Hacker Cinema
Raiders of the Lost Ark
1981 · Film · 115 min
Part of Indiana Jones Collection
Directed by Steven Spielberg
When Dr. Indiana Jones – the tweed-suited professor who just happens to be a celebrated archaeologist – is hired by the government to locate the legendary Ark of the Covenant, he finds himself up against the entire Nazi regime.
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55 comments on Hacker News
> Star Wars did also a fair amount of politics
You might be thinking of The Phantom Menace with its trade negotiations. The movie that Red Letter Media panned because of its focus on this plot point.
The feeble nod to politics in A New Hope mostly went over my head as a kid. It was already obvious the Empire was evil. They had a guy who choked people at a whim and another who blew up planets. The scene telling us the Emperor had dissolved the Senate meant nothing to me.
> maybe raise you Raiders of the Lost Ark
Fair point.
> But Star Wars is best when it's pulp adventure stuff.
This is the way. I saw the first Star Wars the week it opened as a tween and it rocked my world. Both SW and Raiders of the Lost Ark had a clear vision of building on the proven structure of the old B&W movie serials like Flash Gordon but updating them with modern storytelling tools and larger budgets. It was a truly great concept and then Empire raised the stakes higher and even better.
You're right that Mando Season 1 was an attempt to get back to the original concept and it got close. Skeleton Crew is perhaps the only other SW series where the core idea was to update a proven structure of the past in a pure and focused way - except it chose a different genre than 1930s serials. Initially I didn't know what to make of Skeleton Crew but once I got that it was building on the 1980s tween adventures like Goonies, I appreciated how it absolutely nailed what it was going for. My own kids are now older than Skeleton Crew's target audience, so it obviously wasn't for me but I applaud it as Disney's only other pure attempt at applying the 'big idea' that made OG SW great to another genre.
As a sci-fan who loved the original IP to the point of reverence, even bad Star Wars is usually at least interesting but it can also be frustrating when it evokes echoes of the OG by being set in the same universe without even trying to be great in the same ways as the OG. For example, Andor is unique in being a spin-off that is actually very good but I'd argue none of the things that make it so good require being set in the Star Wars universe. It might be even better if it had been unshackled from the rules of the Star Wars cinematic universe and was a new, original sci-fi IP.
Fair points, though let’s make a distinction here, as I would argue that Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark were GREAT ideas, not just good, though there’s some wiggle room in both of those labels for subjectivity. Not every movie is as commercially successful as Star Wars, but it might come away to public and critical reception as “good”, more than break even at the box office, and set the director up for being allowed to direct again.
Nowadays though, it seems like traditional movie studios only want mega blockbusters, which left the door open for Netflix and Amazon to create things with lower financial expectations, but still deliver quality.
So basically, I don’t equate good, with blockbuster, or whatever Schrader equates with good. I can fondly name 20 or 30 movies that made out okay, that weren’t necessarily hard for a good writer to come up with, that all had different subjects.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind was indeed when I first noticed this effect. It was dramatic and cool and all that, but pretty obviously an effect. Coupling it with Raiders of the Lost Ark and the effect almost pigeon-holes a film to be of that era.
I'm unsurprised Douglas Trumbull was behind the Close Encounters effect since his work on 2001: A Space Odyssey captured his earliest experiments filming tanks of liquids with fluids added. They were fairly effective in Kubrick's film when they appeared to resemble fantastic nebulae, globular clusters…
(And never mind the mind-bending cleverness of how the slit-scan shots were created for 2001.)
That's true on there being lots of terrible practical effects out there. The parent lauded Raiders of the Lost Ark for its practical effects. In contrast, Last Crusade was a great movie that had a few practical effects that were terrible. The scene with the tank going over the edge of the cliff is so bad and so fake that I could help rewind and pause to laugh at it when I was a kid.
> it is immediately assumed as CGI
Remember seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark, watching Indiana Jones being dragged under a lorry by his whip and thinking "wow, that's a brilliant stunt"?
Remember (or did you forget) seeing the latest Indiana Jones film with a CGI motorbike and a CGI Indiana Jones jumping onto a moving train?
One will always be more impressive than the other.
Read some interviews with Spielberg and Lucas about how they wanted the Marion character to act and the age they originally wanted. It's not pretty at all. I'm not sure who convinced them to follow a different path, but Raiders of the Lost Ark would have been quite a different film if they had followed through with some of the ideas they were spitballing.
It was solidly OK in my opinion.
