Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade: Never Say Never Again
Indiana Jones rides off into the sunset?
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the third Indiana Jones film, leans hard into Christianity and Comedy, two great tastes you didn’t know went great together. It’s the funniest of the Indy movies by a mile, full of zingers, one-liners and silliness. The whole thing is the antithesis of Temple of Doom: a family adventure, steeped in sentiment, heartwarming and sunny in the places were its predecessor was creepy and cavernous.
It also contains one of my all-time favorite action sequences, where Indiana Jones saves his father from the belly of a “steel beast.” The tank chase is sublime. Without a whiff of digital effects, this old-fashioned discreet scene just builds and builds to a crescendo, it’s edited to the hilt, and ends with an earned, emotional coda that always brings a tear to my eyes (“I thought I lost you boy!”) If this film had no other merits - and its merits are plentiful - this scene alone would justify the price of admission.
As a frame for all this action, The Last Crusade returns to familiar treasure-hunting ground. Like Raiders, it’s a race against Nazis, and like Raiders the MacGuffin is from Western religion. The film is as New Testament as Raiders of the Lost Ark is Old Testament. The Holy Grail is about healing, not wrath, the final puzzle is about identifying Jesus’s juice glass by understanding the humanness in Christ’s divinity.
This is all dosed with the fantastical. The idea, for example, that Holy Grail is the modest cup of a carpenter is an elegant display about Indy’s historical insight. The idea that drinking from the “false” Grail can cause evil people to suddenly age, wither, and die? That’s wild imagining, on par with any other fantasy story.
It’s something I find particularly fascinating about the Indiana Jones series. The audience, as far as I can tell from an unscientific poll of social media and talking to friends, seems to be in a very public debate about suspension of disbelief. In each of the first three Indiana Jones pictures, elements exist that are beyond the real, otherwise known as fiction. There is an Immortal Knight in The Last Crusade, for God’s sake (literally).
When the next film in the series was released (we’ll discuss that one soon) there were audience members who decried the unrealistic escapes and aliens as being a bridge too far. Even though, frankly, there’s nothing more objectively realistic about alien ancestors in Peru than a knight that has been kept alive in a cave by a cup for centuries. Many audience members are steeped in a culture that treats Christian-inflected lore with the aura of the plausible. We don’t treat 1950s pulp novels about UFOs with the same reverence. Should we make those distinctions? Perhaps, as a wise man once said, it’s not what you believe, it’s how hard you believe it.
The movie is more than its MacGuffin: it’s also a father-son story featuring two of the biggest names in Hollywood history. Sean Connery’s casting as Henry Jones Sr. is inspired for the obvious reasons - he’s one of the few people on the planet that can match Harrison Ford’s star power - and for metatextual reasons - Indiana Jones is a sort of American James Bond. Sean Connery is, to many people, the one true and original Bond on film.
Notably, Connery appeared as James Bond in 1983’s Never Say Never Again. That movie was released when Roger Moore was well into his tenure as Bond. The title of the film was a reference to Connery once saying he would never again appear in the role. “Never Say Never Again,” is a cheeky way of saying “I never should have told you I was done, because I’m back.”
Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade has something in common with that sentiment. It plays like the last word on the subject of Indiana Jones. We learn about his father, what motivates him, and we even see River Phoenix as young Indy summing up almost every aspect of the character’s hallmarks, from his hat to his whip to hating snakes to his scar, in one madcap train chase that plays like a tribute to Buster Keaton. (It’s similar to how Solo provides us with where Han gets his name, his gun, his sidekick and his ship in one film, but in about ten minutes of actual screen time.) And yes, River Phoenix was clearly the heir apparent to the role, making his loss all the more poignant. We learn Indiana Jones’s real name and get an inside joke about where our main character’s name comes from (“We named the dog Indiana!”) The word last is right there in the title. Finally, it ends with Indiana Jones, his father, Marcus Brody, and Sallah riding off into the sunset.
It took Spielberg and Lucas almost twenty years to revisit the character, longer than it took for Lucas to return to Star Wars after Return of the Jedi. It seems obvious that this was meant to be the end of the character, and there were no plans in place for another chapter.
It’s perhaps a truism that what you promise you won’t deliver in television and film. There are so many example of stories that seem to have come to a clear end, only to have chapters added: The Matrix, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings. There’s also the reverse, unfortunately. Stories that assume there’s more to come, and leave a lot of unanswered questions, only to be left in permanent limbo. The new Willow Disney+ series ended with a promise of Volumes more, only to be canceled and basically deleted (fuck this trend, by the way). The gorgeous Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance was clearly setting up more when it ended abruptly.
Which is all to say, never say never again. One never knows what the future holds. By 2008, the old gang was brought back together by the fans and for the fans with a movie that would almost inevitably divide fans. The fourth film treats Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as an essential text, calling back to Indiana’s relationship with his father as Henry Jones Jr. learns he is a father himself.
Tomorrow we’ll dig into the oft-debated fourth Indiana Jones film, and find out what happens beyond the horizon of the setting sun. A whole historical era awaits!