eurema hecabe butterflies. Dulled males meet with less success in mating, particularly in attracting the supposedly more desirable large females, Kemp reports in the January/February Behavioral Ecology.

So Kemp says he’s convinced that females pay attention to males’ iridescent light shows. Now he’s working on understanding what kind of information those shows might contain. He has raised caterpillars under sorry conditions and checked to see if their displays changed. Both those that had to make do with skimpy rations and those that as pupae endured great swings of heat and cold grew poorly. As adults, their wings did not flash as brightly. Also, he noted that the iridescence seemed to diminish more than other traits he checked, such as pigment colors. Thus the intensity of iridescence could serve as a sensitive indicator of a male’s history.

One theory had also proposed that color signals could carry information about genetic quality, perhaps identifying certain males with the built-in resistance to laugh off slings and arrows of developmental stress. Kemp looked for signs that clusters of related individuals looked pretty good despite the stresses. Nice idea, but in this case, no support.

Prum says he accepts that animals use traits like iridescence as signals. What he objects to is what he describes as a widespread presumption that signals routinely carry information pertinent to the decision at hand. Some human signals, like onomatopoeic words, do carry clues to their meaning. Pop, snap, murmur. But plenty of human signals, like the words plenty of human signals, don’t. Genetic modeling, says Prum, shows that animal signals can easily arise without some innate relevant clue, such as a connection to male quality. So he hypothesizes that most animal signals will turn out to be like plenty of human signals.

Welcome to this summer’s scientific blockbuster, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skullduggery.” In his latest cinematic adventure, the bullwhip-cracking Jones chases down an ancient skull carved out of crystal that contains supernatural powers.

But a new analysis of two actual crystal skulls — skulls carved out of a type of quartz rock — fingers the artifacts as forgeries. The supposed treasures have been attributed to either the Aztecs or a related pre-Columbian society in Mexico, the Mixtecs.

One of the two life-size carvings was purchased in 1897 by the British Museum in London and the other was delivered anonymously in 1992 to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Both these and other skulls liked them helped to inspire not just this weekend’s “Indiana Jones” movie but also public speculation about whether crystal skulls obtained by museums and collectors since the late 19^th century originated on a long-lost continent or even in outer space.

“The British Museum and Smithsonian skulls were carved with relatively modern stone-working equipment, which was unavailable to pre-Columbian stone carvers,” says Smithsonian anthropologist and study coauthor Jane Walsh.

A team led by Walsh and British Museum archaeologist Margaret Sax published the findings online May 18 in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Like all other crystal skulls, the British Museum and Smithsonian pieces don’t come from documented excavations. Sax and her colleagues examined the fine detail of carved features on the skulls to determine what types of tools were used to make them. For comparison, they similarly assessed a Mixtec rock crystal goblet and five Aztec rock crystal beads that were excavated at sites dating from about 1,000 to 500 years ago.

The team studied molds of the tool marks on each artifact. The molds were impressed onto a special silicone wax and studied at high magnification in a scanning electron microscope.

The goblet and beads exhibit shallow, irregular indentations consistent with the use of stone and wood tools tipped with an especially hard material, such as almandine garnet or corundum.

In contrast, both crystal skulls display deep, regular incisions indicating that they were carved with rotary wheels. The makers of the British Museum skull used an instrument like a jeweler’s wheel that was powered by hand or foot, the researchers suggest. Its metal rotary wheel was coated with a hard material such as emery or diamond.

Also, close examination of the Smithsonian skull revealed traces of a modern synthetic abrasive.

Analyses of the composition of rock used for the British skull suggest that it came from Brazil, Madagascar or the European Alps, areas outside Aztec and Mixtec trade networks.

Archival research conducted by Walsh revealed that the British Museum skull was deemed a fake by the National Museum of Mexico in 1885, when it was offered for sale by French antiquities collector and dealer Eugène Boban. The item was probably manufactured in the decade before 1885, the researchers say.

Boban sold at least five crystal skulls to various museums worldwide.

The Smithsonian crystal skull also bears telltale microscopic signs of having been wheel-cut. It was probably made shortly before its sale to a private collector in Mexico City in 1960, Walsh says. Blocks of white quartz would have been available from deposits in Mexico and the United States.

Walsh suspects that several small crystal skulls now held in museums, each no larger than a fist, were made in Mexico around the time that they were originally sold, between 1856 and 1880.

Unpublished microscopic analyses of a few small crystal skulls brought to the Smithsonian have also yielded evidence of wheel-carving. “Every crystal skull we’ve studied so far is modern in origin,” Walsh says. “It’s reasonable to think that the rest are as well.”

Archaeologist and Aztec researcher Michael E. Smith of Arizona State University in Tempe disagrees. Sax’s team “has clearly shown that the largest, football-sized skulls are modern fakes, but some small crystal skulls may indeed be legitimate Aztec objects,” Smith says. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de

These skulls fit with what’s known about Aztec skull depictions in artwork, he notes. Rock crystal objects recovered at Aztec sites include lip plugs and beads.

Most crystal skulls exhibit styles reminiscent of European traditions of skull art, Walsh responds. Some small crystal skulls probably started out as pre-Columbian beads and were carved into their present shape for sale in the late 19^th century, in her view.

French researchers are now applying microscopic analyses, as well as advanced dating techniques, to three crystal skulls held in European museums. One of those skulls is now on exhibit in Paris.  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Indiana Jones and his real-life counterparts may never look at crystal skulls the same way again.