10 / 10 each
The first three Indiana Jones films are the best adventure trilogy ever made.
Nothing else comes close. Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, Temple of Doom in 1984, and The Last Crusade in 1989 form a complete trilogy that arrived before Hollywood started planning trilogies as franchise products. The three films were planned as one good film, then a second film when the first one made money, then a third film when the second one made more money.
Steven Spielberg directed all three. George Lucas produced all three. Harrison Ford starred in all three. It’s one of the great achievements in popular American cinema.
Three movies, three tens, and I don’t have to think hard about any of them.
This is the adventure trilogy I measure every other adventure film against, and almost everything comes up short. Raiders makes me grin from the first step into the jungle, Temple of Doom gets away with things no family film should, and Last Crusade makes me care about a father and son while tanks and zeppelins go by. I’d give up most of the blockbusters made since for any of the three.
Each film gets a 10/10. The trilogy as a whole gets a 10/10. Spielberg made better individual films across his career. Lucas produced more influential films. Ford starred in more iconic roles. None of those individual achievements match what the three men accomplished together with this material. The trilogy is the canonical example of how to make adventure cinema that’s fun without being stupid, exciting without being incoherent, and emotionally engaged without being sentimental.
Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)
Raiders is the first and the best. Lawrence Kasdan wrote the screenplay from a story by Lucas and Philip Kaufman. Kaufman contributed the central idea that the Nazis would be searching for the Ark of the Covenant. Lucas contributed the wider structure of an archaeologist-adventurer modeled on 1930s serial heroes. Kasdan brought the structural discipline and the dialogue. The combination produced an adventure screenplay that ranks among the best-written in American cinema.
Spielberg directed with the energy of a young filmmaker still working out what he was capable of. He was thirty-five years old. He’d directed Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He hadn’t yet directed E.T. or Schindler’s List. Raiders is the film where Spielberg showed that he could deliver pure entertainment without sacrificing craft. The boulder. The truck chase. The opening of the Ark. The melting Nazis. Each set piece is constructed with patience that most action filmmakers don’t bother to attempt.
Spielberg sets up his payoffs. The payoffs land because the setups have been built carefully.
Harrison Ford had been Han Solo and Bob Falfa in American Graffiti, and he’d be Deckard the following year in Blade Runner.
Raiders is the film that showed he could carry a picture as the leading man, and I’d put the performance near the top of 1980s leading-man work. Ford plays Indy as a competent professional who’s constantly in over his head. He knows ancient languages and how to date an Egyptian inscription, and he still gets punched in the face over and over.
The combination of expertise and physical vulnerability makes Indy work where copies of Indy haven’t worked.
Karen Allen plays Marion Ravenwood as the only Indy love interest who reads as Indy’s actual equal instead of as decorative damsel.
Marion runs a bar in Nepal. Marion has a complicated history with Indy that he hasn’t adequately apologized for. Marion drinks Sherpas under the table. Marion fights Nazis with frying pans. The character is fully formed within her first scene and remains fully formed throughout the runtime. Allen’s performance is the foundation the trilogy’s romance attempts to build on.
Kate Capshaw in Temple of Doom and Alison Doody in Last Crusade are good. Neither matches Allen.
Paul Freeman plays Belloq, the rival French archaeologist working for the Nazis. The performance is one of the great supporting villain performances in adventure cinema. Belloq is Indy’s mirror. Belloq has the same education, the same skills, and the same passion for ancient artifacts. The difference is that Belloq will work for whoever pays him while Indy maintains professional ethics.
Freeman plays Belloq with intellectual respect that the character feels for Indy. The villain isn’t stupid or evil for its own sake.
Belloq is the villain I’d put at the top of the whole series. He’s a competing professional who made different ethical choices, and that scares me more than any cackling bad guy could, because I can see Indy one bad paycheck away from becoming him. Freeman never begs me to hate him, and I like the film more for it.
