Over the course of the past two days, I have watched all three Indiana Jones movies (pretending the fourth one does not exist). I had not seem them since I was pretty young, so I did not have to much memory of the specifics that occurred in the movies, as it turns out I had actually kind of melded them all into one movie. I just thought everything happened in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but this clearly was not true. I went into it thinking that Raiders was also my favorite of the three, mainly because I recalled loving the opening scene with the ball rolling down after him, but it turns out that only lasts like five minutes, and is inconsequential to the rest of the movie. If I were to rank them after this rewatch I would have to put them as follows: The Last Crusade, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Temple of Doom. Overall though, they are very close to being ranked the same.
They have remarkably similar story arcs and about the same level of intrigue. I feel like the Last Crusade has the best plot throughout and has more of a mystery and creates more intrigue. It reminds of a more adventurous and less academic Da Vinci Code. If you were to compare Robert Langdon to Indiana Jones, they are both professors, and they are both drawn into worldwide mysteries/ conspiracies that are clearly above and beyond any responsibility a professor would be called upon to do, and I do get it, it is a fictional movie. If being a professor involved being like Langdon and Jones, more people would probably try to take that route. Even though as kid I enjoyed the opening of the Raiders as a child, I ended up liking the opening of the Last Crusade more this time around for two reasons. First, it is being filmed in Arches National Park, which I immediately noticed before they even got to Double Arch. To me Arches is the best national park, and it enjoyable to see it in the 80s before it was turned into the more developed park it is now with roads and paths covering the land (Go read Desert Solitaire if you want more of that). The other reason it is the best opening is due to the fact that it actually gives some back story into who Indiana Jones is, and what he stands for as a person, supposedly, and why he is afraid of snakes.
There is one big problem I have with Indiana Jones; I think he is a loser and a hypocrite. When they introduce him at the beginning of the third movie and give the audience the background on him, his main goal is to get the relic from the looters so that he can give it to a museum so that others can see it and enjoy it. He does not want to the looters to be able to take it and be able to gain their own selfish profit, but once he is grown up in all three movies his main goal is to get profit from these ventures. Every time he is one of his missions, or being recruited to go onto another mission, he seems to care way more about retrieving the objects so that he can become rich than actually caring if it allows people to see it at a museum. His adventures are more about his own personal glory than they are about educating the public on these varying relics that he is trying to find. He also ends up destroying many historical sites by trying to retrieve these various relics, so I do not think he really cares about the public knowledge and is any better than the people he is trying to prevent from the same riches.
Now when it comes to him being a loser, in the movies, he only successfully retrieves one of the relics, and that is the golden cross in the third movie, and that is on his second try. He must steal it off a boat from the guy that he tried to steal it from when he was a teenager. The rest of his attempts result in failure. In Raiders, he steals the idol form the temple and makes it out of the temple and gets chased out by a giant stone, and he ends up doing all the work just to have his rival take it from him once he exits. Continuing with Raiders, Indie is the one that finds the Ark of the Covenant only to have it immediately taken from him. Then the Nazis open it and have their faces melted off and explode, so he regains control only to have the U.S government take it from him with no reward.
Then in Temple of Doom, the opening sequence he is trying to retrieve a giant diamond which ends up getting mixed up with ice and him having to make a grand escape with nothing of value. He ends up crash landing in India and getting pushed into another mission to recover a stolen stone that brings good crops to the village he crashed. Through the course of retrieving the stone, he loses two that he could have kept and brought back and has to give back the one that he saved to the village.
Finally in the Last Crusade, he is going after the Holy Grail, and he successfully finds it, only to learn that it is not allowed to be taken out of the temple which turned out to be Petra in Jordan. Once he finds the grail, the Nazis, again, immediately steal the grail from him and try to take the it out of the temple leading to the destruction of the temple and losing the grail forever. He could have taken one of the fake grails and brough it back to the U.S and had his Dad and friend back him up saying that it was the Holy Grail, then he could have had his riches and his fame, and have the grail in a museum, but instead he just had it all destroyed. He ended up destroying and losing more of history than retrieving anything.
Also one would think that sense this guy has gone on all of these adventures and is world renown he would have the nice corner office at the university, but this is not true. In the third movie, they finally reveal his office and he is stationed in a utility closet with like a water heater, it is an absolute terrible place to be. He does seem to be successful in engaging his students during his lectures though, and that is something to be celebrated, even though in the lecture he tries to explain how boring archeology is.
Overall the movies hold up well enough, the fight scenes are absolutely terrible though. They do use a similar sound effects to Star Wars, and some of the music score is also very similar to Star Wars, so at the end of the day, if you are choosing between watching the original Star Wars Trilogy or the Indiana Jones Trilogy, I would definitely choose Star Wars, it just holds up so much better.
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