The primary beefs seem to be with the supposed plot holes and one-dimensional characters. I won't argue that this movie is perfect because it isn't but IMO the proliferation of video essays on film has turned everybody into a critic. Many now think that narrative works have to fit into a "hero's journey" template where we have to identify with extensively-developed characters just because some guy with a beard on YouTube cut together some clips from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" while ranting loudly and quickly about the Platonic form of narrative structure as executed by blockbuster 80s films. These people clearly don't understand that large swaths of narrative entertainment don't fit this mold and Tron is one such franchise. Complaining about the admittedly-cheesy MacGuffin and Jared Leto's wooden acting in this movie is tantamount to saying that there weren't enough car chases in "Pride and Prejudice". It's a feature-length music video with sci-fi themes, not a modern epic. Enjoy it for what it is.
I'll never see this movie again but I was satisfied with what my $17 bought. I'd recommend seeing it in IMAX before it goes away because the experience won't translate at home.
There's merit to your suspicions. For example, the 1996 movie A Time to Kill depicts a black father avenging the rape and attempted murder of his ten-year-old daughter by two white men, using it to depict the evils of white racism, and justifying vigilantism. The rape (but not the vigilantism) is based on a true event, when the author witnessed the "harrowing" court testimony of a 12 year old rape and assault victim, with two simplifications: there were two victims and one assailant, instead of two assailants and one victim, and the races were reversed: the perpetrator was black, and the victims were white: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Time_to_Kill_(Grisham_novel)#Inspiration
Similarly, the film Bad Ass features an older Latino that beats up white skinheads that were harassing and threatening him. Based on a real event, where an older white man was being harassed and threatened by a black man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Ass_(film)
The film River's Edge is about a boyfriend that kills his girlfriend, both white teens. Based on a real murder, but the perpetrator there was black: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River%27s_Edge
The Netflix series Painkiller features a capable black woman lawyer that takes on the Purdue pharma in the opioid epidemic. The real lawyer was white: https://www.thepublica.com/netflix-accused-of-race-swapping-after-replacing-investigators-who-took-down-purdue-pharma-during-opioid-crisis-with-a-fictional-black-woman/
In Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Nazis have free reign in Egypt, and the locals support and cheer for the British and Allies, to the point of breaking into song lauding British sailors. In reality, Egypt at that time was effectively under British occupation, which the Egyptians fiercely disliked, and hated the British (they would have a revolution against them in 1952).
Let’s be real, the overwhelming majority of those 500 are straight up terrible. Netflix alone has produced well over 100 movies, and IMO at best some of them are worth finishing not that I can think of any off the top of my head.
Now I’m sure you’ve looked forward to many movies but off the top of your head list stuff you’ve either seen more than once and or actually recommend to someone that came our in the last 10 years vs…
(78) The Deer Hunter, Superman, National Lampoon's Animal House, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (79) Apocalypse Now, Alien, Life of Brian, Mad Max, Escape from Alcatraz (80) The Shining, Star Wars: Episode V, Airplane!, The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack, The Elephant Man (81) Raiders of the Lost Ark, Das Boot, The Evil Dead, Mad Max 2, Escape from New York, Time Bandits (82) Blade Runner, The Thing, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Poltergeist, Conan the Barbarian, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Tron (83) Scarface, WarGames, Star Wars: Episode VI, Trading Places, The Evil Dead
Obviously not all great movies but that’s ~30 classic movies in just 6 years and I’m sure I’ve missed a few as kids movies are largely missing from that list.
The only one I've ever noticed on my own in a long life of watching movies is the compressed air tank to overturn a chariot in Gladiator (2000).
I was told about the pole that causes the truck to flip in Raiders of the Lost Ark and now I can't unsee it.
—Warning to those who enjoy 2001 A Space Odyssey with their blinders on...—
2001 made a big impression on me as a kid and I've seen it many times. There was a point when watching for the Nth time in middle age that I first noticed that all the anti-gravity shots show the actors bodies carrying their own weight. Especially in the aisle scene with the floating pen, which itself is rotating about the center of the sheet of clear plastic it's attached to rather than its center of mass. Later in the same sequence, food trays are brought to the bridge after the long scenes of a flight attendant, who picks up trays as they slide downs from a dispenser, and as she hands the trays to the crew, one of them instinctively puts his hand out under the tray to helpfully catch its weight. In the next scene an officer joins other crew by coming up from behind them, leaning over and resting his arms on their chair backs as the scene cuts to details of anti-gravity meal consumption. Finally Floyd stands in front of a toilet reading a 1000 word hard-printed list of instructions after the viewer has been shown electronic displays used everywhere else. The self-consciousness of that clip provides a lovely relief from all the previous cognitive dissonance. I'm not able to unsee any of this now and it detracts from the spectacle. But at the same time, it makes the orchestration and ideas of the movie seem all the more artistic, so nothing lost except innocence. There are many other oddities to find in the movie working on different planes of awareness, including proprioceptive assumptions about reality, intelligence, progress, and spirituality.
