There’s Still Only One Great Indiana Jones Movie

Maybe Hollywood can’t quit Indiana Jones because the magic of his first adventure still hasn’t been recaptured. Not by a long shot. Photo: Lucasfilm

Every few weeks, Vulture will choose a film to watch with readers as part of our Wednesday Night Movie Club. This week’s selection comes from writer and critic A.A. Dowd, who will begin his screening of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark on July 5 at 7 p.m. ET. Head to Vulture’s Twitter to catch the live commentary.

Has Dr. Henry Walton Jones, archeologist and famed “obtainer of antiquities,� raided his last temple, hanging up his wide-brimmed hat for good? Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the fifth big-screen adventure for Harrison Ford’s aging academic hero, has the unmistakable feel of a swansong. But then, the same could be said for the previous film in the franchise, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which gave Indy a happily ever after with the woman who got away. And before that even, we had Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; if the title didn’t betray an intended finality, the closing shot of Ford literally galloping into the sunset surely did.

Indiana Jones has a way of turning movie executives into obsessive treasure hunters: Back and back they’ll go to the same plot of desert, hoping that maybe this time, they’ll find another priceless relic glinting in the sand. All the sequels, including the less-valedictory Temple of Doom, have gone searching for the summer-movie bliss Steven Spielberg and George Lucas summoned from their merging imaginations back in 1981. Maybe Hollywood can’t quit Indiana Jones because the magic of his first adventure, Raiders of the Lost Ark, still hasn’t been recaptured. Not by a long shot.

With Raiders, Spielberg and Lucas, mad with power after the industry-reshaping success of their prior hits (the terrifying Jaws, the visionary Star Wars), threw their full clout into the pursuit of a holy grail: the ultimate Hollywood adventure movie. They wanted to update the Saturday-matinee serials of their respective childhoods for a new age of state-of-the-art spectacle. And the two got that mixture so right the first time that every attempt to replicate it, by them or anyone else, has fallen short.

We can hear the protests already. What about The Last Crusade? There are people who like part three, with Sean Connery as Indy’s incorrigible adventurer father, even better than the original. Those people are nuts: The Last Crusade is basically Raiders redux, recycling its basic structure and even the gist of some of its set pieces — a feverish chase here, an exploding Nazi noggin there — while only approximating its fun. The movie was more of a conservative course correction than anything else, moving the series back towards what audiences loved about the original and away from what they didn’t love about the weirder, grosser, meaner second entry.

Temple of Doom has its defenders, too, and for good reason: It’s maybe the most admirably ambitious of the sequels — an attempt to take Indy deeper into the coal mine of the dark adolescent id, pushing the boundaries of the PG rating with squirming bugs, monkey brains, and torn-out hearts. Likewise, the later sequels, uneven and divisive though they may be, have a hint of something special in them. Spielberg brings a puckish enthusiasm to all of Crystal Skull, even its maddening bits of telepathic monkey mischief and alien-vessel silliness. And it’s at least faintly touching to see Ford accept and maybe grapple with his elapsed youth in Dial of Destiny.

Still, none of the sequels come close to the rollercoaster peaks of Raiders. Few movies do. The original unfolds as an unbroken daisy chain of great scenes: That opening scene in the jungle, a perilous journey of betrayals and booby traps, establishes the nature of the fun (think James Bond by way of Allan Quatermain) and the relentless pace of the plotting. Hollywood would quickly imitate the way the movie constantly races from one set piece to the next — it became the defining playbook of the blockbuster machine — but no one could keep up with the playful virtuosity of Spielberg’s craft. How many movies, in this series or any other, have an action scene nearly as inspired as the famous chase in Raiders where Indy and his adversaries play musical chairs inside, outside, above, and underneath a speeding truck?

Part of the lightning Raiders bottled was the intersection of Spielberg’s growing confidence behind the camera and Ford’s burgeoning star power. Where the two met, an icon was born. Indiana Jones is never more interesting or charming than he is in the original. We learn everything we need to know about him, about his values and his history and his driving obsessions, in that first movie. The sequels would make him saltier, provide him backstory and daddy issues, age him into an exasperated sitcom dad, and leave him old and reflective, in that order. But he’s a perfect instrument of adventure in Raiders, defined through his actions, mythic and human in equal measure.

It helps that Ford has Karen Allen as a scene partner, of course. For all its throwback qualities, Raiders was quite modern in giving Indy a love interest who’s genuinely his equal — in grit, in wit, in adventurous spirit, certainly in ability to hold her liquor. So perfectly does she match Ford that the series more or less gives up on trying to find a substitute for her after Temple of Doom. Poor Kate Capshaw, put in the impossible position of replacing Marion Ravenwood.

And none of the sequels reach a more satisfying crescendo than the grisly special-effects finale of Raiders of the Lost Ark, maybe the greatest Fuck Around and Find Out in movie history. Plenty have seen something personal in Indiana Jones: the revenge fantasy of a Jewish boy grown into a Hollywood power player, handing the Nazis the ultimate comeuppance on the biggest screen possible. History’s most hateable villains would rise twice more into Indiana Jones’ crosshairs over the course of the franchise, taking a one-movie break between each ass-kicking he hands them. But Spielberg won that war pretty decisively in ‘81 with the goriest of mic drops. Short of pulling a full Inglourious Basterds and melting off Hitler’s mug, how could the series have ever topped the messy work the Ark of the Covenant makes of the Third Reich in Raiders?

From the moment it became a big success, that first Indiana Jones was destined to not be the last. That’s the real way Raiders bridged the ‘30s Buck Rogers stories Lucas loved to the post-Star Wars world he ushered in: Serialized adventures became the blueprint for an endlessly chugging Hollywood sequel machine. You can’t blame them for making more, because who wouldn’t want to see a dashingly handsome hero vanquish Nazis and uncover Biblical secrets in far-flung places again and again?

The trouble really is just that Spielberg and Lucas threw everything they had into Raiders, all their best ideas and set pieces. They treated that first film like it might be the only shot they’d get at the premise, like the old-fashioned adventure they cooked up might be the last of its kind. And so they made the best possible version of the story they could. But what did that leave for the sequels? When it comes to Indiana Jones movies, there’s the one without his name in the title and then there’s the rest.