This is from a comments thread of a post I made on FB, in which my brother commented, and the final reply of which turned into a substantial exposition of my thinking on the things.
[Original Post]
I am here to declare what to some will be abominable heresy: Raiders, Dial, Skull, Crusade, Temple (that order)
[Brother's Comment]
Absolutely agree… abominable heresy
[First Reply]
Ha ha . . . What would be your order? I can forgive anything other than a change in first position.
[Brother's Reply]
[Final Reply]
My main criteria is female lead, and then probably place, and then probably object . . . although I have to say that the last plays a larger role for me than it would for many and comes from a different place of thinking about what makes narratives good, and a bit of esoteric content knowledge.
I'm not much of a Mads Mikkelsen fan, but Waller-Bridges really surprised me as a strong lead in Dial, really strong, and I thought it an unexpected but well-done move to replace the slot with daughter-type rather than lover. As with you, Marion is what put Skull up higher for me, and I loved her in it, but it wasn't as strong as in Raiders or as Waller-Bridges in Dial; Blanchet was good as maniacal villain but being female is only accidental to her role (some good flavoring to it, but not central), and she could not really best either of the other two in these films anyway, not for the kind of female-lead role these films do.
Then we come to Crusade, but I have to do it by way of the undeniable bottom of the barrel, Temple. For a long time I was "The original Trilogy is so classic, untouchable." Then I got the DVD set in grad school when Hollywood was catching up with the home-media tech advancements and all the old trilogies and other sets were coming out, and I re-watched Temple for the first time in decades . . . not good. I still liked Short Round, but the shallow blond celebrity just made the bottom drop out of any character dynamics, meaning fun character play, not just "drama" (*head and voice dropping in high Shakespearean tragedy mode*).
And then this is where object and place start to come in. India is fine, but the Raj is so far removed from modern popular knowledge of the times (if you're doing social-justice criticism, yeah, do India under the Raj, but that's not this) that they had to go with things like a cartoonish version of the Thugee cult. Other than that, the landscape is a lot more just like the villain, kind of generic oogie-boogie, and the stones as objects are just kind of blah at best.
So, we come to Crusade, where the object of the Grail is very, very high theme-object real estate, not just for Judeo-Christian tradition in general, and not even just as making a Judeo-to-Christian pair of bookends, each sort of as top contender to represent its own domain . . . but rather, there are specific, actual textual instances in which the two act as ciphers for each other in one direction or the other (debated: does the Grail code the Ark to hide it in a Dan Brown sort of way [Graham Hancock's take in his The Sign and the Seal] or does the Grail fulfill and supersede the Ark in a religio-cultural reading?) SO . . . all of that seems like it would put Crusade up behind Raiders for me as the great classic pairing above all else (but, I must insist, Raiders always first . . . too classic in both place and object to beat, and then the female lead that set the standard), and so it did until Dial came out and I realized the impact of the strong female lead . . . and the blond hottie German officer that father and son both bang is far from it. Not that you have to have some super intense dramatic or self-sacrificing heroine role, as these are really swashbucklers at the end of the day, but you can do it with more interesting characters or less, and she is pretty far down that ranking, although not as bad as in Temple.
I'm not a detractor from Connery, but I'm also not any kind of particular fan, so he has zero impact on the rating at best. But, I have to say, and I can't say it too strongly because I can't really put my finger on it in detail, but the "I'm as human as the next man," and "Dad, I WAS the next man" that now makes me go "Woof!" was the kind of thing that seems practically written with Connery in mind.
So, on place and object: Egypt and the Ark are unbeatable (even the anonymous island is really just an extension of Egypt in how it presents in the film). The Ark is even better value as far as mystique, with all that has been done on the Grail even just in cinema. The places in Dial may seem not that strong for mystique, but they do have distinctive swashbuckling value, each with its own flavor for it: New York, Morocco, and Greece. They even got a bit of the flavor of the European-tight-street car chase (most strongly seen in things like the Bourne series) into the mix, but using Greece and the little scooters rather than sleek/gritty cities like Prague etc and cars. South America, for Skull, actually has its own sort of grip in modern historical imagination, with the political situations there that imbue the dense and sticky landscape with a danger beyond the snakes and spiders. After that, it's very weak sauce: Crusade has a cliched Europe-and-North-Africa thing, and I have already mentioned the faults with Temple on this point.
Specifically on object as value for a basic project of, really, turning cultural tradition into adventure, I used to be of the mind that Ark-Grail could simply not be beaten, especially when that is one place where Skull undeniably falls short (and we shall not mention the stones of Temple again). But the dial changed my thinking on that, but as I say, that has some to do with recent readings that have greatly informed my thinking on the development of the shape of thinking, or what Owen Barfield calls the "evolution of consciousness." Barfield was the fourth of the "Inklings," and largely over-looked by those who are into reading them. His main works of note are esoteric philosophy/psychology rather than engaging fiction. He breaks the history human consciousness/thinking into two major stands: the older mystical "original participation" (his key coined term) of "pantheistic" cultures (for lack of a better word, since the very idea of "theism" comes from the other strand), and the "alpha thinking" of objectivity (divide between subject and object rather than participation), which finds its clearest form in science, and its radical form in science since the scientific revolution. For this latter (alpha thinking), he posits two starting points, one of them in the train of religion and the other in the train of broader natural philosophy (the ancient world's version of science): Moses and Pythagoras. The latter is most prominent in this regard in his concept of the "music of the spheres" as the relationship between mathematical precision and the messiness of the natural world . . . and he's in the same set of thinkers known for those same things as Archimedes, our endearing little fellow from Dial.
Obviously, on this esoteric uber-nerd level, Moses and Pythagoras give me Raiders and Dial as the brilliant pair rather than Raiders and Crusade. But even without going to that realm, there is something about the idea of Greece as the birthplace of so much in human culture. Archimedes is known more for a focus on immediate physical observation (than is Pythagoras), at least in the instance from which most people know him who do, shouting "Eureka!" and running out of the house and down the street naked when he discovered water displacement as a way to determine volume and density. So you have this sort of air of the beginnings of Western sciences of observing the physical world and learning how to do shit with it with greater precision and thus power.
Rifts in the space-time continuum is in the realm of fantasy, but then so is some presence being still in the Ark that comes out in the form of screaming witchy wraiths that burn peoples' eyes out. My point with the object is what place it holds in imagination applied to "history" of how humans "learned shit" or experienced. The Ark has this great mystique from the borderlands between the Judeo-Christian tradition and "paganism" or "pantheism" or whatever was back past it that it stood out against, and Greek thought is that borderland between our "science" and whatever oogery-boogery thinking was back behind it, where "medicine" was pushing a hot rock down somebody's throat to determine whether their ailment was a bogey spirit that would kill the tribe if you didn't throw them in a deep chasm or some trope like that.
But as I say, even that is a bit more on the esoteric side, and even any discussion of object at all kind of is, over against talking about certain types of characters and better- or worse-used swashbuckling elements and settings.
I really need to copy this over onto the blog I use for collecting my ideas, just someplace to have them out of my head. When I do long comments like this, it's in part to keep my composition muscles in shape (trying to choose good words and phrasings more on the fly to have those actions down better when examining other people's writing when editing), but it also does represent some of how I think about different instances of literature etc.
