Lucasfilm is currently hard at work on a fifth Indiana Jones movie. Steven Spielberg has stepped down from the director’s chair, but Harrison Ford is still donning the fedora (despite the fact he’s pushing 80). The purpose of this new sequel is supposedly to make up for the disappointment of the previous movie, 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
But even if the script for Indiana Jones 5 is masterfully crafted from start to finish and Spielberg’s replacement James Mangold brings the same bittersweet sense of finality that he brought to 2017’s Logan, the new Indy movie will inevitably end up doubling down on the biggest problem with the last one.
There’s certainly a lot wrong with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The pacing is uncharacteristically slow, the fridge-nuking scene is ridiculous, Shia LaBeouf’s Mutt Williams is nowhere near compelling enough to take the torch of the franchise from Indy – the list of egregious problems with this movie is practically endless. But, specific issues aside, the main problem with Crystal Skull was simply that a fourth Indiana Jones movie wasn’t necessary.
1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade already provided the perfect ending for Indy’s story, so any sequel would inevitably feel contrived (and, unsurprisingly, Crystal Skull did). The point of the fifth movie might be to make up for the disappointment of Crystal Skull, but that’s inherently impossible because it’ll just take Indy further down the reboot rabbit hole away from what was already the perfect conclusion to his on-screen adventures.
The emotional crux of Last Crusade is Indy’s relationship with his estranged father Henry Jones, Sr., played by Sean Connery, and the MacGuffin is the Holy Grail, arguably the most famous fabled artifact of all time. The opening sequence gives Indy a spectacular origin story with a young River Phoenix masterfully capturing the essence of Ford’s performance with more boyish naivety. And in the final scene, after Indy has saved his father’s life and takes his advice to let the Grail go, Indy, his father, Brody, and Sallah all ride off into the sunset, like the final shot of so many classic westerns, set to John Williams’ “Raiders March.” It’s one of the greatest movie endings of all time, and the ideal stopping point for Indy’s adventures.
All signs pointed to Last Crusade being the big finale. In fact, its title basically means “final adventure.” Indy reconnecting with his father – played beautifully by Ford and Connery, who are surprisingly convincing as a father-son duo – provided the character with more emotional depth than either of the previous movies, and gave the audience closure on his backstory (and his bright future). But, Hollywood being Hollywood, a fourth movie was eventually produced. And fans didn’t like it, so a fifth movie is also being produced to redeem the mistakes of the fourth one. This is an ultimately futile effort, though, because the fourth movie’s biggest mistake was existing.
The original Indiana Jones trilogy stands as a near-perfect masterpiece of action cinema. These newer movies with an older Indy and a bunch of CGI feel more like an afterthought or an epilogue than a real addition to this iconic story. There is some hope in Mangold’s hiring. Logan offered the perfect conclusion to Hugh Jackman’s on-screen arc as Wolverine, so there’s a chance that he has the same thing planned for Harrison Ford’s stint as Indy. But what are the chances of catching lightning in a bottle twice?
The only new Indiana Jones movie that fans would welcome would be one that recaptures the pulpy spirit of the original trilogy. But the old-school filmmaking techniques that made the Indy’s original adventures so visceral and thrilling are no longer used in today’s Hollywood. This was an issue with Crystal Skull that will only be exacerbated in the Marvel-dominated industry of the 2020s. After the first three movies offered some of the most impressive practical stunt work ever captured on film, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was awash with hideous CGI.
What’s worse is that these effects were used to create characters and scenes that should never be in an Indiana Jones movie anyway: Shia LaBeouf swings around the jungle with a bunch of computer-generated monkeys and the climactic set piece has a bunch of computer-generated aliens sitting in a circle. Indiana Jones 5 will undoubtedly make the same mistake, because it’s in studios’ best interests to follow industry trends than to go against the grain.
As disappointing as it would be for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to be the definitive conclusion of the Indiana Jones series, the fifth movie has no hope of improving on it, because fans already got the perfect ending to Indy’s story. No version of Indiana Jones 5 could provide a more satisfying conclusion to this series than Indy riding off into the sunset with his father and his two best friends.