For Writers
The opening sequence of Raiders is the definitive lesson in establishing a character through action instead of through dialogue. The audience meets Indy in the South American jungle. Indy handles booby traps. Indy retrieves an idol. Indy is betrayed. Indy escapes a boulder. Belloq robs Indy. The whole sequence runs approximately fifteen minutes and contains almost no dialogue beyond functional commands. The audience learns that Indy is competent, expert, principled, physical, lucky, and unlucky in roughly equal measure.
The opening sets up everything the rest of the film and the rest of the trilogy will deploy.
The lesson for writers is that the first scene with a protagonist should establish the protagonist completely. The reader should leave the first scene knowing who the character is, what the character is capable of, and what the character is up against. Kasdan and Spielberg accomplish this in fifteen minutes of nearly silent action. Lesser writers spend three chapters on the same setup and accomplish less.
Temple Of Doom (1984)
Temple of Doom is the darkest of the trilogy and the most divisive. The film is a prequel set in 1935, one year before Raiders. Lucas chose to make the second film darker because he wanted the trilogy to follow the structural pattern of The Empire Strikes Back.
Empire had been the darker middle film of the original Star Wars trilogy. Temple was the equivalent for Indy. The decision was controversial at the time and remains controversial now. Audiences who wanted more Raiders received something different.
Audiences who accepted the difference often consider Temple their favorite of the three.
Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz wrote the screenplay. They were old Lucas associates from American Graffiti. The screenplay embraces horror imagery in ways Raiders had only suggested. The Thuggee cult ceremony in the underground temple. The heart-removal sequence. The child slavery in the mines. The cult worshipper plunging into the lava pit. The material is disturbing. The film generated enough parental complaints that the Motion Picture Association of America created the PG-13 rating partly in response to the controversy.
Gremlins, released the same summer and produced by Spielberg, also contributed to the rating change.
Kate Capshaw plays Willie Scott as a Shanghai nightclub singer who gets dragged into the adventure against her will.
The film deliberately pitches the character as the opposite of Marion. Where Marion was tough and competent, Willie is glamorous and helpless. Capshaw plays the character with full commitment to the screaming-blonde-in-distress tone. Some viewers find this irritating. The character is supposed to be irritating. Willie is the character Indy didn’t want to be stuck with. The audience is meant to experience Willie’s reactions through Indy’s frustration.
Capshaw later married Spielberg. It gives the casting choice an additional context that contemporary audiences read into the film.
Ke Huy Quan plays Short Round in his first acting role. The character is the eleven-year-old orphan Indy has been taking care of in Shanghai. Quan is the unexpected heart of the film. The character is street-smart, loyal, brave, and useful to Indy at multiple points in the action. Quan’s performance ranks among the best child performances in 1980s American cinema. He’d later disappear from acting and return decades later to win the Academy Award for Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Short Round is the heart of Temple for me, and I think Quan is the best thing in the film. He’s loyal, brave and useful, and the movie gets lighter every minute he’s on screen without getting any dumber. That Oscar decades later felt like a debt finally paid.
The minecart chase is one of the great practical-effects action sequences in adventure cinema. The set was built. The carts ran on actual tracks. The drops were practical. The cinematography is fast without becoming incoherent. The audience can follow the spatial logic of the chase the entire time. Modern CGI-heavy action sequences can’t match the physical reality the Temple of Doom minecart chase delivers. Spielberg understood that practical effects produce stronger audience response than digital effects. The trilogy as a whole shows this understanding consistently.
The Last Crusade (1989)
The Last Crusade is the lightest of the trilogy and the most emotionally satisfying. Jeffrey Boam wrote the screenplay from a story by Lucas and Menno Meyjes. The film returns to the Nazi-villain structure of Raiders but adds the central element that makes the third film distinct from the first: Indy’s father. The decision to make the film about the relationship between Indy and Henry Jones Sr. is the structural choice that raises Last Crusade above what a third Indiana Jones film could reasonably have been expected to deliver.
Sean Connery plays Henry Jones Sr. The casting ranks among the great casting decisions in popular American cinema. Lucas wanted Connery because Connery had played James Bond, the character that had directly inspired Lucas and Spielberg’s creation of Indiana Jones.
