He doesn’t take home the idol, doesn’t get Marion to hand over the headpiece, doesn’t get to keep the Ark (twice), doesn’t convince Belloq to hand over his hostage. He cracks quips and whips with equal ease, and yet while he wins individual fights they never seem to bring him closer to his ultimate goals. He’s charming in a way that isn’t obvious, because he doesn’t seem to notice the audience (or his students) falling head-over-heels in love with him while his mind is on ancient relics. Indy, more than any single role, allowed Ford to display his physicality, his sense of humour and his hangdog charisma. Spielberg and Lucas didn’t expect their search to lead back to an already established name, but presumably divine intervention revealed the capital-T Truth: it always had to be Harrison Ford. The chase through the Egyptian market may not be (is not) culturally sensitive, but it has Looney Tunes levels of fun and inventiveness. The bar fight in Marion’s place in Tibet is packed with gags and also genuinely scary. Think about the beat before the stone starts to sink after Indy removes the golden idol and his look of horror his giant Nazi opponent by the flying wing the inevitable fact that it’s snakes. Moments of iconic action – the boulder, the bar brawl, the glorious truck chase – are leavened with wit and humour. You always know who’s who, what they want, and what’s stopping them from getting it. The action that inevitably follows is always terrific. The speed helps to build the tension even during dialogue scenes, because you know that something bad is always just around the corner. From the moment Denholm Elliott’s Marcus Brody arrives at Indy’s house, the shift to Tibet takes, what, two minutes? All densely packed with exposition, character and backstory, plus a leather jacket, a whip and a gun. That James Bond-esque action opener gives us all the Jones trademarks – whip, hat, fear of snakes, nifty way with death traps, a certain idealism combined with a flexible attitude to antiquities law – and a rolling boulder in the first 10 minutes. Spielberg, with screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, crafts an astonishingly well-told, economical action film. Still, you can feel two masters of blockbuster filmmaking trying to recapture the joys of their boyhoods, which explains the sometimes giddy sense that this was made by kids in a candy shop. There’s an edge to Raiders that few of those 1930s originals have, in Toht’s branding and in that horrifying finale. They wanted to bring back all the excitement and derring-do that they remembered but, crucially, with a proper budget, all-new special effects, and a certain post-New Hollywood sensibility. On a rare lull in his career after 1941 (now reclaimed as a misunderstood gem, but that’s another story), Spielberg famously went on holiday with George Lucas and they got talking about the adventure serials of their youth. Raiders is astonishingly great because it is a perfect film.įirst and foremost, that’s down to Steven Spielberg. The other Indiana Jones films are (mostly) astonishingly great because they’re a lot like Raiders. And if this film teaches us anything, it’s that challenging God is not a good idea. If Raiders had a flaw (see Note 2), it would be like the deliberate mistake that master Persian carpet weavers introduce to their intricate patterns so that they don’t challenge God himself. Raiders is a perfect film: if it had flaws (which it does not – see Note 1, below) they’d be like the scar on Harrison Ford’s chin: a flourish to set off the perfection of the rest. Here’s the thing: you can argue for another Indiana Jones film as the archaeologist’s greatest adventure, but then Raiders comes along and outshines it with a light that reduces all who disrespect it to dust.
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