Overall Rating
  Awesome: 84.73%
Worth A Look: 7.88%
Average: 1.48%
Pretty Bad: 1.48%
Total Crap: 4.43%
6 reviews, 167 user ratings
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| Raiders of the Lost Ark |
by Jay Seaver
"The sort of classic that just gets better every time."
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One of the benefits of living in the Boston area, movie-wise, is that among the multiple theaters in the area that program older movies (either on occasion or regularly), at least one is likely to play "Raiders of the Lost Ark" on the big screen at some point during the year. When that happens, you plan your week around those screenings, because as cool as it is to have it on hand to watch in high definition, it is absolutely worth the time, money, and effort to watch it on 35mm with a few hundred of your closest friends.What makes it worthy of such admiration, compared to the hundreds of other action/adventure movies made in the last century, many of them pretty good? I think it's a pair of traits that are shared not just by the best films by its main creators (Steven Spielberg and George Lucas), but by a great number of movies regarded as classics: The story being told, and the way the filmmakers tell it, is clear and simple, but there's attention to detail as well. The more familiar you become with Raiders, the more little things you notice, but unlike a lot of movies that reward repeated viewings, the price of entry is practically nothing.
Sure, the movie starts in media res with Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) searching the South American jungle for an idol hidden in a booby-trapped temple, but once it briefly returns stateside, it starts to lay out every goal Indy must accomplish before sending him in search of the the Ark which holds the original Ten Commandments. He'll be aided by Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), the daughter of his mentor and a former lover, and Sallah (John Rhys-Davies), an Egyptian digger; his competition is Belloq (Paul Freeman), a French archaeologist and rival, and his Nazi masters. Indy is clever and resourceful, but the Nazis are ruthless and have a head start.
Here's a big part of why this straight-ahead approach works: While Spielberg and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan (developing a story by Lucas and Philip Kaufman) have no problem with spelling out exactly what the characters have to do, they lets the characters reveal themselves through action and performance. Before anyone describes Jones or Belloq's qualifications, we've seen how they handle a sticky situation and what sort of men they are. We spend a little time getting to know Marion, and then she and Indy kind of dance around their history a little, and while the audience can figure out what happened, what's important isn't what exactly happened but that Indy still sort of thinks of her as Abner's kid while she has a mixture of attraction and anger. Sometimes you don't need that much - Ronald Lacey is mostly doing a great Peter Lorre as Toht, for instance, and while John Rhys-Davies is doing a bit of an "unsophisticated but friendly & capable foreigner", he and the filmmakers keep it on the right side of being an odious stereotype.
And when all this plotting and playing out the characters leads to action... Well, Steven Spielberg puts on a clinic on how to do that sort of thing right: Watch any action scene in this movie a few times, and while it's just exciting at first, eventually you see just how precisely constructed they are, with Spielberg making sure that almost every event in one of those sequences is the result of things he has shown you a few moments before, just shortly enough that the hole in the gasoline truck is fresh in your mind when someone starts waving fire around but long enough that the ensuing explosion doesn't feel out of nowhere. The camera tracks the action rather than jumping around, and this isn't just a matter of how they made movies "then" as opposed to "now"; Spielberg stages this sort of scene in the likes of Jurassic Park and The Adventures of Tintin with the same attention to flow. Just as impressively, he uses action to reveal character, as well - things slow down just enough at times that Indy's personality (and that of the other characters) can shine through without ever stopping for a mere quip.
That's when it's great to have the likes of Harrison Ford on board. Ford's at his most charming here, having a blast with a script that makes its action hero quite capable of screwing up without ever looking less cool for it. It's a very funny performance without being jokey, especially as Jones gets worn down over the course of the movie. Like a lot of the film, though, this performance gets better with multiple viewings: There's a darkness to Indiana Jones that makes Belloq's comments about them being more alike than Jones thinks have teeth - behind the heroic actions and funny responses to frustration is a guy who can have his eye so clearly on the prize that he'll lose track of what that relic he's chasing means or what kind of danger he's putting Marion in to get it. The conflict between monomania and the conscience he does have is something that pops up in interesting places throughout the movie as well as the other films in the series, and the way it seems like something he always has to wrestle with is a big part of why Indiana Jones is Ford's best role on the merits, not just an audience favorite.Of course, it's also a favorite, and re-watching "Raiders" with a large crowd is always a delight, particularly if the theater books one of the spiffy recent 35mm prints: Each individual piece is so well-done, and the combination so perfect, that it's not just the simple pleasure of recognition that makes the audience cheer: It's discovering that this thing they've loved for decades still works, and may actually be better than they realized. There aren't a lot of films that can reward regular revisits like that, so it's fortunate (for me) that chances to see this one again come relatively frequently.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=223&reviewer=371
originally posted: 07/09/13 13:34:04
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Trilogy Starters: For more in the Trilogy Starters series, click here.
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USA
12-Jun-1981 (PG)
DVD: 14-Oct-2008
UK
30-Jul-1981 (PG)
Australia
14-Aug-1981 (M)
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