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Poster (c) Paramount Pictures
The famous plot has Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) first being chased by a gigantic boulder (which has been parodied so many times it felt like I had already seen it), and then going on a treasure hunt to find the Biblical lost ark, which supposedly holds the original Ten Commandments before some Nazis do. Along the way, he meets up with his former teacher/friend’s daughter Marion (Karen Allen) who has an important piece of the puzzle, and together the travel to stop the Nazis from, basically, taking over the world.
It’s easy to picture this movie as a cheesy serial, and, in fact, Steven Spielberg himself said that that’s all he thought this was as he was making it. Little did he know that he was going to create one of the most influential movies in the history of American cinema. That has both good and bad side effects. The good is that there seems to be no work like this, none that can compare. The bad is the countless number of imitators. Many have done the “map with the line tracing where the hero goes” now, and it seems like Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the first action movies that has a lot of comedy in it, and now every action movie is labeled as an “action comedy”.
Rarely does a movie come along in this vein where you are entertained even when there isn’t a fight scene or something that most people would consider exciting on screen. Spielberg knows what the audience wants, and by gum he gives it to them. The majority of people don’t want a lot of exposition, so just enough is given. Even when something exciting is not happening on screen, you have to pay attention to understand what everyone is saying with all of their accents. That could be one advantage to seeing this on DVD. Although it would be great to see it on the big screen, I could put on the subtitles at home.
I hate to say this, though, but there were a few things about this movie that bugged me. First, even for a crowd-pleasing movie like this, the lack of character development on many side characters bothered me (I’m a guy who loves his character development). Also, although John Williams is a genius composer, the same few bars got a little tiring after he played them over and over again in every scene. All in all, though, Raiders of the Lost Ark is a true classic.
Rated PG for strong violence/blood and some language.
Review Date: December 10, 2003