> Atari was not. Atari had many cash grab games like ET the extraterrestrial where most budget was spent in box art and marketing than game development.
It's a little bit ironic that Spielberg's love of videogames kinda ruined Atari.
It was Spielberg who pursued Atari, not the other way around.
Basically, the video game companies weren't looking to do movie tie-ins at the time. Spielberg loved videogames, and made a request to have Atari's Howard Scott Warshaw come out to SoCal to meet Spielberg.
That meeting led to Atari's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" game. Warshaw had previously done "Yar's Revenge" and "Adventure."
Then Spielberg asked Atari to make an E.T. game, and the rest is history.
Basically, if Atari had ignored Spielberg's call to make "Raiders," they wouldn't have made "ET" and they might have remained dominant for a few more years, preventing Nintendo from taking everything over in the mid 80s.
> I don’t know…the actual inspirations for Indiana Jones, like Allan Quatermain from H. Rider Haggard's novels, "King Solomon's Mines", and the real life Roy Chapman Andrews, who led expeditions to Mongolia and China in the 1920s and wore a fedora.
The actual inspiration for Indy was protagonist Harry Steele from the movie The Secret of the Incas (1954). Filmed on location in Cusco and Machu Picchu, before they became popular tourist destinations, the movie also had scenes and elements that made it into Raiders of the Lost Ark.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_of_the_Incas
The movie's available on YouTube! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TS7Fabyolw
A lot more info: http://www.theraider.net/information/influences/secret_of_incas.php
(And listen out for the astonishing voice of Yma Sumac!)
I had a friend whose home was full of movie memorabilia. The boxing shorts from Rocky, the journal from Raiders of the Lost Ark, props from Star Wars, etc. all professionally displayed in shadowboxes along with autographs and photos.
The only thing is that they were all fake. My friend's hobby wasn't collecting memorabilia, it was making fakes. He was quite open about the fact that none of it was real and would happily describe how he created each piece.
Merry Christmas to everyone! I've read a few great stories in here and thought of sharing mine. My childhood Christmas were never that special unfortunately and during my teen years, life was pretty tough. But I do have great memories from all the Christmas I had my wife over the past 20 years. We established a lot of Christmas traditions for our families, since I never had any from my childhood to share. Actually we just finished watching the Raiders of the Lost Ark and spent two hours talking about great cinema and of course me playing the Indiana Jones game from Lucasarts. Oh wish, I could get back in time and play that game for the first time. Not quite the same playing it these days, the magic unfortunately is gone.
So yeah today was a great Christmas day! All the best to the HN community.
I don't think Spielberg ever lost it. He's made a lot of exceptional films since E.T. or Raiders of the Lost Ark or whenever you could say he had power and money. Saving Pricate Ryan, Schindler's List, Jurrassic Park, etc. Even clunkers like Ready Player One show how great a director he really is.
That's just not true. My non-Roku TV has this as an option alongside dozens of others I can turn on and off.
I'm gonna need to see some data on that. The nearly universally description I hear from regular, non-techie people is "my TV started looking weird", especially when they're watching content they're familiar with. If a brand new movie or show looked like this and that's the only way I'd ever seen it, fine, so be it. I remember seeing "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in soap opera mode on our then-new TV and thinking "WTF is this and how do I turn it off?". That's not what Indiana Jones movies are supposed to look like.
A bit of context: Leigh Brackett was a sci-fi author and screenwriter that George Lucas hired to write the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back in 1977. She wrote it based on a story conference the two had but unfortunately passed away from cancer a month after submitting it in 1978. Lucas then wrote a few drafts himself but wasn't satisfied. Eventually, he brought on Lawrence Kasdan, who would also write Raiders of the Lost Ark and Return of the Jedi. This draft is a lot different from the movie that would eventually get made but you can still see hints of it in the final film. Both Kasdan and Brackett got a screenwriting credit for the film.
The warehouse is like the scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where they file away the artifact into a box to be placed alongside countless shelves of other artifacts. I wouldn't say it's filthy as much as I would say it's dark and cluttered- they can really use some more structured organization and inventory management. They get donations of really large equipment, and their first priority is that it has a place where it won't be scrapped. But they have a ton of stuff, a small staff and modest budget, so they do what they can.
