I’ve watched a lot of movies over the years, but few lift my spirits quite like Steven Spielberg’s 1989 flick Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
No matter how many times I’ve seen it, I can throw it on and instantly feel better. It’s one of those rare films that seems to hit all the right notes — action, humour and heart — and does it all with effortless charm.
My love for Indy goes way back. As a kid, I dressed up as him for Halloween more times than I can count. I had the LEGO sets scattered across my room and spent hundreds of hours replaying the LEGO Indiana Jones video game. The Last Crusade missions were always my favourites, especially the bonus mission featuring a young Indy.
Even in plastic-brick form, it perfectly captured the adventure and discovery that hooked me from the start.
Indiana Jones has always been cinema’s ultimate good guy. He’s smart, tough, a little bit reckless, endlessly quotable and always willing to risk life and limb to stop dangerous forces from acquiring priceless artifacts. And it doesn’t hurt that he’s played by Harrison Ford at the height of his movie-star prowess.
That opening prologue still hits the same way. A teenaged Indy, played by River Phoenix, stumbles upon a group of grave robbers in the Utah desert as they dig up a priceless artifact.
In just a few minutes, we see him begin the rest of his life and become the hero we know, earning his whip, hat, chin scar and fear of snakes and uttering, for the first time, “It belongs in a museum!”
It’s a great moment, and exudes that sense of wanting to preserve and protect rather than exploit.
It’s pure cinematic joy seeing how he came to be. I’ve always enjoyed getting that look into his life before adventure was such a common occurrence.
From there, the movie unfolds into a globe-trotting race against the Nazis to find the Holy Grail. There are so many classic sequences: the eerie catacombs beneath Venice, the escape from the Nazi castle with its revolving fireplace and the tank chase through the desert.
Every time I watch, I’m still on the edge of my seat — even though I know every scene by heart.
As thrilling as the action is, it’s the father-son dynamic that gives the film its weight. Sean Connery’s Dr. Henry Jones Sr. is blunt, brilliant and hilariously unimpressed by his son’s heroics. I love the way he continues to call Indy “Junior,” much to his chagrin, throughout the film’s entirety.
Their chemistry shines throughout, even in more awkward moments, like when they realize they’ve both been involved with the same woman, Dr. Elsa Schneider (Alison Doody), the femme fatale archaeologist who turns out to be a Nazi spy.
After much running from and chasing after the Nazis in their quest, there’s the film’s triumphant final act.
Indy endures numerous life-threatening booby traps to acquire the Cup of Christ from an ancient temple.
When Elsa seizes the Grail and turns to leave, the temple begins to collapse. She slips and the Grail tumbles onto a ledge in the newly opened ravine. Desperate, she reaches for it, ignoring Indy’s outstretched hand. He clings to her, but her leather glove slides free and she plunges to her death.
As the ground crumbles beneath him, Indy dangles over the same chasm, his fingertips just inches from the Grail. “I can almost reach it, Dad,” he gasps.
His father, whose lifelong obsession with the Grail has driven their quest, clutches his son’s arm and softly pleads, “Indiana… let it go.”
The rare use of his preferred name breaks Indy’s trance. He releases the Grail at last and reaches up, grasping his father’s hand as he’s pulled to safety.
The classic action film ends on something so simple and profound: the idea that some things, like connection and family, matter more than the prize.
Upon their temple escape, the heroes ride off through the desert on horseback as the blazing sun sets in front of them, capping off Indy’s most remarkable adventure in the perfect way.
Whenever I get to rewatch The Last Crusade, I’m transported back to being the astonished kid I was when I first watched it.
