The basic story, credited to Lucas, is the same: Area 51, Jones fired from his job, Peru jungle trek, a lost city. There’s still a nuclear blast and red ants and aliens.

But LaBouf’s Mutt Williams and Cate Blanchett’s evil Russianista are gone. There’s a lot more Marion Ravenwood, as well as cameos by Sallah and Indy’s father Henry Jones Jr. 

-- “Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods is 100% a better script than the one that was shot for the film,” raved G4. “This would have been the right way to close out the series, and it would have been a return to form that no one could have expected, instead of a movie that everyone places just above the abysmal Temple of Doom in the Indy canon.”

-- “Darabont's script reads a little too much like fan fiction at times,” wrote one fan on AintItCool. “I agree with [“Crystal Skull” writer] David Koepp that characters shouldn't be remembering their exact dialogue from decades earlier. Yet that's precisely what Indy and Marion do throughout this script.”

Our take: The script feels like the early draft that it is. Long, loose , chatty and with too much connective tissue for a summer movie. But there are some fine moments that one wishes had been in “Crystal Skull.” Jones saying goodbye to his class after he was fired. A spectacular biplane chase that takes wing-walking to a new level.

There’s also scenes that would have had fans in an uproar had they been included in the movie – such as Jones being swallowed by a giant snake (keep in mind, just because this is supposedly Darabont’s draft doesn’t mean any given idea inside the script, for better or worse, is his – same goes for Koepp’s).  And though Blanchett’s character bothered some critics, “City of the Gods” features a vague roundtable of villains and one can see why they were consolidated to a single and more distinctive character.

As the previous reader noted, there are too many references to the earlier films. One play off a classic Jones line, however, works well: “It ain’t the mileage sweetheart,” he groans to Marion, “it’s the years.”

Another standout line is perhaps too referential for a Jones movie, but is funny for those who have followed the Jones saga. Asked whatever happened to Willie Scott from “Temple of Doom,” who was played by Kate Capshaw, Jones replies: “She moved to Hollywood to be a star. Last I heard, she fell in love and married some big shot director.”

What does seem to rightly please many online fans is that the relationship between Jones and Marion is front and center, and downright touching. Marion is inconveniently married in Darabont’s draft (to another archeologist who gives Jones a run for his money), which gives the characters much more of a hurdle to overcome.

Darabont also does a better job handling the alien mythology business, but only because he sort of cheats by keeping the thread obscure until the final scenes – whereas “Crystal Skull” blurted out exposition about psychic warfare and aliens from the very start. 

The ending of Darabont’s script also makes slightly more logical sense than Koepp’s -- the aliens have a conversation with the Jones and Co where they offer each a gift with a deadly price -- but, as a result, the scene plays even more silly.

If  “Crystal Skull” was a disappointment (and its tough to argue it wasn’t for many fans), the leaked script shows that the fault is not with Darabont or Koepp, but likely with Lucas. It’s the constants between the two versions -- the spine of a story that tries to push Indiana Jones into a 1950s flying saucer movie -- that both writers struggle to pull off. At the end of the day, neither draft as written is a return to the glory of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s one that every writer already knows: If you write draft after draft and your story still isn’t working, try a different story.