Raiders of the Lost Ark Review

With only a few weeks to go before the premiere of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, producer George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg's long-awaited fourth feature film starring Harrison Ford as archaeologist/adventurer Indiana Jones, it's hard to believe that it's been 19 years since audiences saw him riding off (literally) into the sunset at the end of 1989's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

It's harder still to believe that nearly 30 years have passed since we got our first glimpse of the "obtainer of rare antiquities" with a penchant for getting into trouble; Indiana Jones, with his now-familiar snapbrim fedora, leather aviator's jacket, and his skills with guns and the bullwhip, has become a classic icon of action-adventure films, especially those involving fortune-seeking rogues with hearts of gold and ancient artifacts with supernatural properties.

The Indiana Jones franchise - which, like its space-fantasy counterpart Star Wars, has become a lucrative multi-media and merchandising treasure chest for Lucas, not only consists of the four feature films, but Indy has battled villains and crossed the globe in novels, video games, comic books, and a critically-acclaimed but not very successful "prequel" TV series, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, which aired for two and a half seasons on ABC in the early 1990s.

But, as the tag-line for another Lucas prequel film puts it, every saga must have a beginning, and Indy's saga begins with the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a.k.a. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, in the summer of 1981.

Starring Harrison Ford (Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope) as Indy, Raiders begins like a James Bond film - at the climactic tail-end of a previous adventure in order to introduce the character and set up the main plot of its story. This prologue is set in South America circa 1936, where Indiana Jones is searching for a gold idol in the Peruvian jungle. In a series of cliffhangers, Indy overcomes betrayal by his two Peruvian "partners," a booby-trapped temple, and a huge rolling boulder and almost gets the idol....only to have it taken from him by his archrival Rene Belloq (Paul Freeman), who has allied himself with a fierce but naive tribe, the Hovitos, just to take the sacred idol and sell it.

Indy escapes - barely - but not before we discover that the seemingly fearless Dr. Jones has one heck of a phobia:

Indiana: There's a big snake in the plane, Jock.
Jock: Oh, that's just my pet snake Reggie.
Indiana: I hate snakes, Jock. I hate 'em.
Jock: C'mon, show a little backbone, will ya? .

Raiders then takes the audience on a globe-trotting race against time as Indiana, a renowned archaeologist at an unnamed American university, is approached by two Army Intelligence officers to help them solve a mystery:

Colonel Musgrove: Yesterday afternoon our European section intercepted a German communique that was sent from Cairo to Berlin.
Major Eaton: You see, for the last two years the Nazis have had teams of archaeologists running around the world looking for all sorts of religious artifacts. Hitler's gone nuts on the subject. He's crazy. He's obsessed with the occult. And right now, apparently, there is some kind of German archaeological dig going on in the desert outside Cairo.
Colonel Musgrove: Now we have some information here but we can't make anything out of it and maybe you can. "Tanis development proceeding. Acquire headpiece, Staff of Ra, Abner Ravenwood, US."

Professor Ravenwood, we are told, once was Indy's archaeology instructor, mentor and friend during his days at the University of Chicago, and Tanis was the older man's obsession, mainly because that lost Egyptian city was supposedly one of the resting places of the Lost Ark of the Covenant.

Indiana:The Nazis have discovered Tanis!
Major Eaton: Now just what does that mean to you? Tanis?
Indiana: Tanis is one of the possible resting places of the Lost Ark.
Colonel Musgrove: The Lost Ark?
Indiana: Yeah, the Ark of the Covenant. The chest the Hebrews used to carry the 10 Commandments around in.
Major Eaton: Alright, now, what do you mean the 10 Commandments? You talking about the 10 Commandments?
Indiana: Yes, the actual 10 Commandments, the original stone tablets that Moses came down out of Mount Horeb and smashed if you believe in that sort of thing. Didn't you guys ever go to Sunday School?

Impressed by Indy's presentation, the Army operatives tell Indy's friend and boss Marcus Brody that in exchange for Dr. Jones' talents for acquiring the Ark before the Nazis do, they will let the museum keep the ancient relic after it has been studied. And knowing that he needs the headpiece of the Staff of Ra to find the resting place of the Ark, Indy must head to Nepal and seek either Abner or his daughter Marion (Karen Allen), a girl with whom Indy had had a relationship...which in turn led to a falling out between the young archaeologist and Marion's father.

Director Steven Spielberg, working from a screenplay by writer-director Lawrence Kasdan (Body Heat, Star Wars - Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back), gives us a rip-roaring, fun-filled, and deliberately campy action-adventure that deliberately evokes the thrills and chills of Saturday afternoon "serials" of the 1930s and '40s, the same genre that inspired Indiana Jones' creator George Lucas when he conceived Star Wars in 1973. (In fact, Lucas wavered back and forth between starting the adventures of "Indiana Smith" and the space-fantasy; in the end, Star Wars was produced first, borrowing the phrase "I have a bad feeling about this" along the way.)

Kasdan's screenplay, which was based on the story by Lucas and a concept by Philip Kaufman, takes elements from the screwball comedies of Preston Sturges, the action adventures of Howard Hawks, and some of the spirit of Michael Curtiz's Errol Flynn crowd-pleasers. Raiders has all the imprints of the serials that it's channeling, and it has a sassy, tongue-in-cheek sensibility that makes up for some of its calculated lack of spontaneity. (Director Nicholas Meyer has said that the Indiana Jones movies are so meticulously storyboarded and pre-planned, the only "real" moment in Raiders is when a fly makes its way into Harrison Ford's mouth during a tense confrontation between Indy and Belloq.)

There are so many elements that make Raiders of the Lost Ark a pleasure to watch. Harrison Ford, obviously, steps into a role initially intended for Tom Selleck and truly makes it his own; Ford's Indy is resourceful, brave, reckless, romantic in a masculine manner, capable of delivering one-liners, and at the same time he's cerebral and at times even shady. Han Solo made have made Ford a household name, after all, but Indiana Jones is the role that proved he could carry a movie as a leading man.

The supporting cast, too, is great. The late Denholm Elliott shines as Indy's boss and advisor Marcus Brody, Paul Freeman is charming yet treacherous as the renegade French archaeologist Belloq, Ronald Lacey as the ruthless Gestapo inquisitor Toht, John Rhys-Davies as Indy's Egyptian sidekick Sallah, and the luminous Karen Allen, whose portrayal of Marion Ravenwood, the sassy, spirited former lover who holds one of the keys to the location of the Lost Ark.

Featuring great stunts (some performed by Ford himself, including the famous rolling boulder in the prologue), fantastic special effects that still hold up over 20 years later, adept directing by Spielberg and a terrific score by composer John Williams, Raiders of the Lost Ark is an adventure film which has truly endured the test of time.

Of all the action-adventure films to come out in the 1980s, Raiders of the Lost Ark ranks head and shoulders above the rest. The Die Hard series of the late '80s and early '90s is pretty good in its own fashion, but it depends far too much on R-rated violence and "shock and awe." The Indiana Jones films, on the other hand, have their share of gunplay and "ewwww" moments, and Raiders has some really memorable ones -- the shootout in Marion's Nepal bar, the thousands of snakes in the Well of Souls, the "face-melting" wrath of the Ark finale -- but it's all done so broadly and with a lightness to the whole endeavor that one has fun watching Raiders of the Lost Ark. I still remember the first time I saw this in a theater in 1981; the audience was wildly clapping or cheering whenever Indy and his friends got out of a messy situation....which is the reaction Lucas and Spielberg were hoping for when they first got together on a Hawaiian beach and sketched out the story and character.