I was a kid when I first saw this and I feel like a kid again when I see it today. Almost, at least. I’m too old and jaded to see this great adventure story and want to BE Indiana Jones anymore, but my enjoyment of it has deepened over time because I now get what a sincere love letter it is to the old movie serials. Here Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, both children of the 1950s Saturday matinee, revive for the 80s the kind of swashbuckler hero who’d gone out of fashion. Star Wars got the ball rolling, but Raiders of the Lost Ark made the homage explicit by setting it in the 1930s, the age of the serials. They give these old ideas a fresh polish and a modern sense of humor—and they did it so well that they created a new icon who stands on his own.
Many of the stunts here are high dollar versions of ones straight out of the old low-budget serials. Also, while Indiana Jones isn’t a masked crimefighter like The Shadow or The Green Hornet, Spielberg sets him up in the beginning as a wordless mystery man who lets his bullwhip do his talking—and then smartly humanizes him in the same scene by having Jones be the loser in a race to acquire an obscenely rare artifact (actually Jones does all of the life-threatening work to get a golden idol out of a trap-filled ancient cavern only for a villainous rival archaeologist to swipe it from him and take the credit.) Further, he leads a classic double-life as a man of action who’s a nerdy, bow tie-sporting college professor on the side.
It’s pure fantasy, an invitation to a dream world, a trip to La La Land. Ain’t a realistic moment in the whole thing. Indiana Jones is the luckiest adventurer of all-time, no doubt. Any time death looks certain, there’s always a handy vine or rope or hollow wall to get him out of it. And anyone who fires a gun at him has the worst aim on Earth (again, shades of Star Wars, where every bad guy shoots like he’s half-blind). You could poke holes in this one all day.
You can also talk all day about how beautifully made it is, how Harrison Ford’s screen charisma could power a city block and how exciting and mysterious the film renders its exotic locales—and that’s the conversation that I’d rather have.