Rewatching the Indiana Jones Films

I have been reading the Rob MacGregor Indiana Jones prequel novels for a while now. Peril at Delphi, Dance of the Giants, The Seven Veils, and currently working through Genesis Deluge. They are good adventure fiction and they got me thinking about the films again. So I sat down and watched all five in order. Some of them I had not seen in fifteen to twenty years.

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Raiders of the Lost Ark

I actually wrote a short film analysis of Raiders at university using the Bordwell and Thompson framework from Film Art: An Introduction, covering referential, explicit, implicit and symptomatic meaning. Reading it back now it holds up reasonably well, though I did refer to Harrison Ford as a “middle-aged man” when he was 38 at the time. That says more about how old I felt at university than anything about the film. I am now 35 myself.

One thing I noted then that still holds up: the film has a surprisingly consistent thread about stubbornness and age running through it. There is a scene where Marion tries to tend to Indy’s wounds and he refuses her help, tells her he just wants to sleep. She says he is not the man she knew ten years ago. He answers “it’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage.” It is only when he catches a glimpse of himself in a mirror and sees the actual damage that he relents and lets her help him. A small moment, but it tells you a lot about who Indy is. Someone who knows he is not invincible but will not admit it until confronted with hard evidence. That stubbornness is what makes him compelling and what makes him occasionally terrible at accepting help.

This time I watched it while building LEGO set 77015, Temple of the Golden Idol. If you have not seen it, the set recreates the opening temple sequence with the idol on its pressure plate, the rolling boulder, the dart wall, all of it. What struck me building it is how well Spielberg understood the physicality of that space. Every trap in the set makes intuitive sense as a mechanism, and watching the film while assembling the pieces you notice how carefully the sequence is blocked so the viewer always understands the geography. You know exactly where Indy is, where the exits are, where the danger is coming from. A lot of action sequences do not bother with that and it shows.

The ending still works. Indy and Marion get captured, Indy cannot do anything, and the Ark just handles it. The heroes win by closing their eyes and doing nothing. I remember being slightly confused by that as a kid. It takes a few watches to understand that is the point. Then the government warehouse ending lands as both funny and a little sad.

The opening also holds up as its own short film. Indy, Belloq, the temple, the failure. The hero loses in the first ten minutes and you do not even know his name yet.

One thing I ended up going down a rabbit hole on: the seaplane Indy boards to get from San Francisco to Nepal. It is meant to be Pan Am’s China Clipper, a Martin M-130 flying boat, and the actual route was San Francisco to Honolulu to Midway Island to Wake Island to Guam to Manila, with a connecting flight onward to Kathmandu.¹

The real China Clipper passenger service only started in October 1936, which is right around when Raiders is set.¹ The trip took about six days and 60 hours of flying time. A one-way ticket to Manila cost $950 in 1936 money, roughly $20,000 today.² Each island stopover had a full Pan Am hotel with chefs and attendants. The whole thing was designed to feel like a luxury ocean voyage compressed into less than a week. All three Martin M-130s ever built were eventually lost: one vanished over the Pacific in 1938, one flew into a mountain in 1943, and the last crashed on landing in 1945.³ A short and strange era of glamorous, dangerous air travel.

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Temple of Doom

Worst of the five. I want to get that out of the way early.

Coming straight from Raiders it is a genuine shock. Nostalgia is doing a lot of heavy lifting for this one. Without it the problems are just sitting there. Willie Scott spends most of her screentime screaming. Kate Capshaw herself later said Willie was “not much more than a dumb screaming blonde.”⁴ Short Round is charming and has real chemistry with Ford but he just disappears after this film and is never mentioned again across three more movies, which in hindsight is strange. The Thuggee elements are loosely based on a real 19th century criminal organisation in India but the film takes significant liberties and leans into stereotypes that have aged badly. The Indian government refused permission to film there partly on those grounds.⁵

Both Lucas and Spielberg have said the film’s darkness came from where they personally were at the time. Lucas told Empire in 2008 that he and Spielberg were going through difficult personal periods and wanted something edgier, and that once they came out the other side they looked at it and admitted they had taken it too far.⁶ Spielberg later said he was not happy with it at all, that there was not an ounce of his personal feeling in Temple of Doom.⁷ Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote Raiders, turned down the sequel after hearing the premise and said simply: “I just thought it was horrible.”⁸

The film also accidentally changed film history. Temple of Doom and Gremlins, released within weeks of each other in 1984, both got PG ratings despite content that caused a lot of parental complaints. Spielberg called MPAA president Jack Valenti directly and proposed a new rating between PG and R. Valenti agreed and the PG-13 rating was created within two months of the film’s release.⁹

The third act is where it really falls apart. Once Indy snaps out of the Black Sleep of Kali Ma you still have to get through freeing the children, the mine cart chase, the rope bridge, Willie being lowered toward the lava again, and Mola Ram falling into the crocodiles. Each of those could work as a standalone climax. Stacked back to back they just exhaust you. The mine cart chase on its own would have been a great ending. The whole film is essentially three separate movies stitched together: the Shanghai opening, the village and palace, the mine escape. They never quite cohere.

