Raiders of the Lost Ark | Film review

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas take a lot of heat for the way Jaws and Star Wars transformed the studio system into a summer-blockbuster conveyor belt. In reality, it took the perfect synthesis of both their sensibilities to rewrite Hollywood’s playbook. That synthesis was Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Today’s class of noisy event movies, constructed like nonstop roller-coaster rides, owes a clear debt to this 1981 collaboration, which introduced the world to Harrison Ford’s whip-snapping, gun-toting Indiana Jones. From that opening plunder of the temple to the final, face-melting minutes—maybe the gooiest, goriest climax ever wedged into a PG movie—Raiders is one breathless, ingenious cliffhanger after another. Back on 35mm for its 30th anniversary (the Music Box says it’s the first U.S. theater presenting the new digital restoration), it still plays like the platonic ideal of the popcorn movie.

Of course, Spielberg and Lucas didn’t do it alone. Like the previous year’s The Empire Strikes Back—which this actually improves on—Raiders was penned by Lawrence Kasdan, who again took an adolescent-fantasy blueprint from Lucas and gave it dimension and wit and flair. It’s Ford, though, who lends the film its spark of timeless, brainy-brash charm; he’s like James Bond spliced with Allan Quatermain, with a dash of Bogartian grit for good measure. Slyly but unmistakably, he’s also a Semitic superhero, a coding that makes the Nazi-vanquishing Raiders a strangely moving act of boyhood wish-fulfillment. It’s not just Spielberg’s most purely entertaining movie, but also, in its own featherweight, escapist way, one of his most personal.