There is a moment in Raiders of the Lost Ark that changed everything. Not the opening boulder. Not the Ark’s apocalyptic finale. It’s the truck chase — that extended, breathless, seemingly impossible sequence in which Indiana Jones fights his way across, underneath, and eventually on top of a Nazi convoy truck while being shot at from every conceivable angle. Roger Ebert called it the best truck chase stunt he had ever seen, surpassing even the legendary sequences in Bullitt and The French Connection. That’s a bold claim, but it’s hard to argue with. And the reason it works — the reason it still works after more than four decades — isn’t because of any technological marvel. It’s because you can feel the danger. The weight of the vehicle. The heat of the Tunisian desert baking everything in sight. The sweat, the bruises, the sheer physical commitment of Harrison Ford throwing himself into harm’s way in ways that no amount of computer animation could replicate.

That commitment is the secret ingredient of the Indiana Jones franchise at its very best. And it’s the thing the series has most tragically abandoned as it has aged.

A Philosophy Built on Bruises

When Steven Spielberg and George Lucas set out to make Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1980, they weren’t approaching action sequences the way filmmakers do today. There was no green screen safety net. There was no digital alchemy to clean up mistakes in post-production. There was a $20 million budget, a 73-day shooting schedule, and a cast and crew baking in temperatures that regularly exceeded 130°F in Tunisia. Under those conditions, action sequences weren’t designed in a computer. They were invented on location, often improvised under pressure, and they succeeded or failed based on the physical reality of what was captured on film.

Take the famous boulder trap that opens Raiders. The prop itself was a masterpiece of practical engineering — a sphere constructed from fiberglass, plaster, and wood, originally designed to be 65 feet wide but ultimately scaled down to 22 feet and weighing around 300 pounds. It was controlled by a steel rod hidden behind rubber rock formations, and Ford ran the gauntlet ten times to capture the sequence from multiple camera angles. Spielberg later admitted he was, in his own words, “an idiot” for letting Ford do it himself — but also acknowledged it wouldn’t have worked with a stuntman, because the audience needed to see Indiana Jones’s face. The tension in that opening isn’t manufactured. It’s earned, frame by frame, take by take.

This philosophy — that the audience can feel the difference between a man actually in danger and a man who appears to be in danger — runs through the entire original trilogy like a thread. And it’s worth pulling on.

Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Blueprint

Raiders isn’t just the first Indiana Jones film. It’s essentially the textbook on how to construct an action-adventure sequence from the ground up. Every major set piece in the movie was built around a simple, visceral idea, and then executed with an almost reckless commitment to physical reality.

The Well of Souls snake pit is a perfect example. Spielberg wanted a genuinely terrifying environment, and he got one. The production gathered between 6,000 and 10,000 snakes — a staggering number — from handlers across London and Europe, after an initial supply proved woefully insufficient. Anti-venom had to be imported from India because local supplies had expired. The stage doors were kept open during filming so a waiting ambulance could reach the set quickly if needed. Karen Allen was so frightened she couldn’t scream on cue, so Spielberg dropped a dead snake on her to provoke a genuine reaction. This isn’t filmmaking as a controlled, sanitized process. This is filmmaking as something closer to controlled chaos — and the audience feels every second of it.

Then there’s the Flying Wing fight, one of the sequences most people forget about but which is arguably the most impressive from a purely practical standpoint. The plane — a custom-built prop based on real experimental aircraft designs — was constructed by the British engineering firm Vickers, dismantled, shipped to Tunisia, and assembled on location. It was never designed to fly. It was designed to spin, to threaten, and to create the sensation that Ford was fighting for his life against a massive, roaring machine. The fight beneath the plane was largely improvised on set. And during one take, the vehicle actually rolled over Ford’s foot. It took 40 crew members to move it off of him. He avoided serious injury only because the extreme heat had softened the tire and the ground was covered in sand.