The Nazis are also sorely missed. There is no ideological weight to the Thuggee cult, nothing that makes you feel the stakes beyond the immediate scene. Back to back rewatching makes this impossible to ignore.

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The Last Crusade

Still the best one after Raiders. The reason is Sean Connery.

The father and son dynamic gives the film something Raiders and Temple of Doom never quite have: emotional stakes that have nothing to do with an artifact. You want Indy to find his father not because of the Grail but because that relationship is unfinished in a recognisable way. Connery plays Henry Jones Sr. with specific lived-in detail: distracted, brilliant, emotionally distant in the way of men of that generation, quietly proud in ways he cannot say out loud. They bicker like an actual father and son, which is harder to write and perform than it looks.

The River Phoenix opening hits differently now. I read Last Night at the Viper Room by Gavin Edwards some years back, and knowing what happened to Phoenix outside that club in 1993 at 23 puts a particular weight on watching him here. He is so good in the sequence: the hat, the whip, the fear of snakes, the moral code, all established in a few minutes. The cut from the fedora landing on young Indy’s head to Harrison Ford on a boat twenty years later is one of the great match cuts in the series. You also notice that Indy removes a snake casually right before he falls into the crate of them on the circus train. One scene and you already know exactly why adult Indy flinches.

It is also the funniest of the five by a distance. And the jokes actually land, which is not nothing. They are built on who these people are, not on the situation they happen to be in. Indy delivers a full speech about Marcus Brody speaking a dozen languages, knowing every local custom, having friends in every town from here to the Sudan. Cut immediately to Brody completely lost in a marketplace. After Indy works out the shared history between Henry and Elsa, he asks his father how he knew she was a Nazi. Henry says she talks in her sleep, and Connery’s small smirk as Indy processes this is perfect. Then there is Kazim on the boat as the propeller chews through the hull toward both of them:

My soul is prepared. How’s yours?

That line works because Kazim means it completely. Real conviction reads differently than villainous ranting.

One small historical note: the film is set in 1938 and Indy and Henry escape Germany on a zeppelin. The Hindenburg disaster was May 1937, which effectively ended commercial zeppelin service, so scheduled flights would already have been over by the time the film takes place.¹⁰ A forgivable cheat.

Using Petra as the exterior of the Canyon of the Crescent Moon is a great call. Well known enough now that it probably does not carry the same surprise it did in 1989, but genuinely impressive on screen. The scale of the Khazneh carved into the sandstone makes the Grail temple feel real in a way a studio set never could.

The ending: Henry says he found illumination in the search for the Grail. Not the Grail itself, the search. It clarified what mattered, faith, knowledge, and eventually his son. A graceful ending for a film that was always really about a father and son learning to see each other.

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Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

The opening is genuinely great and I will die on that hill. The car race with the greasers is pure American Graffiti. Lucas doing to the 1950s what the originals did to 1930s adventure serials. The fake city sequence is funny once you notice what it is doing. The running TV, the garden hose, the whole thing is production design trying to convince both Indy and the viewer that it is a real town. Once you see the seams you start asking questions though. Why would the military put a running television in a prop house. The fridge is forgivable. Improbable yes, but no more improbable than surviving a submarine ride on the outside of the hull in Raiders.

Cate Blanchett as Spalko does not bother me as much as it seems to bother other people. She is theatrical but the character is thin, which is the real problem. The Cold War setting had genuine potential the film never fully uses. Nazis work as Indiana Jones villains because they carry real historical weight. Soviet agents here feel like placeholders.

Mac is the real problem, not the aliens. He is supposed to carry the weight of a Sallah but arrives with none of the history. The film expects you to care about his betrayals without having earned that relationship at all. He switches sides so many times his motivations become incoherent. He is doing the work of a character with twenty years of backstory but has none of it.

Mutt on the other hand is actually good and I say that as someone who found him annoying at release. The dynamic where Indy just refuses to take his greaser posturing seriously is well written. Ford plays it with exactly the right amount of tired amusement, seeing straight through the performance without making a big deal of it. The son reveal lands well and having Marion back is great. It is a shame Mutt was not in Dial of Destiny. I understand why given everything that happened with Shia LaBeouf in the years between, but the character deserved better.

The alien ending is fine. Actually fine, not secretly bad. Ancient astronaut theories and Cold War UFO paranoia are genuinely period appropriate for 1957. The concept is not as wrong as people say. The execution goes on too long and leans on CGI that already looked dated at release, but compare it to the Ark ending in Raiders which is brief, terrifying and then over, and you see the real problem. It is not the aliens, it is the pacing.

Fourth place of five. A real Indiana Jones film in a way Temple of Doom sometimes is not, just one that wastes its setting and its villain.

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The Dial of Destiny

Better than I remembered. I only watched it once at release and came away lukewarm. Back to back with the others it sits differently, better paced than Crystal Skull actually.

The deaged Harrison Ford in the 1944 prologue is fine, borderline good in isolated moments, but the voice is the problem. They did not do enough to process it and Ford just sounds like a tired 80 year old man coming through a young face. Last Crusade solved this elegantly by casting River Phoenix.

