We'll always have Tanis

Rating: 10/10 (21 May 2008)

Superlatives fail. What to say? Paragon? Pinnacle? Zenith? I surrender. This review isn't meant to convince anyone that Raiders is a good movie, or a great movie, or an immortal movie in film history, b/c I believe that to be an established fact. Twenty-seven years after I first saw it on the big screen in Murray, KY, in the summer of 1981, it has lost nothing of its greatness. This is a review about WHY it is SO GREAT. Why it defined the summer blockbuster forever after, why it spawned so many (inferior) wanna-be franchises, why even its own sequels, done by the same creative team, don't measure up and can't measure up. Don't get me wrong - they are wonderful films, enormous fun and far superior to anything else made in the same vein. But Raiders stands alone, the Everest of summer action adventure. Why?
#1 - THE DIRECTOR One of the best directors in film history. Spielberg, a lover of classic Hollywood films, was the perfect director for this project. He's also a director who could go toe to toe with Wyler, Hitchcock, Lang, etc.
#2 - THE ACTORS The casting of actors who were virtual throwbacks to golden age Hollywood stars. Ford/Bogart, Allen/Bacall, Freeman/Rathbone and Lacey/Lorre were perfect fits and brought more to the table than just their performances, by evoking the greats of yesteryear.
#3 - THE STUNTS The celebration of serials. The legacy of Republic serials and their amazing stunt team (Yakima Cannutt, etc.) is homaged like nowhere else in Raiders. The idea to take B-movie serial pacing and cliffhanger stuntwork and make an A movie out of it was genius. Thank you, George. Indeed, one reason for Raiders' greatness is that it took all the best bits and left little for any of the other films. Swing over pit, collapsing temple, boulder tunnel, automatic spikes and darts, (that's just the first five minutes), burning building, fistfight with multiple opponents, poison, snake pit, fight around propellers, horse to truck transfer with Cannutt's signature travel under the wagon -- any of the great serial cliffhanger death traps not done here were done in the second film. What's left?
#4 - THE MACGUFFIN The Ark of the Covenant is THE BEST MacGuffin in adventure film history. Better than the Maltese Falcon, better than the Holy Grail, better than anything. Thank you, Philip Kaufman. I hope you got paid a lot for giving George the idea. No one had done it before, and I don't think anyone will be able to do it again. Let's face it, the Maltese Falcon is just a valuable statue. The Holy Grail is a medieval legend that doesn't even appear in the Bible. But the ARK - it's got the bona fides.
#5 - THE SCRIPT The character development, dialogue, pacing -- everything is spot on. Beautifully laid out by another creative artist who understands and loves classic Hollywood -- Lawrence Kasdan. He did his best work here, and it shows. Keeping it a period piece set in the 1930s with Nazis for villains only makes it work even better. The flavor is just right. Note for those writing scripts: Larry has shown you the way. More than three good guys is TOO MANY. We don't have time or emotional energy to invest in more than Indy, Marion and Sallah. (Tolkein split up the Fellowship for the same reason.) "More characters" is not the answer.
#6 - THE EFFECTS Old school photographic effects combined with practical effects. It's still the way to go. We don't like digital. If we want that, we'll go play a video game. Practical effects look fake 10% of the time and digital effects look fake 90% of the time. You do the math. Digital is good for solving the same problems mattes and rear projection used to solve. It's good for erasing C stands and stunt safety wires. Not for creating characters. You need actors for that. This is why the Hulk movies have flopped. It's why Gollum succeeded - b/c so much of Gollum was Andy Serkis. The effects in Raiders are old school taken to a new level of excellence. There is sweat involved, and not sweating over a mouse and keyboard.
#7 - THE WRINKLES Raiders was shot quick and dirty. Sometimes, as a result, there are continuity errors. You can see the phone pole sticking out of the bottom of the truck. Marion's shots with the headpiece don't match. If the Staff of Ra is five feet tall, Indy is three and a half feet tall. AND I LOVE IT. Here's why - It's a real movie made by real artists. When a movie is so over-produced and tinkered with that it feels plastic, I hate it. I'm the same way with music. Here comes a guitar solo, but actually it's been built up in seven layers in the studio, each one with a different filter. At this point we're so far away from the guy and the guitar, I don't have a sense of who he is or what his art is about. Unlike a lot of later films, Raiders wasn't made in a Petrie dish. And that makes it fun. Thank God.
For these and other reasons, I hold this movie to be one of the top ten Greatest of All Time. Not even the people who made it knew it would be what it turned out to be. That doesn't mean we should give up on action/adventure films, b/c they just aren't going to get any better. It just means we have a high standard, and hooray for those movies that come close to it. And when we experience the disappointment of the ones that try and fail, remember -- --we'll always have Tanis.