Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Arc

I really am going to have to stop re-visiting old films. There are some films that have never been bettered. These are usually films that do something genuinely unique, or at least have never really been bettered. The Blues Brothers fits into this category, as does Hot Shots part 1 & 2. Top Secret fucking rules this category.

Sadly, action films tend to fare less well.

I just re-watched Raiders because I was interested to see if it was the seminal adventure movie. It's really not.

Let me just say something before I get to the meat of this... I don't care that Raiders was really ground breaking when it first came out. All I care about is what it's like to watch now. As a piece of history, it's invaluable but guess what, so's the original Star Wars and that doesn't stop it being incredibly lame when looked at next to the new Battlestar Galactica.

But anyway, Raiders.

It has several problems. The acting is really over the top, and not in a good way. Bits of it are supposed to be farce and these... tend to drift a little too far into pantomime for my liking. The serious bits are even worse. The Nazis seem to think acting either involves standing as rigid as possible or running all over the place waving their arms. The guy in the black mac is particularly bad for this.

The actions scenes are distinctly under whelming, with the exception of the scene where Indie shoots the sword wielding arab. That is still a fantastic moment. The fight choreographer really needed to be given a slap, though.

It's attitudes to women are also faintly disturbing. I'm going to gloss over the whole relationship with Indie and the love interest because whilst I think it's fairly clear that their previous sexual encounter was distinctly non-consensual on the part of the girl, I may be reading too much into things. What does definitely strike a sour note is how completely incompetent the female is. She can't even open a bloody aeroplane canopy.

Overall, though, Raiders has one massive problem that eclipses all others. That problem is The Mummy. The Mummy does everything that Raiders does a hell of a lot better. The story makes more sense, the acting is better, it's funnier, the characters are better defined...

The Mummy is to Raiders what The Good, The Bad, The Weird is to every western ever made. An update that takes the spirit of the original and does it with a 21st century attitude and budget.

Film making has definitely improved in the past thirty years and boy does it show. There are definitely films from the 1970's and 1980's that have never been bettered but there are far fewer than people think.