Indy faces three challenges before reaching a room of goblets, manned by a knight who’s been guarding the Grail for hundreds of years. Only the Grail’s healing powers can save his father. Having reached the secret temple, Donovan shoots Henry and forces Indy to retrieve the Grail. It would take a heart of sandstone to not be moved by the magic of the film’s climatic set-piece. "I had to rely on a horse, and horses have a sense of survival and they don't actually do what you tell them to do as they haven't read the script." "Technically very difficult," Armstrong said in 2008. It has one of the all-time great stunts, as Indy/Bond/Superman stuntman Vic Armstrong leaps from his horse, galloping along ridge, onto to the tank. The tank was specially built for the scene and the shooting went from a planned two days to more than a week. There’s a thrilling speedboat chase across the waterways on Venice, a daring motorcycle escape from the Nazi castle, and the film’s crowing action moment: a tank chase across the desert, as Indy rides on horseback jumps onto the tank to have a classic fistfight and save his father. The dubious Indian stereotype villains from Temple of Doom were out, and the Nazis were back in (because who doesn’t hate a Nazi, right?).įollowing the Raiders formula, Last Crusade comes up with some of the series’ best action sequences, with some ideas carried over from story conferences on the original film. It’s one of the three most important pieces of blockbuster cinema ever made (alongside Jaws and Star Wars, if you’re asking) and Last Crusade worked hard to put the pieces back together. He’s called it “too dark, too subterranean, and much too horrific.” “I just wanted to bring back the spirit of the original Raiders and have some fun,” he said of Last Crusade.Īs blockbuster formulas go, Raiders of the Lost Ark is about as high as you can aim. But it’s true that Spielberg doesn’t like Temple of Doom. Spielberg and George Lucas had agreed on that when Lucas first pitched the idea of archeologist-cum-adventurer “Indiana Smith” back in 1977. The Indiana Jones films were always meant to be a trilogy. Last Crusade has been seen as a retraction of sorts, an attempt to gallop back to the magical blockbuster formula of Raiders of the Lost Ark. There’s an oft told legend that Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was made as Steven Spielberg’s apology for the darker, critically mauled Temple of Doom. In this feature, first published in 2019, Tom Fordy celebrates his role in a cinema classic
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