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Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
The first film is set in 1936. Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is hired by government agents to locate the Ark of the Covenant before the Nazi Germans. The Nazis have teams searching for religious artefacts, including the Ark, which is rumored to make an army that carries the Ark before it invincible.[24] The Nazis are being helped by Indiana’s nemesis René Belloq (Paul Freeman). With the help of his old flame Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) and Sallah (John Rhys-Davies), Indiana manages to recover the Ark in Egypt. The Nazis steal the Ark and capture Indiana and Marion. Belloq and the Nazis perform a ceremony to open the Ark, but when they do so, they are all killed gruesomely by the Ark’s wrath. Indiana and Marion, who survived by closing their eyes, manage to get the Ark to the United States, where it is stored in a secret government warehouse.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
The second film is set in 1935, a year before Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indiana escapes Chinese gangsters with the help of singer/actress Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) and his twelve-year-old sidekick Short Round (Jonathan Ke Quan). The trio crash-land in India, where they come across a village whose children have been kidnapped. The Thuggee led by Mola Ram (Amrish Puri) has also taken the holy Sankara Stones, which they will use to take over the world. Indiana manages to overcome Mola Ram’s evil power, rescues the children and returns the stones to their rightful place, overcoming his own mercenary nature. The film has been noted as an outlier in the franchise, as it does not feature Indy’s university or any antagonistic political entity, and is less focused on archaeology, being presented as a dark movie with gross-out elements, human sacrifice and torture.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
The third film is set in 1938. Indiana and his friend Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott) are assigned by American businessman Walter Donovan (Julian Glover) to find the Holy Grail. They are teamed up with Dr. Elsa Schneider (Alison Doody), following on from where Indiana’s estranged father Henry (Sean Connery) left off before he disappeared. It transpires that Donovan and Elsa are in league with the Nazis, who captured Henry Jones in order to get Indiana to help them find the Grail. However, Indiana recovers his father’s diary filled with his research, and manages to rescue him before finding the location of the Grail. Both Donovan and Elsa fall to the temptation of the Grail, while Indiana and Henry realize that their relationship with each other is more important than finding the relic.
From the first moments, when the star-circled mountain in the Paramount Pictures logo fades into a similarly shaped, fog-shrouded Andean peak, where who knows what awful things are about to happen, ”Raiders of the Lost Ark” is off and running at a breakneck pace that simply won’t stop until the final shot, an ironic epilogue that recalls nothing less than ”Citizen Kane.”
RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK
Raiders doesn’t mess about, opening with the finest pre-credits scene in cinema. That Paramount mountain fades into a Peruvian backdrop and Indy and some ill-fated cohorts traipse through the woods and a rather cobwebby tunnel in pursuit of a golden relic. He gets past tarantulas, treachery and a tumbling ball – all set to John Williams’s peerless theme – before arch rival Belloq (Paul Freeman) takes what was once his.