The adventure of a lifetime!

Rating: 10/10 (25 May 2008)

When it comes to picking my favorite Steven Spielberg film, I never quite know which one to choose. To make things easier, I divided the movies in two categories: serious and "popcorn" (in the good sense of the word, naturally). As far as the first group is concerned, there is no doubt: the best of the serious films is Schindler's List, tightly followed by Saving Private Ryan. But in the blockbuster group, the dilemma emerges again: Jaws? E.T.? Close Encounters? They're all so good it's damn near impossible to select an absolute favorite. And then a series of images and sounds come to mind: boulders, Nazis, snakes, the legendary theme by John Williams, and many others, all related to the best trilogy of the '80s (yes, even better than Star Wars), and most of all to the unsurpassed first installment: Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Explicitly conceived by George Lucas as a revival of the adventure serials he enjoyed as a kid, Raiders has one word written all over it: fun. That's its reason to exist, and it never fails to deliver on those terms. From the moment archaeologist/treasure hunter Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is introduced, surviving death traps in South America, you know you're in for two hours of flawless entertainment: starting in the jungle, continuing in the desert and climaxing on a mountain top, Raiders takes Indiana, and the viewer, around the world on a never-ending ride disguised as the quest for the Ark of the Covenant.
The magic of the film, as pointed out by Total Film, is all in Spielberg's approach to the story: the sillier the concept, the less seriously you have to take it. Several lesser directors (Michael Bay first and foremost) have done exactly the opposite, sucking all the fun out of the picture. Raiders, on the other hand, rises above all its imitators because it knows how far from realistic Lawrence Kasdan's terrific screenplay is and turns that into an asset: Hitler's passion for the occult might even be based on fact, but the chances of Nazis cooperating with a French scumbag (Paul Freeman, excellent) to retrieve a source of unlimited mystic power are slim to say the least. Yeah, so what? The dialogue is consistently quotable, the music instantly hummable and the action scenes justly deemed some of the best ever filmed.
And then there's Ford: humane, sardonic, occasionally rude, occasionally a bad-ass, constantly lovable. Having already worked with Lucas on American Graffiti and Star Wars, he knows the right way to play the part and does so with utmost perfection. His charisma is ideally matched by Indiana's fundamental quality: he is no superhero, just a regular person who gets dragged in extraordinary situations. Also, for a genre defined by the charms of James Bond, he is all but invincible with the ladies, his love-hate relationship with Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), the first and best of the "Indy girls", going in the most unexpected directions for the whole duration of the feature. He's a unique character, aided by equally unique sidekicks (Denholm Elliott and John Rhys-Davies) in a most outstanding genre picture.
To be brief: there is no reason why Raiders of the Lost Ark, alongside the other Indy movies, shouldn't be on every must-see list in the world. The Indiana Jones trilogy is a faultless combination of B-movie spirit and A-list talent that can't be described as a simple series of adventure or action films: it practically constitutes a genre of its own.