Peru’s Foreign Minister has turned film critic, urging Peruvians to avoid seeing Stephen Spielberg’s latest blockbuster “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”… or was it “the Kingdom of the Geographically Challenged?”
“You shouldn’t see it,” José García Belaunde said in comments to CPN Radio on Thursday, which were widely reported in Peru’s newspapers the next morning. “They haven’t even bothered to invest in research.”
Belaunde conceded that liberties are taken in Hollywood, and even offered a nod to dramatic license in the name of Peru’s greatest novelist.
“It is a concession. Mario Vargas Llosa would say this is fiction and they were within their rights,” Belaunde said. “If you put your corrupt Mexicans and their sombreros up there, you are at least already setting the scene outside the United States.”
But the film, set in Peru, and is riddled with geographic, historical and cultural errors. Yet another Hollywood production that portrays everything south of Rio Grande as having a siesta under a huge Mexican hat.
Peruvian movie goers awkwardly squirmed in their seats when the world’s most famous fictitious archaeologist arrived, with bull whip in hand, in Nazca, a hot and arid town on the southern coast of Peru, only to be greeted by heavy wool poncho and sombrero clad locals who smoked Cuban cigars and listened to Mexican ranchera music.
Indiana Jones explains he learned Quechua, a language spoken in Peru’s highland region as well as in Ecuador and Bolivia, from Pancho Villa as they fought side by side during the Mexican Revolution.
The hero also finds Conquistador Francisco Orellana’s corpse interred in a Nazca tomb, though the Nazca Culture died out approximately 732 years before Spanish Conquistadors arrived in Peru in 1532.
To top it off, when Indy and his friends finally make it to Akator, the lost city in Peru’s Amazon, it looks nothing like Kuelap, or Chan Chan, or even Machu Picchu. It’s a ruins that looks suspiciously like Chichen Itza, the pre-Columbian archaeological site built by the Mayan civilization on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.
This movie is just like Wolfgang Peterson’s Troy, which “had nothing to do with the Iliad,” Belaunde said.
“But honestly,” he added, “Troy was worse.”
