Review of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) by Cinemasins — 08 May 2015

Despite what the DVD marketeers are currently claiming, the title of this movie was, is, and always shall be Raiders of the Lost Ark, not Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. There are times when revisionism can be taken too far, and this is one of those instances. I don't need all of my Indiana Jones titles next to each other in my DVD library. I'm perfectly capable of going to the "R" section for Raiders rather than having it alongside the sequels, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

You have to love a movie that is so devilishly clever as to make the hero's every effort, no matter how Herculean, irrelevant to the conclusion. Had Dr. Jones elected to go on an extended vacation to Mozambique and never have anything to do with the Ark of the Covenant, nothing would have changed. Jones doesn't save the day. In fact, he doesn't come close to rescuing it, unless one considers his having failed as being the key to success. (Although he does get the girl.) Yes, the movie ends with melting faces, but, underneath all of that liquefying flesh and exploding heads, there's an abundance of irony just waiting for the attentive movie-goer to unearth. When was the last time that an action hero has been so utterly, completely inconsequential as Indiana Jones?

But, in discussing the ending, I'm getting ahead of myself. Better, instead, to go back to the beginning. Where that is, is anyone's guess. It could be back in the late '40s, when a young George Lucas was enthralled by the cliffhanger serials that would inspire this film. It could be in 1975, when Steven Spielberg made a little movie about a not-so-little shark and suddenly became a big name in Hollywood. It could be in 1977 when Lucas' Star Wars singlehandedly revived science fiction and solidified the concept of the summer blockbuster. Or it could be later in that same year, when Lucas and Spielberg, while both vacationing in Hawaii, decided that they had to work together on a project. That project would become Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Action movies were a different breed in the pre-1981 years than they are today, and one of the reasons for their transformation had to do with Raiders of the Lost Ark. Before this movie, James Bond ruled the roost and the Bond formula was the accepted path that any self-respecting action movie would follow. The first Indiana Jones outing changed that. The film was constructed as a series of cliffhangers with narrow, death-defying escapes. Not since the era of serials have audiences so often asked the question, "How's he going to get out of this one?" It's unfair to claim that the 007 outings were unexciting, but, compared to Raiders of the Lost Ark, they come across as sedate. Raiders transformed the action movie landscape. In the years that followed, nearly every action movie would try to generate the same sense of suspense and tension. Even the Bond movies would catch on.

Certainly, Raiders of the Lost Ark is a breathless, white-knuckle experience of a movie. It is also perfectly paced. There's enough time in between the frequent action scenes to provide the minimum of exposition and character development for us to understand what's going on and to appreciate the relationships between the individuals who populate the screen. There's none of the frantic quick-cutting that has since become a staple of action movies (thank you, editor Michael Kahn!), and the production does not seem frenzied and out-of-control. This isn't a case of cardboard figures running around in circles and blowing things up. We care about Indy and Marion in ways that we rarely care about protagonists in this genre. When Marion "dies," it stings.

For composer John Williams, who has long been favored by both Spielberg and Lucas, the chance to work on Raiders of the Lost Ark offered him an opportunity to collaborate with them both, and to add another memorable theme song to his list of credits. In the five-year period from 1977 to 1982, Williams created five of movie-dom's most popular title tracks: Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T.

The deserved popularity of Raiders of the Lost Ark resulted in a huge box office bonanza for Paramount Pictures. This is the kind of movie that, even today, audiences immediately fall in love with. It has all the right ingredients: a smart script, a likable hero, a dash of romance, more than a touch of comedy, and a lot of fast-paced action. The two sequels are vastly inferior - Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is too ponderous and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is unforgivably fatuous. Yet, because the first entry of the series leaves such an indelible imprint, the existence of lesser chapters to the Indiana Jones saga does nothing to dilute its impact. Raiders of the Lost Ark is a movie to be savored by viewers of all ages and all persuasions.