"It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage."

Rating: 10/10 (1 February 2014)

"Raiders of the Lost Ark" is an out-of-body experience, a movie of glorious imagination and breakneck speed that grabs you in the first shot, hurtles you through a series of incredible adventures, and deposits you back in reality two hours later -- breathless, dizzy, wrung-out, and with a silly grin on your face.
It's the kind of movie where the hero gets out of bed wondering what daring exploits and astonishing, cliff-hanging, death-defying threats he will have to survive in the next ten seconds.
It's actually more than a movie; it's a catalog of adventure. For locations, it ticks off the jungles of South America, the hinterlands of Tibet, the deserts of Egypt, a hidden submarine base, an isolated island, two forgotten tombs and an American archaeology classroom.
Harrison Ford is the embodiment of Indiana Jones: dry, fearless, and as indestructible as a cartoon coyote.
Steven Spielberg's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" plays like an anthology of the best parts from all the Saturday matinée serials ever made. It takes place in Africa, Nepal, Egypt, at sea and in a secret submarine base. It contains trucks, bulldozers, tanks, motorcycles, ships, subs, Pan Am Clippers, and a Nazi flying wing. It has snakes, spiders, booby traps and explosives. The hero is trapped in a snake pit, and the heroine finds herself assaulted by mummies. The weapons range from revolvers and machine guns to machetes and whips. And there is the supernatural, too, as the Ark of the Covenant triggers an eerie heavenly fire that bolts through the bodies of the Nazis. Watch it with someone you know fairly well. There will be times during the film when it will be necessary to grab somebody.
"Raiders of the Lost Ark" is a swashbuckling adventure epic in the tradition of "Star Wars," "Superman," the James Bond pictures, and all the other multimillion-dollar special-effects extravaganzas. It wants only to entertain. It succeeds.