| Allison Vincent |
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade plays at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, July 13th, through Tuesday, July 15th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
When we first started dating, my wife worked at a puzzle room in St. Paul, MN. One of the many perks of such a venture is that I got to play-test rooms occasionally. One such room was heavily influenced by a certain wizarding world created by She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. I was invited to fill out a group of very enthusiastic puzzle-solving pals. These were the type of folks who attend trivia religiously in homemade T-shirts. They were ferociously competitive and made it clear that they were NOT interested in making space for the weird loner gazing lovingly at the game master. As soon as the intro video cut out and our time began, the groupmates bolted for all corners of the room like rats in an actual maze, racing each other to see who could solve the most puzzles as though their lives depended on it.
I stood, dumbly, surveying the scene and then began looking around the room admiring the craftsmanship of the props, the care that went into the design of the room, and then noticed a chessboard that was missing a bishop. I scanned the room for it, quietly, and found him hiding behind goblin figurines on a bookcase. As I returned him to the board, the magnetized bottom jumped from my fingers into place and a small door on the side of a platform popped open. I stooped down to peek inside and pulled out an ornate pewter dragon statuette. The feeling of discovery, of solving the puzzle, and the delight of the reveal was incredibly rewarding, and it made me think of one of my very favorite characters: Indiana Jones. As the warm nostalgia washed over me, a grown ass woman ripped the statuette from my hand and screamed to her party, “I have the other dragon!” Nostalgia melted into rage. Blind, boiling rage. I have to imagine this is why Indiana Jones works primarily alone.
As I curled up to re-watch Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for this essay, I listened with glee to Indy reciting to his class, “So forget any ideas you have about lost cities, exotic travel, and digging up the world. We do not follow maps to buried treasure and X never ever marks the spot.” The film then goes on to run us through an action-packed archeological romp where every single item on that list is checked. It is an incredibly satisfying movie in every way imaginable. The prologue is essentially winking at the audience as it provides simple answers to almost all of our questions about Indy’s origin in a single action sequence. We even get to find out where the “Indiana” moniker comes from at the end, and the magic of practical effects throughout the movie make the puzzles and movie magic all the more absorbing. How effective is the baking soda on Henry’s gunshot wound? CGI and AI can have a seat.
As a young bookworm intrigued by history, I was enamored with the idea that smart people, academics even, could be adventure heroes too. The film takes the aesthetic of dark academia and gives it the lion’s heart of an action hero. And, based on the lasting popularity of those films (we’re ignoring those outside the original three for personal reasons), I can see I’m not alone. Many of my fellow nerds have dreamt of solving puzzles, traveling the world, hanging off biplanes, sifting through sand for historic relics, and donning a weathered brown fedora and bomber jacket after seeing these movies. But the potency of the story is what keeps me returning to this installment more than the others.
The movie is actually about a lot—fathers and sons, obsession, faith, power, and integrity. For my young mind—I probably saw the trilogy when I was six or seven– the film itself became a journey riddled with moral lessons that I do try to carry through life. My favorite of these lessons is the “pen is mightier than the sword.” Indy defeating a full on war tank with a rock, Henry toppling the Nazi trying to strangle him with pen ink, and Henry downing a fighter plane using an umbrella and seagulls (RIP the seagulls) all go to show that SMART, BOOK READING PEOPLE HAVE THE CAPABILITY TO DEFEAT DANGEROUS, HEAVILY ARMED, POWER HUNGRY MORONS. Ah, fiction.
The blend of comedy, action, and heart in this story is phenomenal. There is action galore in Last Crusade featuring chases on foot, motorcycle, boat, plane, horse, and train. Spielberg shows us once again how he is one of the true masters, not just of action sequences, but of beats. The camera is often setting up visual bits for the audience and the time taken to show us reactions throughout the film is well worth the longer two-hour and seven-minute run time.
Although Last Crusade is a fantastic action film, the beating heart of the father/son story is what makes it a classic. As Spielberg and Lucas developed the storyline and script, Tom Stoppard was called in to write most of the dialogue between Jr. and Sr. for the final script. The job was originally Chris Columbus’s, but he was let go because he was too intimidated to change any of the ideas Lucas and Spielberg dictated and make it his own. Stoppard, known for his witty, highly intelligent repartee between characters in his plays like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and The Real Inspector Hound encapsulated the distance between Indy and Dad without unpacking too much backstory or emotional baggage.
The big payoff to the emotional journey comes when Indy actually survives the trials and procures the Grail. Because Indy’s intentions are pure and he seeks the Grail not for himself but to save his father’s life, he is able to solve one of history’s ultimate puzzles. His reward is not the Grail and eternal life, but his somewhat estranged, curmudgeonly dad saying his preferred name to save him from self-destruction by obsession: “Indiana, Indiana, let it go.” Indy is finally seen as an individual by his father and that is enough to make anybody who has a parent cry, but it does have an extra layer of potency in the times we’re living in now.
SPEAKING OF, Nazis, we hate those guys, right? How satisfying is it to watch Harrison Ford dole out TBIs to some of history’s worst across Europe and the Middle East?
Ugh, *chef’s kiss.* Obviously the John Williams soundtrack kicks all the ass, as is tradition, but the actual sound design by Ben Burtt is metal AF. Every connection of Indy’s fist to a Nazi’s face shook the very limits of my sound bar’s bass on this re-watch and I was living for it. Do you hear me, dear reader?
Obviously Spielberg shares the same morbid fascination with WWII and the Nazi rise to power that many folks do, including myself. As a Jewish director, he’s made his mark on cinema history with one of the greatest and most devastating movies ever made, Schindler’s List, and on television, as co-creator of Band of Brothers. In that vein, one of the most chilling scenes in the film is when Indy infiltrates the Nazi rally in Berlin. Watching people gleefully chuck books onto an enormous fire and saluting a violent dictator felt… topical. During the filming of that scene, Spielberg asked any actor giving the Nazi salute to cross their fingers behind their backs as they did it.
Despite the serious existential threat the Nazis pose throughout the film, in the Jones franchise, and especially in Last Crusade, Spielberg takes a card out of Mel Brook’s book and makes Nazis the expendable cartoon villains they were born to be. The Captain oozes evil while the lowest-ranking soldiers are essentially crash test dummies wearing jackboots. Spielberg’s stoogification of the brownshirts is so successful that I actively cheered when Indy shoots through three Nazis on top of a tank.
AND HOW SATISFYING IS THE GILDED CUP SCENE?
What an absolute banger of a line. SO SATISFYING. My kingdom for a few “He chose poorly” moments in the near future for the parade of Nazis currently fucking around and desperately needing to find out, dear reader.
As Indy and Henry Sr. teach us, in the quest for knowledge it is the journey, not the prize, that matters. Our current culture of instant gratification and demonizing of education, fact, and science has pulled us astray from this simple, but profound truth. This lesson is what gave me the strength to not Indiana Jones punch this grown ass stranger waving my pewter dragon statuette in a St. Paul escape room. That, and, she wasn’t a Nazi. I’m guessing.
She might get the glory of holding the statue, but I had the pleasure, experience, and satisfaction of figuring out how to find it. That is why The Last Crusade remains not only my favorite Indiana Jones movie, but one of my favorites period.
Edited by Olga Tcehpikova-Treon