Every Indiana Jones Movie Ranked Worst To Best (Including Dial Of Destiny)

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a good movie and one that, in the wake of Dial of Destiny, surely deserves greater reappraisal. Spielberg's fourth Indy movie has historically been criticised for ostensibly not keeping in with the spirit of its predecessors, taking on a sci-fi bent and abandoning the mysticism Raiders introduced in 1981.

But Kingdom of the Crystal Skull couldn't be more Indy if it tried. Of course an Indiana Jones movie set in the late 1950s would lean into Cold War science-fiction. It was the era of Roswell and sci-fi was a massive draw in fiction, across film, television, and comic books. Indiana Jones has always been a loving homage to adventure serials; if the character was to be situated in the 1950s, then it would make perfect sense for an adventure to reflect the space age and Cold War espionage. The truth is that aliens are just at home in this series as the spirits of Raiders or the mystical cult of Temple of Doom - why bother taking Indy to the '50s only to ignore one of the decade's biggest obsessions?

Since its release in 2008, the conversation surrounding Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has been led by tedious jibes that have dismissed the film's technical and narrative accomplishments - as well as its obvious flaws. So what if Indy escaped a nuke in a fridge - is the image of Ford staring up at the apocalyptic fury of a new age not cool as hell? Reiterating grievances with the fridge scene and the aliens (sorry, "inter-dimensional beings") distracts from worthwhile critiques on what the film does and doesn't do well. As David Elrich surmised in an excellent Dial of Destiny review for IndieWire, the reductive backlash to Kingdom may have had the adverse effect of driving Spielberg away from the director's chair for the fifth entry.

There is a lot wrong with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - the use of CGI in key action set-pieces, the tediously framed exposition, and the lack of visual flavour once we get to the Amazon - but it's kinetic in a way only Spielberg's films are and delivers a truly heartfelt ending for Indiana Jones. Certainly less refined than its predecessors, but far from the steep departure consensus has indicated.