Raiders of the Lost Ark turns 40, and it’s still an unqualified masterpiece

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.

> one of Indy's allies is a young Chinese boy known only as Short Round, if we're talking about outdated ethnic stereotypes

Uh, a “short round” is an artillery shell that falls short and lands on friendly soldiers. I don’t know how that could possibly be an ethnic stereotype. It seems to me he was named (edit: nicknamed to be clear) for being chaotic and disruptive, much like an unexpected artillery shell landing in your midst.

If you are at all interested in screenwriting or storytelling, you owe it to yourself to listen to the Script Notes podcast's walkthrough of the script and how it works. It's too old for their RSS feed (unless you pay for back episodes), but they put it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Nmoc1W0cMGo

(I can also recommend Script Notes in general. It's a pair of screenwriters, John August (Big Fish) and Craig Mazin (Chernobyl) talking articulately about the art and business of screenwriting. Expert shop talk from an entirely alien field is fascinating.)

Maybe it's time for the US theater industry to reload the whole Saturday film-adventure thing ... revive THE FUN without the bleed-em-dry ethos. Charge kids $1.00 ... popcorn $1.00 ... dig into that loveable, cornball era sitting in the vaults. Maybe some old anime.

And ... no guns allowed.

AM I crazy? Well if they put an adult-only section in the back (they have to stay until all the kids are gone) I'll try it. Sure miss that big screen.

Steven Soderbergh also wrote about it and made a black-and-white version to highlight Douglas Slocombe's work. He also replaced the sound with The Social Network's soundtrack: https://extension765.com/blogs/soderblog/raiders

Sadly, the actual video seems to be gone. It was still online a couple of weeks ago :-/

Silly superstitious ideas mixed with complete misunderstanding of both history and archeology presenting a story that goes nowhere and means nothing. The final scene culminates with transcendent meaninglessness in a kind of abstract burial. This film is everything wrong with modern society.

That is what made the "Uncharted" series of Playstation games so good because it reminded me of Indy.

This was the movie that finally cured me out of the bad habit of reading the Swedish subtitles instead of actually listening to the spoken English.

I remember watching it in Stockholm's most renowned theater at that time, all seats taken.

When Brody and Indy discuss what would happen if the Nazis got hold of the ark, Brody says: "Any army carrying it would be invincible" the Swedish subtitle read (translated back to English): "Any army carrying it would be invisible".