The Question: Why Indiana Jones and the Last Crusades is one of the greatest movies?

The Answer: The Last Crusade is one of the defining movies of my childhood. It holds a place of honor among such enduring classics as Back to the Future, The Goonies, Clue, Gremlins, Red Dawn, and The Hunt for Red October. There are a couple of key reasons I always think of it as the first among these worthies.

1. The Nazis. The Nazis are the best enemy ever. They’re devious and evil, but they’re smart. It’s always better when the hero defeats a smart foe.

2. It’s a family thing. Sean Connery and Harrison Ford are two of the 20^th century’s great actors. It feels perfectly natural to see them as father and son and to understand the inevitable tension and conflict between them. I suspect that anyone who has been a father or a son can identify easily enough with that bit of the movie.

3. To seek the grail. The quest for the grail is one of our oldest legends. It’s one that’s stuck with us generation after generation for millennia. How can anyone watch Last Crusade and not ponder for a moment what eternal health, eternal youth, and eternal life might be like? The quest for immortality is just about as old as our species and it’s powerful because for all our advances, it remains just out of reach on the other side of the precipice.

4. It holds up. So many movies from childhood are a raging disappointment when you watch them again as an adult. The Last Crusade never disappoints. It’s a morality play about good and evil, about love and loss, and about following your passion and overcoming obstacles.

5. Histo-fiction is fun. The original Indiana Jones trilogy is a throwback to a historical 1930s that never was, but we like to imagine existed. A more innocent time, a time before the world tore itself apart in the last good war, and when the line between good and evil was pretty damned clear and heroes always rode off into the sunset.

Sure, it’s not an epic with the scope of Citizen Kane or Gone With the Wind, but a studio could do a lot worse than looking at The Last Crusade to find out how an action movie should be made. Tomb Raider and National Treasure do their best to emulate this kind of storytelling, but they’re at best pale shadows of the original archeological bad ass.