In 1938, an art collector appeals to eminent archaeologist Dr. Indiana Jones to embark on a search for the Holy Grail. Indy learns that a medieval historian has vanished while searching for it, and the missing man is his own father, Dr. Henry Jones Sr.. He sets out to rescue his father by following clues in the old man's notebook, which his father had mailed to him before he went missing. Indy arrives in Venice, where he enlists the help of a beautiful academic, Dr. Elsa Schneider, along with Marcus Brody and Sallah. Together they must stop the Nazis from recovering the power of eternal life and taking over the world!
Although Last Crusade suffers for the lack of a really memorable central villain (notwithstanding Hitler’s cameo during a scene set at a book-burning rally)[,] what feels new—and fun—is the sense of Indy meeting his match in the form of his father, which has as much to do with Connery’s roughly equivalent star power and 007 associations as anything his character says or does. […] What comes through most strongly in The Last Crusade—and what makes it, finally, the sweetest of the films—is its embedded sense of reassurance, visualized by Spielberg as a literal ride into the sunset. I’ve always felt that this final shot was also the end of analogue action movies as we know them. In the summer of 1989, James Cameron was already gazing into the CGI mirror of The Abyss, and within the next five years, an onslaught of artificial-yet-authentic T-1000s and T. Rexes would rewire the Hollywood blockbuster into something more ruthlessly technocratic.