One story they told me is that they are contacted by TV and movie production companies that need period-specific computers and props, so they'll pack up and send out various equipment and lease them out. They come back cleaned up and in better shape than when they sent them out.
I kinda hate Raiders of the Lost Ark — and the transcript really backs up why.
To be sure, I loved the film when it came out. I enjoyed it for what it was — a fun action romp.
But now some 40 or so years later I recognize it as perhaps the beginning of this downward slide that popular films have been on: films that are no more than a stitching together of action sequences — storyboard movies.
Characters are 2 dimensional, don't change or grow across the film arc, morality is black and white....
I saw one of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" films and was confused several times as to if the film was about to end. An epic battle/action sequence would build and conclude and I would assume we were at the denouement. Alas, no, we had merely wrapped up action-sequence #13 and there were still epic battles to come. (I suppose I should have had a clue since we were only at the 2 hour mark.)
</rant>
> When I watched LotR, I was around 20 myself, and a then 20 year old movie (which would be an early 80s movie) would seem like a movie from a completely different era to me.
The first LotR movies was released in 2001. If you go back 20 years, that is 1981. Which is the year Raiders of the Lost Ark came out:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raiders_of_the_Lost_Ark
That still would have seemed fresh in 2001 (and still does now).
Plenty of other notable movies in 1981 as well:
* https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?year=1981&title_type=feature&
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_1981
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_in_film
Rocketeer is among the finest action adventure movies ever made, and deserves to be hailed much more widely than it currently is.
The reason it is not is simple bad luck: out of all the movies it could have opened against, it managed to open against the single film that (at that time) could outdo it in its own action-adventure game, the defining work of the genre: Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Even Rocketeer couldn’t overcome that.
Ten years is a lot of years. You specifically called out a single decade of films. If someone is twenty, a film in 1980 is more than double their whole lifetime away. Wanting to chat with the youth about things before their time as the SHARED culture is dumb. If you’re 35, you were born in the 80s.
Believe it or not, not a whole lot of people will watch Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time and think it was an amazing movie anymore. That’s not to say it isn’t well made. It is. But is also just not very interesting to modern youth.
I like to pick on "Raiders of the Lost Ark" as the birth of what I call the storyboard film. Characters, dialog, character-interaction, even plot are secondary to the primary construction of the film as a string of storyboarded action sequences.
Sure, "Raiders" was unabashed about that. It was reviving the style of serials that were constructed in the same manner. And I think there's a place for those films. Sadly that seemed to become the template for The Blockbuster Film ever since.
Then "Pirates of the Caribbean" and their whole franchise took that storyboard model to the point where it became almost a parody. There were so many "climatic battles" in those films that I never had any clue as to when the film was actually about to end. (And we seemed to go past two hours for action films on a regular basis by then as well.)
When all the super-hero films started crowding the release schedules they were so bad I stopped going to the theater altogether. :-(
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/sep/24/steven-soderbergh-recuts-raiders-of-the-lost-ark-silent-movie-steven-spielberg
Soderbergh's 'recut' as a silent black and white movie with a Trent Reznor soundtrack gave me an appreciation for the cinematography and how much of the story is told visually, with no need for dialogue. Some of the tracks reappeared in HBO's Watchmen (also excellent).
> The movie uses a modern Mayan language for dialogue, uses Maya actors and depicts a religion still practiced today. Moreover, practitioners of that religion were being actively killed for their practice only a decade prior. The analogy with nazis and europeans seems pretty different to me.
Raiders of the Lost Ark uses a modern European language for dialogue, uses white actors, and depicts a religion still practiced today.
What are the differences you were going for?
When I first read this, I thought "melting face" was a reference to the famous climactic scene from the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark", where the Nazi goon's face melts down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcR9k8o4I0w
Roughly, people who liked movies you liked, also liked that movie.
If you like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but you haven't seen Ghostbusters, and 94% of people who have seen all three movies and liked the first two also liked Ghostbusters, then it's 94% likely that you'll also like Ghostbusters.
I'm sure it's much more complicated and nuanced, but that's the general idea.
First home movie I saw was Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. My neighbor had a VHS player in their basement den with a _wired remote_.
In me memory it was "Raiders of the Lost Ark" that was released for less than $30 that blew the VHS movie market wide open. Maybe it was "Top Gun" or "E.T." though.
It was pretty crazy though when movies were like $99 on VHS.
Of course, I'm also old enough to remember seeing a single Japanese import of "Wings Greatest Hits" on compact disc for like $300 in a high-end audio store.