The truck chase, as mentioned, was so elaborate that Spielberg brought in a second-unit director — Michael D. Moore — to film much of it, something he had never done before. Stuntman Glenn Randall suggested the now-iconic scene of Jones clinging to the underside of the truck, and Ford sat in a concealed bicycle seat attached to the vehicle’s belly to film it. One of the convoy cars going over a cliff was achieved through a combination of matte painting and stop-motion animation of miniature figures. But the core of the sequence — Ford, the truck, the desert, the bullets — that was all real. All of it.

Temple of Doom: Darker, Faster, and Deliberately Unhinged

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is a strange beast in the franchise. It’s darker, more relentless, and deliberately more unhinged than its predecessor. Spielberg has openly admitted he wasn’t happy with it, calling it “too dark, too subterranean, and much too horrific.” But from a pure action-sequence perspective, it’s a masterclass in escalation.

The film’s opening fifteen minutes — the Shanghai escape sequence — are, as Roshan Seth once put it, “perhaps the greatest 15 minutes in cinema.” And here’s what makes them remarkable: they were leftovers. Several of the set pieces in that opening, including the escape from Club Obi-Wan and the raft sequence down the Himalayas, were originally written for Raiders of the Lost Ark. They were cut from that film’s script for pacing reasons — Lawrence Kasdan felt the raft scene “interrupted the story flow” — and eventually found their way into Temple of Doom when Lucas and Spielberg were looking for ways to open the prequel with a burst of energy. The mine cart chase, too, had originally been planned for Raiders before being relocated. These weren’t throwaway ideas hastily grafted onto a sequel. They were sequences that Spielberg and Lucas had been turning over in their minds for years, and Temple of Doom gave them a home.

The mine cart chase itself deserves special attention. It was filmed as a combination of a functioning roller coaster, scale models, and practical stunt work, with some minor stop-motion mixed in. Ben Burtt recorded actual roller coasters at Disneyland Park in Anaheim to create the sound design. The sequence is relentless — it never lets up, never gives the audience a breath — and it works precisely because it feels like a physical, mechanical thing happening in real space. You can hear the wheels on the tracks. You can feel the g-forces. It’s visceral in a way that no amount of digital enhancement could improve upon.

The Last Crusade: Spectacle Grounded in Character

If Raiders established the blueprint and Temple of Doom cranked the intensity to eleven, The Last Crusade did something arguably more difficult: it made you care about the action because of what it meant to the characters involved.

The tank chase — filmed in the Tabernas Desert in Spain — is the sequence that best illustrates this. Spielberg had originally planned it as a short scene, but as he storyboarded it, he realized it could become an action centerpiece. He made a deliberate decision, though: unlike the truck chase in Raiders, this sequence needed to be story-driven. Indiana and his father needed to be helping each other throughout. And they are. Henry faces Nazis from inside the steel beast. Indiana rides along across brutal terrain. The two of them are in constant communication, constant danger, and constant dependence on one another. The action serves the relationship, and the relationship makes the action matter.

The tank itself was an extraordinary piece of practical engineering. Mechanical effects supervisor George Gibbs built it over the framework of a 28-ton excavator, added seven tons of tracks driven by hydraulic pumps connected to Range Rover engines, and constructed the whole thing from steel rather than aluminum or fiberglass because the rocky Spanish terrain would have destroyed anything lighter. It broke down twice during filming. It moved at only 10 to 12 miles per hour. And it looked absolutely enormous on screen.

The motorcycle chase away from the castle — another practical marvel — involved real motorcycles, real stunts, and a sequence that flows seamlessly from interior to exterior. The circus train sequence in the prologue required the production to work around the logistical nightmare of actually filming on a moving train, with animatronic giraffes and rhinoceroses and real lions that grew nervous from the rocking motion. Every frame of that prologue feels like it was earned — because it was.