Casting the original James Bond as Indy’s father created a generational pun about adventure cinema itself. The pun would have worked even if Connery had been wooden in the role. Connery wasn’t wooden. Connery’s supporting work ranks with the best of his late career.
Henry Jones Sr. isn’t a younger version of Indy. Henry is a medieval literature professor who has spent his entire life researching the Grail.
He’s fussy. He’s pedantic. He’s obsessive about his diary. He’s also a competent academic with deep expertise in the material he’s been studying. The character is built as everything Indy might become if Indy lived another thirty years and let academic obsession consume him. The relationship between father and son is the dramatic content of the film.
The father and son scenes are the part of the trilogy I value most. Connery fussing over his diary while Ford tries to get them both out alive is funnier than most comedies and sadder than it has any right to be. That relationship is the reason Last Crusade moves me in a way the other two don’t.
The boat chase in Venice. The tank chase across the desert. The Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword. The Zeppelin sequence. The opening with River Phoenix as young Indy explaining how Indy got every defining trait he carries through the trilogy. Each set piece is built with the same craft Spielberg had brought to Raiders. The film doesn’t feel tired. It feels confident. Spielberg had directed the previous two and had learned exactly what audiences responded to and how to deliver more of it without becoming repetitive.
River Phoenix’s appearance as young Indy is among the best opening sequences in 1980s American cinema. Phoenix was eighteen years old. He hadn’t yet developed the screen persona that My Own Private Idaho would establish two years later. He could have carried major adventure cinema if he’d lived. Phoenix died of a drug overdose in 1993 at twenty-three. The young Indy sequence is a lasting example of what was lost.
For Writers
The Sean Connery casting in Last Crusade shows the principle that casting choices can carry meta-textual content that the script itself never has to articulate. Connery had played James Bond. Bond had inspired Lucas and Spielberg to create Indiana Jones. Casting Connery as Indy’s father turned the relationship into a generational commentary on adventure cinema itself. The script never mentions James Bond or the influence. The casting choice does all the work.
Audiences who knew Connery’s history received an additional layer of meaning the script never had to deliver. The lesson for writers is that casting in adaptations and visual media can transmit information that prose alone can’t. If you’re writing material that may be adapted, think about who might play your characters. The right casting can raise the work in ways the writing alone can’t achieve. The wrong casting can damage the work in ways no rewriting can repair.
The Antagonists
Each trilogy film has a different antagonist construction. Belloq in Raiders is the intellectual rival. Mola Ram in Temple of Doom is the supernatural cult leader. Walter Donovan in Last Crusade is the obsessive American who has joined the Nazis for personal reasons. The three villains show three different categories of adventure antagonist. None of them are reducible to generic evil. Each has a specific motivation that works inside the historical and dramatic context the films establish.
Paul Freeman as Belloq plays competing professionalism. Belloq could be Indy with different ethical choices. The character respects Indy and doesn’t hate him. He simply wants the Ark for himself and is willing to work with Nazis to get it. The motivation is intellectual greed. Freeman plays the greed without melodrama.
Amrish Puri as Mola Ram plays absolute supernatural conviction. The character believes in the Thuggee religious system. He isn’t pretending to be religious to manipulate followers. Mola Ram is operating within a worldview that the film treats as having actual supernatural power. Puri plays the conviction without irony. The character is terrifying because he completely believes what he’s doing.
Julian Glover as Donovan plays obsessive corruption. Donovan is American. Donovan is wealthy. Donovan is educated. Donovan has joined the Nazi pursuit of the Grail because he wants the Grail’s eternal-life properties for himself. The motivation is personal instead of political. Donovan isn’t pursuing fascist ideology. Donovan is pursuing personal immortality and is willing to use Nazi resources to do it. Glover plays the character with the polished respectability that makes the corruption more disturbing.
The Score
John Williams composed all three scores. The Raiders March is among the most recognizable musical themes in American cinema. The theme has become shorthand for adventure itself. Williams returns to the theme across all three films, varying it for different emotional contexts. The theme is heroic in Raiders, tense in Temple of Doom, and nostalgic in Last Crusade. The same musical material serves different dramatic functions depending on the orchestration and the tempo.