And going further off topic, I remember that when the CD was released and cost around $20, the record companies assured us the price would drop to that of the vinyl record (which was often about $12 or so at that time).
There have always been some sort of price games in the entertainment industry. When you have the rights to an artist, finding the same thing cheaper somewhere else just isn't an option.
Well, except for piracy. I also remember a store in the college town I went to that rented records (and CD's?) and sold blank audio cassettes....
How exactly are Raiders of the Lost Ark or Breaking Bad storylines better than those of the first Mafia, The Witcher 3, Uncharted 4, Metro Exodus, Kingdom Come: Deliverance or Half-Life 2 + episodes? And I'm not even mentioning artistic pieces like What Remains of Edith Finch or Life is Strange. There are quests in The Witcher 3 you could make a movie from (Bloody Baron).
George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Larry Kasdan sat around talking through all the ideas they had for “Raiders of the Lost Ark”. They tape recorded their meetings. This is a transcription of those tape recordings.
I read it a long time ago, and the most interesting thing that stuck in my mind had to do with the headpiece with a crystal in the center that Indiana Jones had to obtain.
A quote from the movie itself to refresh memories: "And what you did was you take the staff to a special room in Tanis... a map room with a miniature of the city all laid out on the floor and if you put the staff in a certain place, at a certain time of day, the sun shone through [the crystal] and made a beam that came down on the floor... and gave you the exact location of the Well of the Souls. [Which is] where the Ark of the Covenant was kept."
Lucas, Spielberg, and Kasdan got into a discussion about why it had to be a physical thing like a crystal. It couldn't be a map, diagram, or document that gave the exact place to dig. Because valuable information like that, even if it were engraved or printed on a gold artifact, would have been photographed and distributed to museums around the world. Then Indiana wouldn't have needed to go to Nepal to retrieve the original. Hence the headpiece with a crystal -- which isn't easily copied.
There was so much attention to the logical flow of the story.
Also quote:
> "These streaming services have been making something that they call 'movies,' " he said. "They ain't movies. They are some weird algorithmic process that has created things that last 100 minutes or so."
Funny. That would be my description of the block buster action films since "Raiders of the Lost Ark".
Hmmm.... I guess it is when you grew up? I thought the 70's were king for U.S. filmmakers. And 70's sci-fi was some of the best. Until "Star Wars" came along and killed it.
I loved "Star Wars" when it came out, was blown away. But in hindsight I am sad to see it was marked the end of 70's sci-fi.
And then "Raiders of the Lost Ark", which I loved, was more or less the modern blueprint for all the crap that has come out since. It represents a storyboard approach to the screenplay/film: basically action sequences tied together with a thin thread of plot.
The various "Pirates of the Caribbean" are classic examples of the rot that followed as are every superhero film, every "Fast and Furious" film, "Transformers", etc.
I don't have the cycles to spend on all the "streamed content" that HBO, Netflix, etc. are cranking out now so I can't comment on whether "TV" is better these days.
For those who actually understand it, it's a transcendent masterpiece of cinema.
Or maybe it's just the sort of popcorn-crunching entertainment that summer blockbusters should be made of.
In any case, it's the perfect midpoint of Harrison Ford's astonishing trilogy of The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Blade Runner.
What makes this film fun for me is that sense that the world was still undiscovered - there were places you could go that had been forgotten, that mystical artifacts possibly existed, that secrets were encoded in plain sight and that the world was still big. That good and bad were easily identifiable helps a lot.
Some of that is just nostalgia for being a kid when I first saw it, but the world is definitely smaller and less morally definable than it was in the 1980s and vastly smaller than it was in the 1930s. There is an enduring appeal in thinking there are still big secrets and undiscovered places, rather than a meticulously satellite mapped and annotated world with nowhere to hide.
Even living on the most sparsely populated continent in the world, it's obvious you can never truly get too far away from other humans and that the age of discovery has been over for at least a hundred years.
I refuse to use the renamed version of the title, it's always going to be "Raiders of the Lost Ark" plain and simple.
> John Rhys-Davies, who had played Indiana Jones’s sidekick Sallah in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (he would go on to enjoy something of a late-career renaissance when he was cast as Gimli the dwarf in the Lord of the Rings films) ...
Blown away as I was by this ("What? Sallah and Gimli ... wow") ...
... it is even nicer/weirder to find him here.-
(He shows up in the most onexpected places ...)
He was also, allegedly "taller than any of his fellow [LoTR] castmates"
(Then again, that whole franchise plays very well with heights and perspective, effects, etc ...)
See:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/7kd163/til_the_actor_who_played_the_dwarf_gimli_in_the/
There's a transcript of an early story conference for Raiders of the Lost Ark, between George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Larry Kasdan where they present and hammer out ideas for the movie. You can actually see what parts of the movie come from whom. What's striking to me are that Lucas has most of what we now know as Indy, with Spielberg mostly tossing in goofy gags--some of which made it and some which (thankfully) didn't.
https://moedred.livejournal.com/2009/03/04/
Older drafts (link from there) are also quite interesting.
An all-Lucas "Raiders" would have looked very similar to what we got, maybe just a bit more serious.
I read it as: Lucas claimed he had fully fleshed out a 3 movie series. In reality he only had Raiders of the Lost Ark plus a few loose ideas for 2 sequels.
The movie industry has eras, marked by certain production styles. In Hollywood at least, the 1970s was the era of the auteur director. A wave of directors (and actors) who had apprenticed under the famed B-movie master Roger Corman came to power on the strength of a series of absolute masterpieces. It started with Easy Rider, which was shot on a very low budget, and received massive box office success and critical acclaim. It ended with Heaven's Gate, an outrageously expensive disaster that has never even been properly released (I've seen one of the medium-length edits of it, and yes, it stinks).
The real end of the New Hollywood era, though, was the release of Star Wars in 1977. It paved the way for the sci-fi/fantasy blockbuster. It turned into a successful trilogy, and overlapped team-wise with Spielberg's fantastically successful Raiders of the Lost Ark. Hollywood, and movie fans, lost interest in the more intellectual fare of New Hollywood, in favor of kid-friendly, cross-marketing-friendly entertainment.
So it's not surprising that there was a dropoff in critical darlings after the 1970s. Movies got a lot worse - they really did. Even directors who carried on the New Hollywood traditions, like David Lynch and the Coen brothers, couldn't see the kind of success the 1970s directors had.
Of course, before the New Hollywood era, Hollywood kinda stunk, big expensive extravaganzas. Critical attention then turns to the French New Wave, and other post-WWII European film with small budgets and big emotional punches (who makes a movie like Wages of Fear these days?).
I wonder how our current era will fare? I'm thinking about the sort of epic-story serialization that the Marvel franchise and the reinvigorated Star Wars franchise is doing. How will that be viewed?
> you learn of a new concept or word and then immediately see it referenced soon after
It happens to me all the time. For anyone who hasn't experienced this, I offer this experiment. Pick one or more words from the list below that you don't already know. Repeat it to yourself a few times, read the definition, and invent a sentence using the word. Remember, choose a word or words you don't know.
frisson -- shudder of emotion with goose bumps when deeply affected by music
comity -- courtesy between nations for the laws of another
blithe -- happy and not worried; not realizing how bad a situation is
voxel -- 3D analogue to 2D pixel; a portmanteau of "volumetric" and "pixel"
pratfall -- comical fall landing on the buttocks
deus ex machina -- a god introduced into Greek/Roman play to resolve plot; for example, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the hero's problem is solved for him rather than having him solve the problem himself; the film would end the same way even if Indiana Jones didn't exist: Nazis open the ark and kill themselves; pronounced day-us-eks-mah-kah-nah
marmite -- large cooking pot having legs and a cover; also a British sandwich spread made from yeast extract
Maybe you can come back to this comment 48 hours from now and tell us if you've heard your chosen word in real life soon after learning it.
“My professor Gordon Willey at Harvard disliked Raiders of the Lost Ark intensely. The reason being that he was of that generation. He was actually an archeologist in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and so for him, it was not okay to be caricatured in this way. The film did not show what archaeologists did. They did not go out and find prized artifacts and take them and run away. That is looting, not archaeology.”
Well, I don't know if all archeologists and museum directors subscribed to that view until quite recently. For example Russia is still holding on to the famous "Priam's Treasure" looted from Berlin in 1945 (which in turn was looted from the Tory dig by Schliemann) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priam%27s_Treasure#The_treasure_as_an_art_collection. Many other more recent examples can be given, for more information you can start with this Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/jun/29/museums-looting-art-artefacts-world-culture
They could have had the vision to lock down the rights earlier. Raiders of the Lost Ark was already a hit. It wouldn't take much to conjecture an alien movie by the same director would hit.
I've never seen Secret of the Incas before! What a fascinating movie - especially as such a clear inspiration for Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Reminds me of the movie quote: "Wiped clean by the wrath of God.", I suspect from one of the movies Indiana Jones.
