But more often, Spielberg’s gift for lighting and framing, reaction shots and visual sleights-of-hand make the deepest impression: the opening dissolve from the Paramount logo to a South American mountaintop, the soft golden light emanating from a coveted idol, Indy’s unmistakable shadow darkening the doorway of his ex-lover’s bar in Nepal, the sunset silhouette of an archaeological dig in Cairo, the sly comedy of the villain’s medallion-scarred hand revealing itself with the “Sieg Heil” salute.Īnd on and on and on. Granted, a few of the more lasting images from Raiders cost a lot of money, like the bookends of Harrison Ford’s archaeological adventurer, Indiana Jones, outrunning a giant boulder in the first action sequence and the stop-motion face-melting of a Nazi super-villain as God punishes him for his hubris. As with all Spielberg films, the least expensive touches are the most significant. The second lesson is trickier, because attempting to replicate the bigness of Raiders – its globetrotting locales, its historical backdrop, its wall-to-wall action sequences – misses nearly everything that makes it great. The first lesson is “be Steven Spielberg”, which is understandably difficult for other film-makers to manage, since there can only be one director with his deft, seemingly intuitive feel for image-making and storytelling on a large scale. Many more tombs have been raided in the decades since Raiders became a box-office phenomenon in 1981, including sequels of variously diminished returns, but none has recreated the same level of excitement and magic, and most have taken away the wrong lessons from it.
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