Who is responsible for the awful ‘fridge scene’ in ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’?
It should be common knowledge for any cinephile that the Indiana Jones series is a masterpiece, save for the disastrous fourth film, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Littered with several horrendous scenes that would tarnish the legacy of any iconic franchise, Spielberg’s movie was a box-office success but a considerable flop, with a significantly aged Harrison Ford adding nothing new to the title character.
Whilst the movie, which follows a Soviet plot to uncover the secret behind mysterious artefacts known as the Crystal Skulls, sounds like a typical Indiana Jones outing, the film was crammed with enough stupid ideas to exhaust even the most hyperactive 10-year-old. Making the silly decision to involve aliens in the climactic scene, Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull is infamous for its poor decisions.
Though many would rather forget the extra-terrestrial conclusion and that moment when Shia LaBeouf’s Mutt Williams swings like a monkey through the jungle on neatly-placed vines, the most iconically awful scene comes when Indiana Jones survives a nuclear blast by trapping himself in a lead-lined fridge.
Coming near the beginning of Spielberg’s 2008 movie, the scene follows the daring archaeologist as he mistakenly enters a nuclear testing ground. Initially creating a great deal of tension, the scenario is a terrifying and perfectly cinematic one. If it wasn’t for the way in which the protagonist escapes the blast, hiding in a fridge before being blown into the air by the shockwaves, crashing down on the desert slopes a fair distance away.
Instead of crawling out of the fridge a bloodied, bruised bag of Indiana Bones, Ford’s character seems relatively unharmed, becoming one of the few people in human history to survive a nuclear blast with all its horrifying force. Even for a series that explores ancient cults, spiritual curses and ghostly apparitions, the stupidity of this scene, in a franchise that usually does well to balance the scales of reality and farce, was simply a step too far.
So, who’s to blame for this offence against the Indiana Jones brand? Well, Spielberg has admirably taken the rap for the scene in the past, telling Empire (via CNN) in 2011, “Blame me. Don’t blame George. That was my silly idea. People stopped saying ‘jump the shark.’ They now say, ‘nuked the fridge.’ I’m proud of that. I’m glad I was able to bring that into popular culture”.
Too honourable is the friendship between Steven Spielberg and screenwriter George Lucas, and the latter refuses to let the director take the blame for the disastrous moment, strangely tussling over the responsibility for the awful moment of cinema. “He’s trying to protect me,” Lucas told The New York Times in 2012 before revealing that he’d convinced Spielberg to take on the scene after producing a dossier of the scene that was “six inches thick”.
In a remarkable defence of his own nonsensical idea, Lucas says that he went on the offensive to protect the fridge-nuke scene, saying that if Indiana Jones didn’t break his neck when the fridge crash landed, and he was able to get the door of the chiller open, he could survive the blast. “The odds of surviving that refrigerator — from a lot of scientists — are about 50-50,” Lucas passionately states, providing no evidence of who these optimistic and potentially incompetent scientists might be.
Still, we don’t hold it against Spielberg or Lucas. After all, the scene is so remarkably bad that it’s almost charming.
