I Hate Indiana Jones: Day 9

Day 9: Indiana Jones and the Insecure Government Facility

If there's one thing Area 51 is famous for, it's the site's relative impregnability. Despite half a century of fame as the most important location in conspiracy lore and alien mysteries, it has never been successfully infiltrated or exposed in any way.

Naturally, the cachet the location carries in the public's mind means that Area 51 shows up an awful lot in fiction, always depicted as the repository of the most absolutely secret and vital experiments and monsters that the US government can find, steal, or bio-engineer.

A good way to judge the relative quality of the depiction of Area 51 is just how hard it is to break into, and how clever the characters need to be to get inside. This can range from the dumb end of the spectrum (cutting through a fence and walking in), to the elaborately clever (something with betrayal, forged IDs, and possibly stolen retinas).

So how do the Commie agents break in to Area 51 at the beginning of the movie? They drive up in army uniforms and shoot everyone at the gate.

Let me break that down a little further - it's established that the base is on lockdown because there's going to be a nuclear bomb test tomorrow, yet when an entire convoy of military vehicles drives up, no one at the gate finds it especially suspicious, or bothers to radio this information to anyone. Despite the fact that they're all Army vehicles, and Area 51 is an Air Force base?

Then, when shooting the guards at the gate, the commies don't even bother to use silencers, instead emptying the clips of four different tommyguns into the gatehouse and everyone around it. Amazingly, all this gunfire doesn't alert the rest of the base, which is shown to be under a mile away, so no one gets ready to defend themselves, and the Commies are easily able to gun down the 50-odd other people that work there, although off-camera to preserve the PG rating.

Apparently it's even easier for a truckload of Commies to break into Area 51 than it was for Indiana Jones to break into that secret Nazi base in Last Crusade, and that was one of the many moments of that film that can be classified as embarrassingly stupid.