Echos of the Lost Cast

Rating: 6/10 (9 April 2017)

The film that captured the imagination of entire generations aged rather well and is still a decent watch but some parts have rotten away like bad cheese. What still stands are the lush, romanticized depiction of the pre-WWII period, the camera-work and the music. And Karen Allen's brazen quirkiness.
More obvious now than before is that Tom Selleck's stand-in, Harrison Ford, proved an unsuitable lead. He brings in a rather difficult chemistry for the film that is supposed to be a goofball, roller-coaster adventure. Ford is clunky, suffering and reluctant, bordering on depression. There is a conspicuous lack of joy about his Indiana Jones that shouldn't be there, because it's at odds with everything else in the film. His comebacks at other characters come off as angry snaps rather than comic relieves. He doesn't possess that devil-may-care attitude that would convince the viewer that his character actually likes all these adventures, nor does he exude that suave, Bondian eroticism that should sell that scene where all of his female students want to eat the good professor alive. The audience must have given him a pass simply because everybody still saw a Han Solo in him.
The lack of a lead that is neither too serious to expose the silly nor too hammingly humorous to drag everything into a camp is what the whole film suffers for. It's because the plot itself treads the fine line between awesome and idiotic. It mixes top-class religious artifacts and magical powers with Nazis and harebrained schemes of world domination, cartoon action with sadistic villains and their gruesome deaths, some really terrible lines of dialog with some really good one-liners, and a bungling detective story with a truly awe-inspiring and larger-than- life finale. Without the poster face that could make you forget that this mishmash of ideas, that only George Lucas could churn out, doesn't quite hold water it's easier to be taken out of the film by some of its lowest points.
What keeps it together still is the brilliant direction of Steven Spielberg. His visual style was at that fledgling time of his career pretty flamboyant, with daring but perfunctory choice of angles, camera movements and compositions, which lent itself to great pacing - moving quickly through the plot points and keeping the tension in the set-pieces with the idea that no one notices how ridiculous they are. He builds up very well towards the climactic end and the revelation of the real hero of the film: the mythical Ark. Its matter-of-fact act of self-defense is a big pay-off so few films achieve these days. It's doubtful that a conventional director, however competent, would have been able to deliver anything better than a B-schlock with the given material.
Harrison Ford made a career playing gloomy characters that got stuck in unpleasant situations and just wanted to leave. He should have been nowhere near this film. Steven Spielberg is a genius for making this work at all, let alone gain a cult-status, of all things.