I just finished watching, for the first time in many years, the super-awesome Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, as part of a complicated scheme to get my father to pay for movie tickets to the one now in theaters. Anyway, the experience was interesting, since the movie is as enjoyable as ever, and yet, as a much better scholar and amateur medievalist than I was the last time I saw it, a number of things stuck out.
On the one hand, I could follow all the German spoken by the Nazis in the movie, which was encouraging, as well as the snippets of Latin etc. On the other, it's much more clear now how much of the movie isn't based on anything at all. Fourth-century catacombs underneath Venice? "The Chronicles of St Anselm"? The medieval Latin name for God is Iehovah? Hmm . . . . Also, that seven-hundred-year-old knight speaks surprisingly modern English.
