Welcome to another edition of Top Ten Things! You know how it works. It's a countdown. Of ten items.
Today it's the top ten films by one of the all-time great directors, Steven Spielberg. Spielberg's extraordinary forty-plus-year career has given us multiple iconic films and he's renowned for his uncanny ability to craft intelligent movies we can all relate to. Whether he's making a summer action movie or a thoughtful historical epic, Spielberg excels at imbuing his movies with substance. His best work demands multiple viewings over decades, and there probably isn't another director alive who's repeatedly demonstrated such pure storytelling ability across such varied genres.
Here now is the list....
HM: Jurassic Park
In 1993 Spielberg created the definitive dinosaur movie, about a small group of scientists and children sent to a remote island near Costa Rica to be a focus group of sorts for the first-ever dinosaur zoo. Predictably nothing on the island works properly, and thanks to a rogue IT manager the dinosaurs are able to escape their enclosures and wreak havoc on the park and its human occupants.
Jurassic Park doesn't contain much in the way of lofty concepts; it's simply a quintessential popcorn action-adventure with some of the best creature effects ever put to film. This was one of the earliest movies to make extensive use of CGI, and for the most part those dinosaurs still hold up today. As with
Jaws, Spielberg was wise enough to let the human characters carry the early parts of the story so we care what happens to them, and built up to the appearance of each species of dinosaur. The T-Rex sequence is a masterfully assembled piece of action-horror, and the later Velociraptor scenes work on the same monster movie level as some of the sequences in
Aliens. Three decades later
Jurassic Park's flaws show through pretty clearly, but it's still a great example of Spielberg's ability to create crowd-pleasing entertainment that actually has a brain.
10. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
The third and final chapter (
Crystal Skull was just a bad dream...) of the
Indiana Jones saga reminds me of
Return of the Jedi in many ways, insomuch as the bulk of the story elements from the trilogy's first film are reused here. Indy is up against the Nazis once again, racing to find a religious artifact that will allegedly render its owner invincible. Indy's pals Sallah and Marcus Brody are back to join in the fun, and in a casting coup, Sean Connery plays Indy's father, who has spent a lifetime searching for the Holy Grail. The action sequences, as good as they are, don't quite hold up to those of the first two films for me, and this movie's real strength is the interplay between Ford and Connery, who have perfect chemistry together. Don't get me wrong,
Last Crusade is a fantastic piece of summer moviemaking. But it doesn't have the freshness of
Raiders or the unrelenting pace of
Temple. So like
Return of the Jedi it's simply a very worthy conclusion to the series (Jeezus, why couldn't they have left well enough alone??) that introduces a new side to the action hero we've all come to love.
9. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
The followup to the iconic
Raiders of the Lost Ark,
Temple of Doom was, I believe, the first time anyone in Hollywood used the word "prequel." For some reason Spielberg and Lucas set this movie a year before
Raiders (Sort of an odd choice since it removes the suspense of whether Indy survives or not), and this one plays out like a standalone adventure, with Dr. Jones himself the only
Raiders character present. This time Indy has to retrieve a mystical stone which has been stolen from an Indian village by an evil underground cult. This film pushed the limits of what could be shown in a PG-rated movie and set an exceedingly dark tone; there's human sacrifice, brainwashing, child slavery, people being crushed, people being eaten by alligators, and most infamously a dude having his still-beating heart ripped out of his chest. In fact we have
Temple of Doom and
Gremlins to thank for the existence of a PG-13 rating. Most (including Spielberg himself) consider
Temple of Doom the weakest of the Indy trilogy, but I disagree. I love how unapologetically dark this film is and how different it is from
Raiders. This movie might also have the most fun climax of any Indy film, with our heroes and villains fighting for survival while hanging from the side of a cliff (but only after a long and thrilling mine cart chase).
Temple also has probably the greatest booby trap sequence of all time - that scary room with all the spikes. As a kid this was one of the earliest sequels I got to experience as it was coming out, and it still holds up for me as a tremendously fun roller coaster ride of a movie.
