Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Official trailer

Raiders of the Lost Ark is Steven Spielberg’s 1981 American adventure film depicting archaeologist Indiana Jones searching for the lost Ark of the Covenant in 1936 before Nazi agents can secure it for Hitler.

Jones travels from his university teaching position to Nepal, Egypt, and a German submarine pen, recovering the Ark after extensive action sequences while pursuing his former lover Marion Ravenwood and outwitting French archaeologist Rene Belloq who works for the Nazis. Harrison Ford plays Indiana Jones. Karen Allen plays Marion Ravenwood. Paul Freeman plays Belloq.

Ronald Lacey plays SS officer Toht. John Rhys-Davies plays Jones’s Egyptian friend Sallah. Denholm Elliott plays Jones’s colleague Marcus Brody. Wolf Kahler plays Colonel Dietrich. Lawrence Kasdan wrote the screenplay from a story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman.

Paramount Pictures and Lucasfilm produced the film on a budget of approximately 18 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 389 million dollars worldwide. The work won five Academy Awards.

I measure every adventure movie I watch against this one, and nearly all of them come up short. It moves like a freight train, it’s funny without winking, and Ford gives me a hero who sweats and gets scared and still gets the job done. I can’t find a thing I’d change, and that’s why it’s a 10.

The film is the foundational document of the modern American action-adventure blockbuster and the principal Indiana Jones production. Spielberg and Lucas combined to create a deliberate homage to 1930s serial adventure films at the technical scale 1980s production allowed. Harrison Ford established himself as a major star independent of the Star Wars trilogy through the Indiana Jones role. The Lawrence Kasdan screenplay constructed a series of self-contained action set pieces connected by minimal exposition, establishing the template that later blockbuster action films would follow.

The John Williams score produced the Raiders March theme, now among the most recognizable in American film music. The result is the film that defined how American mainstream action filmmaking would work for the next four decades.

The Set Piece Structure

Kasdan’s screenplay arranges the film as a sequence of self-contained action set pieces.

The opening Peruvian temple raid, the Nepal bar fight, the Egyptian truck chase, the submarine pen, and the closing Ark opening all function as distinct action sequences with their own internal logic. Each set piece could be extracted from the film and remain comprehensible. The connecting material between set pieces handles plot mechanics without slowing the momentum the action sequences establish.

The truck chase is my favorite of the bunch, and the opening temple raid is close behind. Each one tells me who Indy is before anybody explains him, and I’d put that opening against any cold open ever made.

The structure proved influential beyond what Spielberg and Lucas anticipated. Later blockbuster action films from the Pirates of the Caribbean series through the Mission Impossible franchise have followed the set-piece template Raiders established. The structure works because it gives audiences regular spectacle while still maintaining narrative through-line. Films that abandon the structure for pure plot or pure action typically fail commercially. The Raiders template has become standard practice instead of innovative technique.

Harrison Ford as Indy

Tom Selleck had been cast as Indiana Jones before scheduling conflicts with Magnum, P.I. forced him to withdraw. Harrison Ford was hired as replacement after Spielberg and Lucas had already met with multiple alternatives. The casting decision proved critical to the film’s success. Ford brought particular qualities to the role that conventional leading-man casting wouldn’t have generated. He gives Jones occasional incompetence, vulnerability, and visible fear during dangerous sequences. The character is heroic without being invulnerable.

Ford’s performance also includes the famous improvised gunfight scene in Cairo where Jones encounters a sword-wielding assassin and simply shoots him instead of engaging in extended swordfight.

The scene was improvised during production because Ford was suffering from dysentery and couldn’t perform the originally scripted extended fight choreography. The improvisation became one of the film’s most reference-worthy moments. Production accidents can produce material that careful planning would have prevented.

The Cairo gunshot is the funniest moment in the film and my favorite piece of character work in it, even though nobody scripted it. One shrug and a pull of the trigger tells me everything about this man: he’s tired, he’s practical, and he has no interest in the other guy’s big show.

The Score

John Williams composed the score including the Raiders March theme that announces Indiana Jones’s heroic moments. The theme has acquired cultural reference standing exceeding most film music.

It appears in popular reference contexts. It plays at sporting events. The theme is an audio shorthand for adventure heroics across multiple media. Few film themes have achieved comparable cultural penetration.

Williams composed the score after extensive collaboration with Spielberg about specific musical moments and emotional tones. The composer-director relationship produced material that conventional commissioning wouldn’t have generated. Williams later composed scores for all four sequel Indiana Jones films, maintaining the franchise’s musical identity across over four decades. The composer-director long-term collaboration model has been imitated extensively. Few later collaborations have matched the Williams-Spielberg result. The combination of skilled composer, committed director, and consistent franchise production produced one of the strongest score traditions in American film.

If I could keep only one piece of Williams, it would be the Raiders March. Whenever it kicks in the film finds an extra gear, and I can feel Spielberg cutting to it.

Does Raiders of the Lost Ark still hold up?

It’s a 10 and it gets there without breaking a sweat. The set pieces snap together, Ford makes Indy scared and sore and still unstoppable, and Williams gives the film a theme you’ll be humming for a week. Everything I enjoy about the modern action picture traces back to the template this film set, and I haven’t found another one that does it better. If you care about action or adventure filmmaking at all, start here.

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