The Last Crusade also contains what might be the most emotionally satisfying action beat in the entire franchise: Henry Jones Sr. running along the beach, calmly and methodically scattering a flock of birds into the engine of an attacking German fighter. It’s barely an “action sequence” at all. Sean Connery is moving along the shore, opening an umbrella. But the context — the father protecting his son, the absurdity of the gesture, the way it connects back to everything we know about Henry — makes it one of the most memorable moments in any Indiana Jones film. It works beautifully.

And then Indiana Jones rode off into the sunset. The trilogy was complete. The hero had found what he was truly searching for — not the Grail, but reconciliation with his father. It was a perfect ending. A clean, earned, emotionally resonant conclusion to a story that had been building across three films.

So why on earth did they keep going?

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Dial of Destiny: When the Magic Disappears

I’ll be honest with you. Watching Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and The Dial of Destiny as action films — particularly after the masterclasses of the original trilogy — is a genuinely frustrating experience. Not because the movies are unwatchable. They’re not. But because so much of what made Indiana Jones’s action sequences iconic has been quietly, systematically replaced with the one thing that can never replicate it: computer-generated imagery.

Crystal Skull is where the shift becomes most jarring. Spielberg stated before production that very few CGI effects would be used. By the time the film was finished, there were approximately 450 CGI shots in the movie, with an estimated 30% of all shots containing CG matte paintings. The jungle chase sequence — a critical action centerpiece — required extensive digital work simply because filming a genuine chase through an undeforested Amazon rainforest would have been unsafe. ILM essentially created a virtual jungle and composited it around the actors. It’s technically impressive. But it doesn’t feel like Indiana Jones.

And then there are the moments that cross from ambitious into genuinely absurd. CGI ants consuming a man alive in seconds. Shia LaBeouf swinging on jungle vines alongside cartoon monkeys in a scene so disconnected from the gritty, physical world of the original trilogy that it feels like it belongs in an entirely different franchise. These aren’t action sequences. They’re effects showcases. And no amount of John Williams scoring underneath them can make them feel earned.

The Dial of Destiny attempts to course-correct in places — Mangold has spoken openly about wanting to rely on practical effects wherever possible, and the film does contain some genuinely committed stunt work, particularly in its opening train chase. The de-aging technology applied to Harrison Ford in that sequence is genuinely remarkable from a technical standpoint, and the sequence itself has real energy. But the film still stumbles into the same CGI-heavy territory that plagued its predecessor, and by the time the story reaches its time-traveling finale set during the ancient Siege of Syracuse, we are so far removed from the world that gave us the boulder, the truck chase, and the tank that it barely feels like the same series at all.

What Was Lost, and Why It Mattered

The reason the original Indiana Jones trilogy’s action sequences endure isn’t nostalgia, though nostalgia certainly plays a role in how we receive them today. It’s something more fundamental. It’s the fact that audiences can sense the reality behind what they’re seeing. When Harrison Ford hangs from the underside of a truck in the Tunisian desert, you believe it because it is him. When the boulder rolls, the weight of it registers because it was a 300-pound prop designed and built specifically for that one moment. When the tank drags Indy across a canyon wall, the sound of it is real, the dust is real, and the danger — however carefully managed — is felt.

CGI can do extraordinary things. It can create worlds, creatures, and scenarios that would be physically impossible to stage. But it cannot replicate the sensation of genuine risk. It cannot make an audience lean forward in their seat the way a real man dangling from a real vehicle in a real desert can. And in a franchise built entirely on the premise that adventure is something you feel in your bones, that distinction matters more than almost anything else.

Indiana Jones rode off into the sunset at the end of The Last Crusade. It was the right place to stop. Not because the character had nothing left to offer — he didn’t — but because the trilogy had said everything it needed to say, in exactly the way it needed to say it. Practical. Physical. Earned. Every bruise, every take, every impossible stunt a testament to the belief that cinema, at its most thrilling, is not something you watch from a distance.

It’s something you survive.