Fortune and Glory: All 5 Indiana Jones Adventures, Ranked
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For anyone who knows me, this article is inevitable.
Since the beginning of the Cinemantics project about sixteen months ago, I’ve teased out and professed my love for the Indiana Jones franchise. The brain child of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, these movies have had a seminal impact on my life and my love of the art form. You can read more about that below.
And while the franchise does not carry the same luster today as other products of the late seventies and eighties, the impact the films have had on popular culture reverberate far beyond name recognition. Box office receipts total $2.4 billion, fifteen Oscar nominations, and honors from the National Film Registry and American Film Institute. In 2007, Harrison Ford’s performance in Raiders of the Lost Ark was ranked as the second greatest movie hero of all time by the AFI.
Four decades of imitators, rip-offs, and wannabe successors in adventure genre (from Tomb Raider to The Librarian television movies to the video game franchise Uncharted) reach for the efficiency and pure entertainment of the Spielberg-Lucas spectacles. But none reach it.
So, in the name of “content, content, content,” it was only a matter of time until I took a few hundred words to rank the Indy movies. Are the people clamoring for this? Probably not. Do I care? Definitely not.
5. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)
This movie haunts me. You see, Dial of Destiny is a cinematic specter. It exists but doesn’t. It has the shape of the previous thing, of the thing we love and remember, but is itself nearly translucent. We see through the $300 million budget and bloated runtime. We see through the unnecessary characters. We see through the shoddy effects. Like the ghosts of lore, seeing the shape of the past makes us languish for what we lost. Watching the madcap horror of Temple of Doom on the big screen this month made this point painfully clear.
As an audience, we damn the passing of time and curse the changes it wrought on the heroes once thought to be immortal. But it’s not just the loss of previous Indy adventure’s substance that we mourn, but an entire era of filmmaking.
As the world looks up to the stars and wonders in awe of what the future will bring, Jones is stuck in the dirt with the relics of the past he’s spent his life studying. Like its titular character, Dial of Destiny wants to be in the tradition of tactile Hollywood. Yet it looks up to the digital era in envy, yearning to be in the firmament again. The film teaches that it’s okay to be content with the world moving on and find peace in our lives. The irony is that the filmmakers forgot that lesson. In making Dial, first-time Indy director James Mangold overcompensated. They nobly tried to produce a film that wanted to make you pine for the days of yore but leaned too heavily on the digital tools that swept away Old Hollywood in the first place. They used the weapons of destruction as a means of resurrection. The result? A bittersweet mirage we see straight through. It’s a decent adventure, a thoughtful coda, an overwrought elegy, and an exhumed corpse.
Now, this doesn’t make Dial a bad movie. It makes it deeply complicated and flawed. The three standout sequences (featuring Tangier, an underwater expedition to a wrecked Roman ship, and the bonkers, time-traveling finale) are in the grand tradition of a classic Indiana Jones adventure. They are so good that it frustrates this audience member to see the rest of the movie not live up to the heights. Others disagree, which is fine. But no matter the many frustrating flaws, Dial has an incredible heart. At its best, this final adventure is a thoughtful coda to Hollywood’s greatest hero. When the movie struggles under the weight of orchestrated digital chaos, Harrison Ford shines bright: gruff and surprisingly soulful. At 80, his dedication to this character shows that not only was this the role he was born to play, but it was the one he loved playing. And, even when we wanted more from the movies, we loved when he played it.
4. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
Divisive when released, Crystal Skull is better than everyone remembers. One only needs to re-watch the twenty minute escape from Russian forces at Area 51 to be reminded of that. It captures the verisimilitude and ingenuity of the original trilogy. It’s fun, focused, and features some great practical stunts.
It also produces one of the standout visual moments of the franchise: of Indiana, older now than in his Nazi fighting prime, looking up at the atomic cloud that hovers over him. Firmly in the atomic age, a man out of step with time. Visually, it elicits more than anything in Dial. While infamously hesitant to return to the fourth adventure, Spielberg feels at home here in the opening minutes of the picture. The image also sets up one particular line of dialogue that I think of often, one that hints at a more provocative and somber film that never was: “We’ve reached the age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.”
Sadly, what could have been the epilogue to Indy’s adventures just becomes another generic romp as the movie charges into the third act, devolving into a CGI slog. If he felt at home in the opening warehouse set piece or the motorcycle chase through academia, then Spielberg is a stranger by the end as he tries to reign in the digital chaos. Writer David Koepp brushes past the provocative questions of age, morality, and the purpose of history in the atomic age to focus on a flying saucers and the “space between spaces.” These thematic oversights help inform the best parts of Dial of Destiny but, ideally, we wouldn’t have needed it.
Crystal Skull was doomed to be divisive. It was the most high-profile legacy sequel in Hollywood at the time. Released the same year as Iron Man and The Dark Knight, seven years before The Force Awakens, and three years after the prequel series ended with Revenge of the Sith, it really marked the end of one era and the beginning of another, setting up the internalized tension that permeates Dial of Destiny. Internet trolls, review bombing, franchise purists were in their infancy and cinematic universes and franchise gluttony were still over the horizon. Over the summer of 2008, while Marvel and Christopher Nolan were praised for upending the system, Spielberg and company were unfairly chastised for playing with the recipe for everyone’s favorite comfort food. And while some of the ingredients were wrong, the recipe still tasted basically the same after all these years.
3. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
Everyone has a rough patch. When confronted with challenges, it is often recommended that one tries therapy of some kind. Temple of Doom offers another remedy. The movie suggests that, instead of therapy, one should channel their anger, rage, and heartbreak into making movies. Who knows, you might just make the darkest blockbuster of all time.
