A couple weekends ago, I was wrapping presents and needed to throw something familiar on the TV that I could watch while I worked. I revisited Raiders of the Lost Ark earlier this year, but didn't manage to squeeze in rewatches of the other 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Indiana Jones films before Dial of Destiny hit cinemas in June. Months later, with no new movie to cram for, I opted to just throw Last Crusade on, and I was not disappointed. Though it beg🌌an as a distracted rewatch, I spent t♌he last 45 minutes fully locked in.
Last Crusade, which served as Steven Spielberg's goodbye to the franchise for the 19 years before Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, has been my favorite movie in the series since I first watched it on a portable DVD player in the mid '00s. After Spielberg's autobiographical family drama The Fabelmans last year (which ended up being another of this year's holiday rewatches), Last Crusade only hits harder and the reasons it clicks for me have become all the clearer.
The long answer is that it's just as good a vehicle for action-adventure as Raiders, but with significantly greater emotional stakes. I like Raiders' Marion Ravenwood as much as anyone else, and have always been glad Spielberg and George Lucas brought Karen Allen back for Crystal Skull and, briefly, Dial of Destiny. But the romantic aspect of Raiders of the Lost Ark doesn't hit as hard as the father-son plot in Last Crusade. Which leads us to the short answer for why this one works so well: the dad story.
Raiders of the Lost Ark is a brilliantly constructed action machine, and Temple of Doom is a lurid, exciting piece of (admittedly, pretty racist) pulp, but Last Crusade was the first movie in the series to resonate with me on a deeper level. That all comes down to Spielberg injecting a whole bunch of his issues with his own dad — chronicled in The Fabelmans and the 2017 HBO documentary, Spielberg — into the relationship between Harrison Ford's Indy and his father, Henry Jones, Sr., memorably played by Sean Connery.
Connery is completely believable as Indy's father, despite being just 12 years older than Harrison Ford.
This dynamic is set up during the film's prologue, in which River Phoenix plays a young Indiana, during an action set-piece that shows us how Henry Jones, Jr. became Indiana Jones, the whip-wielding, fedora-wearing, artifact-protecting action-adventure icon. It's Solo: A Star Wars Story in miniature, but it being 11 minutes long instead of 135 helps it avoid outstaying its welcome. We only see a glimpse of Henry Jones, Sr. during this intro, but we understand quickly that he's a stern and distant figure in Indy's life. This opening has Indy stealing a golden cross from a tomb raider dressed exactly how Indy will later style himself as an adult, and the lack of a strong father figure makes this sartorial susceptibility make sense.
When the plot picks up decades later, with Indiana recovering the golden cross as an adult, he hasn't spoken to his father in 20 years. He feels abandoned by his father, who took a hands-off approach to parenting after the death of Indy's mother. But, when we get the two together, Ford and Connery's chemistry lights a fire under the movie. Last Crusade is entertaining for its first half, as Spielberg puts the pieces in place and sets the plot into motion, but once Connery and Ford are on screen together it becomes a propulsive buddy action comedy that doesn't let up until they're riding off into the sunset over the closing credits.
Connery, the previous generation's sex symbol for his role as James Bond, and Ford, the next generation's sex symbol for his role as Spielberg and Lucas' alternative to James Bond, make great sense as father-son casting. There are several great comedic moments between them, like when the pair are both tied to a chair and have to escape a burning room while dealing with a secret door behind a rotating fireplace that reveals a room full of Nazis. Or the moment when Jones, Sr. inadvertently reveals the uncomfortable fact that both Jones men have slept with the same woman, Elsa Schneider, a Nazi double agent, by saying he learned she was in league with the Nazis because "she talks in her sleep" — a line improvised by Connery.
But the moments of pathos hit hard, too. When Jones, Sr. saves the day by shooing a flock of seagulls into a pursuing plane's engines, it's a funny moment that hits deeper when you see the look of dawning appreciation on Indy's face. Then there's the moment that Jones, Sr. thinks he's lost his son, when he sees the car he was in crash off a cliff, only to hug him tight when he walks up, dazed, behind him. That moment lends extra emotional heft when Indy almost has the Holy Grail in hand, but can't quite reach it, and his father tells him, "Indiana. Let it go," as John Williams' iconic music stirs. He lost him once, he won't lose him again.
It's understandable that some critics felt Last Crusade was a retread of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It brings back a religious artifact as the MacGuffin directing the plot and the Nazis as Indy's competition in finding it. While Temple of Doom took the franchise in a darker direction, Last Crusade is closer to the tone of Raiders, and feels more like a traditional sequel. Last Crusade might be "safe," but it's also as good an action-adventure film as anyone has made in the last 40 years, so safe may not be so bad.
Dial Of De❀stiny’s Twi🔴st Isn’t That Wild A Swing For Indiana Jones
No movie in the series has a grounded third act.