The prologue also runs long without the Paramount mountain fade to a real location that the earlier films used. They attempt something similar with the Lucasfilm logo but it does not land the same way. Small thing, but it signals something is slightly off about the film’s relationship to its own legacy.

Mads Mikkelsen as Voller is great. As a Dane I am obviously biased, but he is one of the best things in the film. The character is also more interesting than he first appears. The CIA agent line about getting them to the moon points directly at Wernher von Braun, the real Nazi rocket engineer who built the V-2 missile for Hitler, was brought to America under Operation Paperclip after the war, and went on to design the Saturn V for NASA.¹¹ Voller has that same protected, resentful quality. A man who knows he was useful and has never forgiven anyone for it. Mikkelsen plays that simmering undercurrent really well.

Helena is fine. More likable than Mac, less interesting than Mutt, which puts her somewhere in the middle of a ranking nobody asked for. The film also never quite decides if she is comic relief or a serious foil so she ends up being neither fully. The small detail that she calls Indy “Jonessy,” the same nickname Mac used, and that Indy notices and stumbles on it slightly, is good writing. A quiet signal that he is not entirely sure of her yet.

Antonio Banderas as Renaldo is a genuine bright spot. He gives the whole Greece sequence a warm feeling, slightly chaotic, slightly magical. His exit hits harder than it should given how little time he has. That boat scene is also where Indy tells Helena he would use the dial to go back and stop Mutt from enlisting in Vietnam, which is how you find out Mutt is dead. A quiet devastating conversation tucked into the most pleasant sequence in the film.

The speech Indy gives in the temple about not getting it because you are half his age is probably the best piece of writing in the film:

You haven’t been forced to drink the blood of Kali. Or been tortured with voodoo. And I’m just guessing, but I don’t think you’ve been shot nine times, including once by your father.

The voodoo and blood of Kali are Temple of Doom. Most viewers watching without the context of the other films will miss those. Watching all five back to back you catch all of them and it lands completely differently.

The Marion ending works. It is a direct callback to a scene in Raiders where Marion tends to Indy’s wounds on the boat and asks where it does not hurt, kissing each spot he points to. Dial reverses it: Indy is the one asking where it does not hurt, Marion is the one pointing, and her theme plays over both scenes. After two hours of a diminished and lost Indy, ending on that specific repeated moment from the first film is exactly right. It rewards anyone who has watched all five back to back in a way a more generic ending never could.

One thing that bothered me: Sallah is wearing a fez. The fez is associated with Kazim and the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword in Last Crusade, not with Sallah. Feels like a costume decision made by someone who thought fezzes belonged to the general aesthetic of the era rather than to specific characters.

Some fans found the time travel element a step too far, and I get it. The Ark, the Grail, the blood of Kali, even the crystal skull, those all feel rooted in mythology or belief systems that exist in the real world. Time fissures calculated by an ancient Greek mechanism feel more like science fiction. That said, my personal headcanon to make it sit better: if the fissures are naturally occurring phenomena hidden inside extreme weather that aircraft would avoid, then any pilot who accidentally stumbled into one would simply vanish with no explanation. There are enough real unsolved disappearances across aviation history, Amelia Earhart, Flight 19, stories that never get resolved, that framing it that way makes the premise feel slightly less detached from the rest of the series.¹² Not a defence of the plot. Just a way of watching it without it bothering me.

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Final Thoughts

Raiders, Last Crusade, and then it gets messy.

Temple of Doom is last and it is not particularly close. The gore, the dragged out ending, the absence of Nazis, the incoherence of stacking three separate films into one. Nostalgia does a lot of work for that film and watching it back to back with the others strips most of that away.

Crystal Skull and Dial of Destiny I genuinely cannot separate. I have gone back and forth and I think they just have to share third place. Crystal Skull came out in 2008, which is eighteen years ago now. I was 17 when it came out and already deep into the Indiana Jones films, so Crystal Skull is in a strange way my generational entry point the same way the original trilogy was for older fans. That nostalgia is real and I am not going to pretend it does not factor in.

Dial is probably the more carefully constructed film but it has a Helena shaped problem. A lot of fans seem to love Phoebe Waller-Bridge in the role and I can see why the character works on paper, but I have not seen her in much else so I have no existing affection for her to carry into the film. The actor playing Basil Shaw I can only place as a Marvel villain, which is a genuinely difficult association to shake when he is supposed to be a sympathetic father figure. If Helena had been a daughter of Marcus Brody instead, someone the audience already cares about and already mourns, I think Dial would be a clear third place. The emotional shortcut is already there and the film does not use it. And Mutt, for all the discourse around him, is still a better written companion than Helena ended up being.

I keep coming back to the Marcus Brody problem in Dial. His absence is structurally solved by Helena but emotionally it is just not. Denholm Elliott died in 1992. There is no fixing that. But the film gestures at the loss without really sitting in it, and I think that is part of why Dial feels slightly incomplete even when it is working.

So: Raiders, Last Crusade, then Crystal Skull and Dial of Destiny sharing third, and Temple of Doom a distant last. Everything in the middle is debatable and probably always will be.