Right, at
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Raiders_of_the_Lost_Ark
> Brody: However, about a year after the pharaoh had returned to Egypt, the city of Tanis was consumed by the desert in a sandstorm that lasted a whole year. Wiped clean by the wrath of God.
I'm more interested in what those 20 movies are. I found:
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=1981
1 Raiders of the Lost Ark 2 On Golden Pond 3 Superman II 4 Arthur 5 Stripes 6 The Cannonball Run 7 Chariots of Fire 8 For Your Eyes Only 9 The Four Seasons 10 Time Bandits
Of which I guess 2, 3, 8 isn't original.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2:w014
1 American Sniper 2 The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 3 Guardians of the Galaxy 4 Captain America: The Winter Soldier 5 The LEGO Movie 6 The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies 7 Transformers: Age of Extinction 8 Maleficent 9 X-Men: Days of Future Past 10 Big Hero 6
Of which only 10 is original.
This is precisely why the first film in the series (Raiders of the Lost Ark) was by far my fave. It's just so gritty and realistic—comparatively speaking, of course—to the sequels. It's almost a perfect action/adventure movie. You can feel the love and physical attention to detail that Spielberg poured into every frame.
>How Lucas, Spielberg and Kasdan Created 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'...
...without CGI, thankfully.
It's been more than a decade since Hollywood released a movie with a realistic patina.
For an example, compare the centerpiece truck chase in Crystal Skull with the propeller-dodging fistfight in Raiders. Where's the fullers earth, where's the blood, where's the sweat? Contemporary CGI effects contaminate films with a phony "sheen" which future film historians will no doubt condemn as glaringly phoney.
Likewise, CGI seems to encourage special effects artists to "overload" movie frames, the clutter devolving into little more than a figurative close-up of a child smashing toys together. Was the Tarzan reference really necessary in Crystal Skull's truck chase? Did a kitchen sink really need to float by in Revenge of the Sith?
Further, CGI characters are forgettable. Can filmgoers still see the details of the spheroid attack vehicles from Attack of the Clones in their minds eye? Contrast this with the AT-AT's from Empire Strikes Back. The former CGI props do not ring true to the mind and are thus only imperfectly recalled. The latter physical models are unforgettable. Also see ED209, the stop motion owl from clash of the titans, the terminator skeleton from Terminator 1, etc. Physical models are crude but effective. CGI is nuanced but phoney at a deeper and much more damning level.
The widespread adoption of CGI circa Phantom Menace will likely mark the beginning of a protracted dark age in filmmaking. Who knows when or if there will be a renaissance.
Netflix has already killed the old distribution model. For the price of about 8 full-price DVDs per year, you can watch any video in the Netflix catalog with the assurance of consistent quality and convenience. You can even watch multiple video streams at once, if you have a network pipe that's fat enough and a few extra screens.
I have a decently-sized collection of DVDs. But my indexing and search system sucks, in that it heavily relies on physical discs being replaced in exactly the right spot, which is often hard to reach. Now, a decent HTPC with networked storage would solve that problem handily. But I would still have to read the video files off all the discs and put them into a media catalog.
Netflix has already done all that work for the videos they are licensed to distribute. So if I know that a movie I want to watch is buried behind two rows of DVD cases, certainly no longer in the genre+alphabetical order that I try in vain to enforce, and possibly not even in its case, I'll definitely check to see if it's on Netflix before I get off the couch.
And if I know I don't own the DVD, and it's not on Netflix, I'm certainly not going to go check a dozen walled gardens that will probably still want me to pay $2.99 to view each TV episode one time, or $4.99 to see one movie one time, and maybe they also want me to log in using credentials from a cable or satellite provider.
It only takes a few instances of being annoyed and frustrated like that, and a few instances of finding exactly what you desire from friendly pirates, before skipping the former. I have already demonstrated my willingness to pay for content that I like. But that willingness has limits.
I bought the Ghostbusters DVD, because I knew that I'd want to see it again, at multiple times of my choosing in the future. And I also know how to use certain programs to take the video off the physical medium and transcode it to a file viewable on my kids' Android tablets. That's still not as convenient as Netflix, because I have to do that extra work, and there's still no central entertainment nexus, where I can search in just one place for the video I want to watch.
That's the thing that will kill the walled gardens. People don't want to have to flip through 57 channels and still not find anything they want to watch. They want to open up the program guide, maybe search, maybe look at recommendations and reviews, and then press play. If consuming your entertainment becomes too much like work, your audience shrinks. As long as Netflix has the infrastructure to make consuming entertainment convenient it doesn't need to carry exactly the content people want. All they need is a reasonable alternative.
