Steven Spielberg action scenes tend to survive in memory as things you actually did. Tell me that isn’t correct. It was you who ran from the boulder. You held your breath while the raptors searched the kitchen. You watched the tank inch toward the cliff. You hit Omaha Beach and immediately wanted to crawl back into the ocean. That is a ridiculous gift. Plenty of directors can stage something enormous. Spielberg can make ten minutes of controlled chaos live in your head like a memory you somehow participated in.
And he is almost unfairly good at the tiny decision inside the huge sequence. Spielberg understands that action becomes unforgettable once you desperately care whether one specific person gets through the next thirty seconds. These 5 Spielberg films achieve that in one or more ways.
5
‘Minority Report’ (2002)
Tom Cruise as John Anderton looking up towards a reflection in Minority Report (2002).Image via 20th Century Studios
Minority Report becomes a chase built around one delicious problem: the man who knows exactly how Precrime hunts fugitives is now the fugitive. In 2054 Washington, D.C., John Anderton (Tom Cruise) leads Precrime, a police unit that arrests people before they commit murders predicted by three psychic Precogs. John believes completely in the system until it predicts that he himself will murder a man named Leo Crow within thirty-six hours, despite having never met him.
Spielberg keeps finding ways to make the technology personally invasive. John replaces his eyes because retinal scanners can track him, then walks through a mall where advertisements still address him by name because his new eyes belong to somebody else. The spider robots are even better. They flood an apartment building, crawl into private rooms, and force everyone to stop whatever they are doing for compulsory eye scans. John is submerged in an ice bath trying to keep his freshly operated eyes hidden while one spider crawls toward him. The future here is impressive, efficient, and absolutely exhausting. That tension is why the movie still feels alarmingly close.
4
‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’ (1989)
Harrison Ford and Sean Connery in Indiana Jones and the Last CrusadeImage via Paramount Pictures
Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) discovers that his father, medieval scholar Henry Jones Sr. (Sean Connery), has vanished while searching for the Holy Grail, the cup believed to have been used at the Last Supper. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade sends Indy across Venice, Austria, Germany, and finally the desert trying to rescue Henry and finish the Grail hunt before the Nazis reach it first.
The action is fantastic, but the father-son bickering makes everything ten times better. Indy escapes a burning castle and proudly announces their situation is improving, only for Henry to reveal that he accidentally shot their own plane’s tail. Henry later takes down another aircraft by frightening a flock of birds into its path with his umbrella. And the tank chase is peak Indiana Jones because every new problem immediately creates another one. Indy jumps onto the tank, fights soldiers, gets trapped against a cliff wall, then apparently falls to his death while Henry finally realizes how terrified he is of losing him. The Grail itself ultimately tests that relationship. Indy can reach immortality or take his father’s hand. For once, he chooses correctly.
Collider Exclusive · Action Hero Quiz Which Action Hero Would Be Your Perfect Partner? Rambo · James Bond · Indiana Jones · John McClane · Ethan Hunt
Five legends. Five completely different ways of getting out alive — with style, with muscle, with charm, with luck, or with a plan so intricate it probably shouldn’t work. Ten questions will reveal which action hero was built to have your back.
🎖️Rambo
🍸James Bond
🏺Indiana Jones
🔧John McClane
🎭Ethan Hunt
01
You’re dropped into a dangerous situation with no warning. What do you need most from a partner? The first few seconds tell you everything about who belongs beside you.
02
You have to get somewhere dangerous, fast. How do you travel? How you get there is half the mission.
03
You’re pinned down and outnumbered. What does your ideal partner do? This is when you find out what someone is really made of.
04
The mission is paused. You have one evening to decompress. What does your partner suggest? Who someone is when the pressure drops is who they actually are.
05
How do you prefer your partner to communicate mid-mission? Good communication is the difference between partners and a liability.
06
Your enemy is powerful, well-resourced, and has the upper hand. How should your partner approach them? The approach to the enemy defines the partnership.
07
Things go badly wrong and you’re captured. What do you trust your partner to do? Who someone is when you need them most is the only thing that matters.
08
What does your ideal partner bring to the table that you couldn’t replace? A great partner fills the gap you didn’t know you had.
09
Every partnership has a cost. Which of these can you live with? No one comes without baggage. The question is whether you can carry it together.
10
It’s the final moment. Everything is on the line. What do you need from your partner right now? The last question is the most honest one.
Your Partner Has Been Assigned Your Perfect Partner Is…
Your answers have pointed to one action hero above all others. This is the person built to have your back — for better or considerably, spectacularly worse.
Rambo
Your partner doesn’t talk much, doesn’t need to, and will have assessed every threat in your immediate environment before you’ve finished your first sentence. John Rambo is not a man of plans or politics — he is a force of nature shaped by survival, loyalty, and a capacity for endurance that goes beyond anything training can produce. He will not leave you behind. He has never left anyone behind who deserved to come home. What you get with Rambo is the most capable, most quietly ferocious partner imaginable — one who has been through things that would have broken anyone else, and who chose to keep going anyway. You’ll never need to ask if he has your back. You’ll just know.
