Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made (2015)

In 2016, every cool person or thing known to exist is the subject of a documentary or has one on the way. Do you have a camera crew following you around? If not, you probably suck, I’m sorry to say. Just accept it and hang with me in the shadows and watch some of these documentaries. Like this one. If you’ve never seen Chris Strompolos, Eric Zala and Jayson Lamb’s  painstaking Raiders of the Lost Ark remake shot on video from 1982 to 1989 when they were all school kids, then this will make you need to hunt it down immediately. The movie industry talking heads here still can’t believe it exists even after they’ve seen it and the now grown-up original makers are stunned by the attention. Every documentary needs a hook and this one has at least two. The first is the story behind the making of this truly odd artifact. The other hook is the uphill struggle of these guys to finish their project decades later, with some Kickstarter money, some time off from their jobs and a dream to finally conquer the film’s most difficult scene (for a no-budget project, at least): the one where Indiana Jones fights Nazis while dodging the moving propellers of an airplane that eventually explodes. It’s a charming celebration of movie fandom, as well as an inspiring story of men who recapture youthful energy and defiance that they didn’t know they still had in them. As we get older, many people think that energy gets taken away from us, but I disagree. Rather, I think it’s something that merely gets lost in the clutter, both physical and mental, of our years. Here are some people who managed to clear a path.