For example, if people search for "Indiana Jones" on Netflix, they might see a "not found" result. Instead, Netflix could have said "not found, but..." and made suggestions.
Features like "Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark": "The Librarian and the Spear of Destiny", "Allan Quatermain and the Kingdom of Skulls", "The Da Vinci Code", "The Mummy", (>> more >>) ...
Features starring Harrison Ford: "Star Wars", "The Frisco Kid", "Witness", "Cowboys and Aliens", (>> more >>) ...
Features directed by Steven Spielberg: etc ...
Features set between 1917 and 1945: etc ...
Something like that would kick those distributors who refused to license content at a reasonable price right in the wallet, because Netflix would be forcing them into direct competition with all the other features that include the same old tropes and plots. Likewise, anyone who could seize the initiative from Netflix as the first place that people check for the features they want to watch could kill them, too.
All it would take is a better search engine, with support for alternative recommendations.
My first reaction to this news was: "there is one screenwriter who was involved in writing Raiders of the Lost Ark, Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi?"...and he's still alive? what the hell has he been doing all this time and how badly did he piss off George Lucas to not be involved in the most recent Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies? Both Raiders and ESB have such wild adventure and such respect for the audience's intelligence that watching them today is still a revelation, even after seeing them dozens of times. I recently watched Avengers for the first time and was shocked at just how such a dull movie could make so much money...are our standards just lower? Are special effects too relied on to gloss over poor imagination? Or am I just getting really old, even though the original Star Wars movies were before my time? I felt the same way during Avatar...I couldn't believe that the same guy who wrote the sparse but brilliantly quotable dialogue of "Aliens" was behind Avatar's groanworthy one liners.
I hope Kasdan brings back the magic and that the reason why we don't see movies like ESB and Raiders anymore is because their screenwriter simply stopped writing them.
I'm also a Sorkin / WW fanboy and would add:
1) The movie isn't for y'all (i.e. SV programmers) - it's for everyone else. How Raiders of the Lost Ark is Spielberg's action-adventure archeology, The Social Network is a Sorkin-banter exercise.
2) Sorkin enjoys writing for intellectual ideology, which is very difficult to position in any form of entertainment. In a way, he's forced to choose personas capable of centering his complex dialog, be it the President of the United States or a 20-something self-made billionaire.
A simple script isn't the same thing as a bad script, though. Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Die Hard, Alien... these are simple scripts, but they were all turned into good movies.
The problem with Avatar's script is not so much its simplicity, but its preachiness. A story set in a simplified world of good and evil isn't so annoying (cf Star Wars) unless it's supposed to be making some kind of political commentary on our own world.
From a very good screenwriting website comes this essay, "Impressive Failure":
http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/wp08.Impressive.Failure.html
"In plotting an action-adventure type film, how your hero fails is at least as important as how he succeeds. If the plot requires the hero to fail, try to figure out a way for him to fail as impressively as possible.
"Consider RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. Indiana Jones is perhaps the greatest action hero in the history of the movies. And in his debut film, he flat-out fails from beginning to end.
"He loses the golden idol. Marian is kidnapped and he's unable to rescue her. He finds the Ark, but it is immediately taken away. His bluff to destroy the Ark is called, and he gets recaptured. He can't even look upon the Ark when it is opened. And the government ends up with his long sought-after and much suffered-for prize. This guy's an action hero?
"Yup. Because he fails so damn impressively, from start to finish. Indy fails so well, in fact, the audience is impressed as hell, and hardly aware of the fact that he's failing. The defeats are just setbacks that create more opportunities for heroism. As an added benefit, Indy wins the audience's sympathy -- the poor guy's trying so hard, you can't help but root for him."
Two anecdotes.
Perfect Dark, the N64 game released around the year 2000, got given an 18 certificate in the UK because of the fact that blood can splatter from shot enemies onto walls.
Raiders Of The Lost Ark, the film released in 1981, nearly got refused a PG [edit: thanks, bena] certificate because it showed exploding heads.
The picture you linked depicts both of these acts of violence, whereas Wolfenstein 3D does not. Maybe Apple have similarly esoteric criteria for unacceptable acts of violence as the film and video game rating boards.
I'm surprised to hear such bitching about Flash. Actually, this is one of the few Flash-heavy sites I've seen in recent memory that didn't (a) crash my vintage 2.0.0.20 Firefox running on Fedora Core 4, or (b) warn me that I needed to download a new plugin.
It did, however, break the Back button in an interesting way: after I clicked on "Classic Movies" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark", clicking the Back button several times took me through the pee times of several other random movies.