Williams also composed distinct supplementary themes for each film. Marion’s theme in Raiders. The dark Thuggee chant material in Temple of Doom. Sean Connery’s elegant Grail theme in Last Crusade.
The supplementary themes give each film its own musical identity while the recurring Raiders March keeps the trilogy connected. The scoring approach is the model for how franchise musical identity should work. Most modern franchises don’t follow the model. They should.
The Cinematography
Douglas Slocombe shot all three films. He was a British cinematographer who had been working since the 1940s. Slocombe was sixty-eight years old when he shot Raiders and seventy-six when he shot Last Crusade. The trilogy was the late-career achievement of a major cinematographer. His visual style is consistent across all three films. The desert sequences are gold and orange. The temple sequences are deep black and red. The library and academic sequences are warm brown and amber. The lighting is dramatic without becoming theatrical.
Slocombe’s approach treats each location as having its own visual identity.
The Map Room in Raiders has different lighting than the Well of Souls. The Pankot Palace in Temple of Doom has different lighting than the Thuggee temple. The boat chase in Venice has different lighting than the desert tank chase. The visual variety supports the geographic range the trilogy travels. The films never look like soundstages despite extensive soundstage use. Slocombe’s lighting produces locations that feel real even when they were entirely constructed.
The Crystal Skull And Dial Of Destiny Problem
Crystal Skull arrived in 2008. The film is set in 1957. Indy is older. The Cold War has replaced the Nazi villains. Cate Blanchett plays a Soviet psychic researcher named Irina Spalko. Shia LaBeouf plays Indy’s previously unknown son Mutt Williams. Karen Allen returns as Marion.
The film attempts to do what Last Crusade did with Sean Connery: introduce a generational relationship that gives the older protagonist new emotional content to work with. The attempt fails.
There are specific reasons Crystal Skull fails. The alien structure violates the trilogy’s established treatment of supernatural material as religious instead of as science fiction. The Ark of the Covenant is religious. The Sankara Stones are religious. The Holy Grail is religious.
The crystal skulls of Akator are extraterrestrial. The shift in genre isn’t earned, and it damages the consistency of the trilogy’s worldbuilding without offering anything heavy in exchange.
The famous refrigerator survival sequence is the moment most viewers identify as the film’s specific failure.
Indy is at a fake Nevada town built for nuclear testing. The nuclear test happens. Indy survives by climbing into a lead-lined refrigerator and being thrown miles through the air without injury. The sequence is stupid. The sequence is stupid in ways the trilogy had carefully avoided being stupid. The previous three films featured implausible action that respected basic physical principles. The refrigerator sequence violates physical principles in ways the audience can’t accept.
The refrigerator is where Crystal Skull lost me, and it never got me back. I’ll give Indy plenty of luck. I won’t give him a lead-lined icebox that turns a nuclear blast into a bumpy ride, and once the film asks me to swallow that, nothing else it shows me carries any weight.
The CGI is also a problem. The prairie dog sequences. The Tarzan vine swinging with monkeys. The waterfall sequences. The CGI in Crystal Skull is uniformly worse than the practical effects the previous three films delivered. Spielberg knew the practical effects were better. Lucas had been campaigning for CGI through the Star Wars prequel trilogy. Crystal Skull is the film where Spielberg let Lucas’s CGI preferences override his own better instincts. The film suffered for the choice.
Dial of Destiny arrived in 2023. James Mangold directed instead of Spielberg. Harrison Ford was eighty years old. The film attempts to give Indy a final adventure that closes the character arc. The attempt fails for different reasons than Crystal Skull failed.
The filmmakers built Dial of Destiny around Helena Shaw, Indy’s goddaughter played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. The film positions the character to take over the franchise. It gives the character more competence than Indy across most of the runtime. It positions Indy as the older mentor figure who has been broken by personal loss and who needs the younger protagonist to save him. The structural choice is the film’s central problem. Audiences came to see Indiana Jones. The film gave them a film about someone replacing Indiana Jones.
