Indiana Jones

Okay, so this will have to be concise. We are talking here about four films, two of which are among my very favourite of all time and all of which warrant considered and detailed analysis. Having said that, no-one is going to read a 3,000-word treatise on the man with the hat, so let's get straight to it:-
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
We meet Indiana Jones, college professor, archaeologist, finder of rare antiquities and peerless fedora-wearer. He is in Latin America, negotiating perilous booby traps, hunting a gold statuette and trying to avoid poison-dart shooting natives. He makes it out alive, but only just. Back in the US, he is approached with a mission to the middle east to find the Well of Souls, rumoured to be a possible resting place for the Lost Ark, the Ark of the Covenant in which Moses laid the original 10 Commandments, etched in stone by the finger of God himself.
What follows is a film of breath-taking pace, action and adventure. It is easy to forget that Steven Spielberg was still very much in his early years here and all that Harrison Ford really had under his belt was Star Wars. The two combined effortlessly, Ford playing weary, grumpy, heroic and fearless, Spielberg driving the action forward at a searing, but entirely comprehensible pace. We have feisty females, duplicitous servants, Nazis, truck chases and one of the most iconic closing shots since Rosebud was thrown into a furnace.
It is genuinely difficult to fault this film in any way. The cast, including Karen Allen, Denholm Elliot, John Rhys-Davies and a very young Alfred Molina are all spot on, the script is crackling, the special effects, stunts and booby traps are thrilling and on top of all of that, it is the sort of film you could watch every day for a month and not grow tired of. Watch it (again) now.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
This is, so to speak, "the dark one". Scenes of child slavery and sacrifice, along with removing one man's heart while he is still alive pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable within the certificating system at that time, leading to the PG-13 category being created in the US (it would take five more years for the UK to launch its own "12" certificate).
As for the film itself, it is in fact a prequel, set a year before the events of the first film. If the first film seemed fast-paced, this set down a new marker. We initially find Jones at Club Obi-Wan (hoho) in Shanghai, trying to obtain some sort of Maguffin from the Chinese. He winds up being poisoned, fights to get the antidote, escapes with a dancer to the airport, gets on a plane from which they then have to eject and finds himself in a remote village in India. There he agrees to help the villagers try to retrieve their children from a nearby temple, where they have been taken by the Thugee cult as slave-labour in the caves beneath the titular temple.
Jones and the dancer (Spielberg's then wife Kate Capshaw) encounter all manner of booby traps (what else?) at the temple, along with horrific human sacrifice practices and highly unpleasant dining habits (live snakes and jellied monkey brains anyone?), before eventually an escape plan is hatched and attempted.
Many dislike this entry in the franchise, finding it too dark after the relatively light and breezy tone of the first film. Certainly it is a darker film and deliberately so, but it has many set pieces that represent realisations of fundamental staples of the genre (mining cart chase = rollercoaster ride, rope bridge finale = literal cliffhanger) and the relentless pace is hugely enjoyable. It is by no means as good as Raiders, but a film need not scale those heights in order to be excellent in its own right. It's not one for younger children by any stretch of the imagination and suffers by comparison to the franchise entries either side of it but is still well worth a watch.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
Putting the word "last" in the title always made this feel like it was closing the book on Indiana Jones and the more time that went past, the more that seemed destined to be the case. In the end, as we now know, Crystal Skull was finally made (more on that below) but until then, we had a trilogy that pretty much matched Star Wars stroke for stroke, at least tonally. After the crowd-pleasing action adventure of the first film, we had the darker second entry, before lightening up again for the "final" part.
Last Crusade was in fact the first of the films that I saw, at the cinema with my brother and some of our friends. I absolutely loved it and still do. The film opens with Jones as a teenager, getting caught up with some gentlemen who are trying to steal a relic that belongs in a museum. We discover how his fear of snakes began, where that scar on his chin came from and how the whip, jacket and hat all became part of his ensemble. We then leap forward to the quest - locating the Holy Grail, the cup from which Jesus and his disciples drank at the Last Supper and into which his blood ran when he was crucified. Jones finds that his father initially set off on the quest but had disappeared without a trace.
As with Raiders, this is a globe-trotting adventure, starting in the US and taking in Venice, Berlin and Alexandria, as Jones and those fiendish Nazis close in on the final resting place of the cup and its ancient guardians. The booby traps don't quite measure up to the opening sequence of Raiders but they are fiendishly inventive none the less and loaded with subtext in terms of how Jones must overcome his fears and achieve victory. We even get a death scene to rival the face-melting from the climax of Raiders!
Sean Connery was inspired casting as Jones Snr, with Lucas and Spielberg having originally conceived of Indiana Jones as being their stab at James Bond-style action/adventure. As always, the pacing is perfect, the script zings again and we even get the heroes literally riding off into the sunset as the curtain drops. Perfect.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Having loved Indiana Jones for close on two decades, I faced this latest entry with some trepidation. I didn't like the sound of the title and the plot/concept/mcguffin sounded a little too "sci-fi" for what is essentially a series revolving around ancient artefacts. But then, I reasoned, this is Spielberg. He is on a roll. His last dozen or so films had been stone-cold classics and he wouldn't sign on to a mediocre, or half-baked project.
Hmm. I still don't know what to think. For the first 95 minutes I was grinning like a Cheshire cat, enjoying ace stunts, ridiculous fist fights, car chases and Jones, back in his hat and reflecting on his declining strength. "This won't be easy", says Ray Winstone's Mac, "not as easy as it used to be," replies Jones. Ford is clearly so comfortable in Jones' skin, picking up where he left off without any apparent shift in performance - more than any other character he has played, this seems to be the one that fits him like a well-tailored suit. The flying fridge sequence was, of course, patently ridiculous, but this was a film, or at least a franchise that already had so much goodwill from me built in, it was going to take great deal to spoil it for me.
But they managed it. In the space of an asonishingly mis-judged final 10 minutes, all of that goodwill was undone as the film lurched off into Area 51-style flying saucers and alien visiters. John Hurt wittering about "the space between space" and "inter-dimensional beings" left my jaw on the floor and nothing Jones said about them being intergalactic archaeologists was going to help matters.
It was so frustrating. 95% of the film was fantastic. The initial raid on the warehouse wherein the Ark was stored in Raiders, the truck chase in the Amazonian forest, the motorbike chase, even the punchup with the evil Russkies (no Nazis no more) were all thoroughly worthy entries in a franchise that pretty much wrote the book on exciting action-adventure set pieces, but then that was all trashed by a betrayal of the fundamental ethos of the films. It just is not a sci-fi franchise and I cannot believe that of all the ideas being bounced around after Last Crusade, this was the only one deemed suitable. I blame George Lucas personally.