Infamously, both Spielberg and Lucas were going through ugly (and expensive) divorces while development began on the second Indy adventure. Uninterested in bringing back the Nazis as the primary villains, the collaborators made the curious choice to make this a prequel to Raiders instead of a true follow-up. This granted the duo—as well as American Graffiti writers Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz—enormous creative liberty to craft a version of the character that, in many ways, contradicts and grows to become the one we meet in the original. These creative choices and personal anguish collide here in deeply disturbed, surprisingly funny, and exhilarating ways.
The Indiana Jones we meet covets “fortune and glory” over preservation or humanity. In the Bugsby Berkley-inspired opening, Harrison Ford descends down the staircase of Shanghai nightclub in a white tuxedo reminiscent more of James Bond or Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca than the hero we met in 1981. And perhaps Bogart’s Rick is the best comparison to this Indiana Jones: a deeply ambivalent American abroad who comes to realize that he cannot stand idly by.
Technically, the movie is still a wonder to behold. I recently watched a theatrical re-release at my local movie theater, fully opening up the scope and sound of the picture in a way that VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, and digital all failed to capture. While the set pieces of Raiders were revelatory and the emotional impact of Last Crusde is singular, the ingenuity, staging, and pure entertainment of the final thirty minutes are the most impressive in the franchise.
Mind you, this is not a fun movie at times. It’s scary even to this day. The infamous scene where a man’s heart is ripped out of his chest still leaves you unsettled as the chorus of chants and drums crescendos menacingly. As an audience member, this movie can make you feel like you too drank the Blood of Khali. But with one wink to Ke Huy Quan’ Short Round deep in the third act, the movie signals to both him and the audience that the nightmare is over. Now, its time to have some fun: the iconic introduction of the Indiana Jones we know and love, the mine cart chase, the bridge collapse. Alone, it’s a perfect popcorn movie. That makes the fact that its only the third best even more of an indication of the franchise’s success.
2. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
The brilliance of the third Indy adventure is that the fabled Cup of Christ—the Holy Grail—is not the movie’s real MacGuffin. It’s merely a decoy, much like the glistening and bejeweled chalices in the chambers of the last of the Knights Templar.
No, the real MacGuffin is the strained relationship between Indiana Jones and his crotchety professorial father (an iconic turn from Sean Connery). So affecting is their shared arc that it feels feeble to attempt to offer some fresh take never-before encountered. Aside from a few standout moments in Dial of Destiny, no Indy movie is as a moving as this one.
After the breakneck action and madcap horror of Temple of Doom, the set-pieces in Last Crusade feel tame in comparison—and that’s not a bad thing. In fact, it’s admirable. Following the arc of the character over the first two films, Spielberg and company craft a visual language and fighting style that feels like the maturation of what we saw in Raiders. It less about spectacle and more about character. Crafting the fight scenes—including a great opening set-piece featuring River Phoenix— around the comedic sensibilities of its two leading men, the movie gives audiences the chance to understand them as individuals and as an odd-ball pairing both verbally and non-verbally. To top it off, the brilliant dialogue (famously punched up by Tom Stoppard) is reminiscent of a buddy comedy more than a grand adventure tale.
Of all the franchises, Indy remains the most unique in one key aspect: each film is different in tone and theme. Raiders is a classic adventure, Temple of Doom is horror, Last Crusade is a buddy comedy, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is science fiction, and Dial of Destiny is a mortality tale. Leaning into the lightheartedness of the father-son dynamic, Spielberg, Lucas, Ford, and Connery craft a sincere and touching movie. It’s no wonder why it often is in contention for the franchise’s best.
1. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
If you know me, there was only one movie I would ever put at the top of the list.
The cultural and cinematic impact of Raiders of the Lost Ark has set a bar so high that no film—not even its sequels—has lived up to it. As a pure movie, it might just be the best ever made. The highest grossing movie of 1981, this adventure fable earned a remarkable eight Oscar nominations including Best Picture and Best Director. The AFI ranked it as the 66th greatest American movie of all time. In 1999, the National Film Registry announced its preservation in the Library of Congress.
Spielberg’s composition and pacing is at its best here in this tale of a secular, world-weary archeologist (an all-time great Harrison Ford performance, ranked as the second greatest movie hero of all time by the AFI) who must battle Nazis to find the mythic Ark of the Covenant. Each scene is beautifully staged, each performance rich and lived-in, and every action set piece raised the bar even higher for the next five decades of imitators.
Coming shortly after the titanic successes of Jaws and Star Wars, the first of the joint efforts by Hollywood’s wunderkinds represents the perfect blend of 80s-Amblin spectacle and the actor-driven movie moments that recall the Golden Age Hollywood. It embodies the sensibilities of two very different eras to produce a film singular and timeless, feeling as fresh and exciting today as it was forty years ago. To paraphrase Rolling Stone, it's as perfect a piece of pure, uncut entertainment as anyone has produced in the last few decades. It also is incredibly thoughtful, exploring the blurry line between science and religion and the concept of Divine Intervention—all while dragging its titular hero behind a moving truck and evading snake infested catacombs.
This globe-trotting adventure turned pulp entertainment into high art — and the character into a legend. Four decades and four sequels later, Raiders of the Lost Ark still stands at the pinnacle of moviemaking.
Reader, how would you rank the Indiana Jones movies? Let us know in the comments below!
Can’t argue with these rankings! Though imagine the clicks if you’d ranked Raiders second 😂😂
Perfect ranking, no notes.