For Fans of Indiana Jones

The 1981 original is a perfect film in a way that none of its sequels, however beloved, quite replicate. Every scene earns its place. The famous boulder, the sword vs. gun gag, the truck chase through the desert: these are not set pieces bolted onto a story. They are the story, each one revealing something about who Indiana Jones is. Spielberg and cinematographer Douglas Slocombe gave it the texture of a 1940s serial filtered through the visual ambition of New Hollywood, and John Williams wrote the defining adventure theme of the 20th century. Forty-plus years later, it has not aged a frame.

Sean Connery's Henry Jones Sr. is one of cinema's great supporting performances, and the third film earns its emotional climax because Spielberg spends the whole movie building genuine tension between a father and son who love each other but cannot say so. When Henry calls Indy by his real name at the Grail's threshold, it lands because the film has done the work. Adventure movies rarely slow down long enough to care about their characters this way. The Last Crusade does, and it is the better for it.

LucasArts' 1992 point-and-click adventure is not a licensed cash-in. It is a genuine Indiana Jones story, written by Hal Barwood with a plot ambitious enough to have been a real fourth film: three branching paths through the legend of Atlantis, voiced performances that rival the films, and puzzles that reward actual lateral thinking. The Great Circle (2024) is a worthy modern successor, but Fate of Atlantis earned its place as the franchise high-water mark outside the cinema long before that.

Spielberg and Lucas designed Indiana Jones as a conscious homage to H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the pulp serials of the 1930s. That lineage is worth following. H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) is the direct ancestor: a Western adventurer, an African wilderness, a hidden treasure, and a civilisation older than memory. Reading it after watching Raiders reveals exactly what Spielberg was reaching for, and what he transformed.