James Bond
Your partner will arrive perfectly dressed, perfectly briefed, and with a cover story so convincing it’ll take you a moment to remember what’s actually true. James Bond is the most professionally dangerous person in any room he enters — and the most disarmingly charming, which is the point. He operates in a world of layers, where nothing is what it appears and every advantage is used without apology. You’ll never be bored. You’ll occasionally be furious. But when it matters — when the mission is genuinely on the line and the margin for error has collapsed to nothing — Bond is exactly the partner you want. He has survived things that have no business being survivable. He does it with style. That is not nothing.
Indiana Jones
Your partner will know the history, the language, the cultural context, and exactly why the thing everyone else is ignoring is actually the most important thing in the room. Indiana Jones is brilliant, reckless, and occasionally impossible — but he is also one of the most resourceful, most genuinely knowledgeable partners you could find yourself beside. He approaches every situation with a scholar’s eye and a brawler’s instinct, which is an unusual combination and a remarkably effective one. He hates snakes and gets personally attached to objects of historical significance, both of which will slow you down at least once. It doesn’t matter. What Indy brings is irreplaceable — and the adventures you’ll have together will be the kind people write books about. Assuming you survive them.
John McClane
Your partner was not supposed to be here. He does not have the right equipment, the right information, or anything approaching the right odds. He has a sarcastic remark and an absolute refusal to accept that the situation is as bad as it looks. John McClane is the greatest accidental hero in the history of action cinema — a man whose superpower is stubbornness, whose contingency plan is improvisation, and whose capacity to absorb punishment and keep moving would be alarming if it weren’t so useful. He will complain the entire time. He will make it significantly more chaotic than it needed to be. And he will absolutely, unconditionally, without question come through when it counts. Yippee-ki-yay.
Ethan Hunt
Your partner has already run seventeen scenarios by the time you’ve finished reading the briefing, and the plan he’s settled on involves at least two things that should be physically impossible. Ethan Hunt operates at the absolute edge of human capability — technically, physically, and intellectually — and he brings the same relentless precision to protecting his partners that he brings to dismantling organisations that shouldn’t exist. He is not easy to know and he will never fully tell you everything. But he will carry the weight of the mission so completely, so absolutely, that your job is simply to trust him — and the remarkable thing is that trusting him always turns out to be the right call. The mission will be impossible. He will complete it anyway.
3
‘Saving Private Ryan’ (1998)
Tom Hanks as Captain John Miller in a ruined town wearing his army helmet in Saving Private Ryan.Image via DreamWorks Pictures
After the Normandy invasion, Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) is ordered to take a small squad across occupied France and find Private James Ryan (Matt Damon), whose three brothers have already been killed in the war. Saving Private Ryan turns that rescue mission into an argument the soldiers keep having with themselves — how many lives should be risked to bring one man home?
Nothing prepares you for Omaha Beach. The landing craft opens and men are killed before they can get into the water. Miller reaches shore dazed, watching soldiers burn, drown, lose limbs, and desperately search for cover that barely exists. Spielberg never lets combat become clean after that. Even smaller choices come back viciously. Miller releases a captured German soldier after Wade (Giovanni Ribisi)’s death, only to encounter him again during the battle at Ramelle. And when Miller lies wounded on the bridge, firing his pistol uselessly at an approaching tank, the gesture is heartbreaking precisely because there is nothing heroic left to perform. He has done everything he can. He just keeps pulling the trigger.
2
‘Jurassic Park’ (1993)
Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) smiles joyously as he peers through the front window of a car in ‘Jurassic Park’ (1993)Image via Universal Pictures
Paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill), paleobotanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), and mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) are invited to a private island where billionaire John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) has created living dinosaurs using recovered DNA. Jurassic Park initially lets everyone experience the impossible dream. Then the park’s security systems fail during a storm, the electric fences shut down, and the animals stop being exhibits.
The first T. rex attack is still absurdly good because Spielberg makes you wait. A goat leg lands on the car. The water in the cup ripples. The fence is suddenly empty. Then the dinosaur steps through it, and every confident promise Hammond made about control becomes hilarious. Later, Grant and the children climb an electric fence just as Ellie unknowingly restores the power, while Tim is still hanging from it. The raptor kitchen scene goes in the opposite direction and makes tiny noises terrifying. A ladle falls. A claw taps the floor. Lex and Tim are trying to breathe quietly while predators learn how to open doors. The dinosaurs were the selling point. The suspense is why people have never stopped watching.
1
‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ (1981)
Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) comes face-to-face with a deadly cobra in ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’Image via Paramount Pictures
Archaeologist Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is recruited by U.S. intelligence after learning that Nazi agents are searching for the Ark of the Covenant, a biblical artifact believed to possess devastating power. Raiders of the Lost Ark sends Indy after his former mentor’s medallion, reunites him with Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), and turns the hunt for the Ark into one disaster after another across Nepal, Cairo, and the Mediterranean.
And almost every disaster is partly Indy’s fault, which is essential. He steals the golden idol and triggers the boulder. He thinks Marion has died and immediately drinks himself miserable. He gets dragged behind a truck because simply staying inside the vehicle would apparently be too easy. During the famous marketplace confrontation, an elaborate swordsman shows off in front of him and Indy, exhausted and irritated, just shoots him. That gag tells you the whole character. He is brave, capable, occasionally brilliant, and permanently one inconvenience away from being fed up with the entire adventure. Then the ending pulls the perfect trick. Indy spends the whole movie chasing the Ark and survives its opening by finally respecting something he cannot understand. Close your eyes. For once, Indiana Jones knows when curiosity should lose.