The Marion treatment is damaging. Karen Allen returns for approximately two minutes of screen time. The script establishes that Indy and Marion have been separated for years because of the death of their son Mutt off-screen between Crystal Skull and Dial of Destiny. The film tells us about Mutt’s death instead of showing it. It tells us about the separation instead of showing it. The reunion at the ending is brief. The film has effectively erased the Indy-Marion relationship that had been the emotional foundation of the trilogy’s romantic content.
That choice makes me angrier than anything else in the later films. Marion was the best woman Indy ever had on screen, and Dial of Destiny splits them up off-screen and keeps her out of the picture until the final scene to clear room for Helena Shaw. Forty-two years of audience investment got spent on a character nobody asked for.
The film also handles its political content poorly. The Nazis return as villains. Mads Mikkelsen plays Voller, an ex-Nazi scientist hiding in America after Operation Paperclip. The political structure could have generated legitimate dramatic content. The film deploys the structure as backdrop instead of as developed material. The Helena Shaw character delivers contemporary political commentary throughout the runtime. The commentary isn’t essential. The plot doesn’t depend on the commentary. The commentary is decoration painted on top of the action.
The box office performance reflected the audience response. Dial of Destiny lost money. The film was the lowest-grossing in the franchise after Crystal Skull. The reception was generally negative.
The legacy effect on the trilogy is limited because audiences can simply ignore the two additional films and treat the original three as the complete work. Most fans now do exactly this.
Craft Note
Craft Note
The Indiana Jones trilogy is the canonical example of adventure cinema that doesn’t insult the audience. Most adventure films treat the audience as easily distracted children who need constant stimulation. The Indy films treat the audience as adults who can follow plot, recognize character motivation, and appreciate craft. The opening sequence of Raiders doesn’t explain itself. The audience figures out what’s happening through observation. The Belloq character is a competent rival making different ethical choices.
The Sean Connery casting carries meta-textual content the script never has to deliver.
The trilogy takes the supernatural elements seriously instead of treating them as background spectacle. It constructs the action sequences with patience that lets the audience follow spatial logic. The dialogue is sharp instead of expository. The character relationships build across the three films without requiring constant reinforcement. The trilogy shows that mass-market entertainment doesn’t have to be stupid.
The crystal skull and the dial of destiny show what happens when people treat the same property after forgetting the principles the original trilogy was built on.
The lesson for writers is that respecting your audience is a craft skill. The instinct to dumb down material, explain too much, or shovel in commentary the plot doesn’t require is the instinct that damages otherwise viable productions. Resist the instinct. The audience is smarter than the bad writers think.
Is The Indiana Jones Trilogy as good as people say?
The trilogy is a 10/10 across all three films. Raiders of the Lost Ark is the best of the three by a small margin because it had to invent everything the other two films would build on. Temple of Doom is the darkest and the most divisive but contains some of the trilogy’s best individual sequences. The Last Crusade is the most emotionally satisfying and the most accessible. All three are essential viewing. All three reward repeat watching. All three have aged with grace that most 1980s blockbusters haven’t managed.
The trilogy is the model of how adventure cinema should be made. Practical effects. Strong screenplays. Real locations. Major composer. Major cinematographer. Director and producer who respect the audience. Lead actor who carries leading-man weight. Supporting cast that raises the material.
Antagonists who are competent instead of disposable. Set pieces that pay off setups instead of existing for their own sake.
I give Crystal Skull a 4/10. Stupid in specific ways the trilogy had avoided being stupid. Watch it once. Forget it. Dial of Destiny is a 3/10. Built around the wrong protagonist. Damaged the Indy-Marion relationship that had been the trilogy’s emotional foundation. Most fans now treat the trilogy as the complete work and ignore both later films. The approach is reasonable. The trilogy ends with Indy riding off into the sunset with his father, Marcus Brody, and Sallah. That’s the correct ending for the character.
That ending is the reason the trilogy gets a 10 from me and the reason I don’t count what came after. Indy rides off with his father, Brody and Sallah, and there’s nothing I’d change in the three films that got him there. Raiders has the edge for inventing the franchise, but all three deserve the perfect score without a second’s hesitation from me.
