Watching Raiders with Sam
As there is a new Indiana Jones movie coming out in May, and a new Lego Indiana Jones video game coming out soon after, I decided Sam (6) should see Raiders of the Lost Ark now, before all the cool parts have been reduced to mere slapstick comedy beats through the lovable antics of the Lego characters (we’ve already had many discussions of how the Star Wars movies differ from their Lego counterparts).
I knew what he meant. Raiders, for those who were not born yet in 1981, was a bolt from the blue. I had seen a lot of movies by the time I was 19 years old, and considered myself a pretty sophisticated moviegoer, but I had never seen anything remotely like Raiders when it came out. As Rolling Stone described it, it was a movie of all “good parts.” I sat in the theater slack-jawed, wondering, if it’s possible to make a movie like this, why aren’t all movies like this? It was grittier and more “adult” than Star Wars, swifter than any ten James Bond adventures, more fun than any movie in memory, with incredible action sequences that still hold up today as masterworks of movement, suspense, wit and pure kinetic genius.
Anyway, Sam had never seen it before and I was curious how he would react. He knows nothing about ancient Hebrew artifacts, Nazis or Nepal, and it turns out it doesn’t matter. He knew that the Nazis were the bad guys, Belloq was a more complicated bad guy (“it’s like he’s working with the bad guys, but he’s more like Indiana Jones, and they could almost be friends” was the way he put it, which put him yards ahead of my initial reading of the movie), and, in spite of a ton of exposition delivered by men in suits in Reel 2, he had no trouble following the whole complicated “Staff-of-Ra-leads-to-the-Well-of-Souls-leads-to-the-Ark-of-the-Covenant” storyline. He noted that the music sounded like Star Wars, that Indiana Jones reminded him of Han Solo, and that Cairo looked like Tatooine. Most impressively, in the middle of the truck chase he pointed out that one guy who falls off the back of the truck screams exactly like Boba Fett (actually a Weequay) falling into the pit of the Sarlacc.
Then he crept around the house for the rest of the afternoon, jumping out from behind things with a plastic axe when I least expected it. I don’t know if he was pretending to be a spy, or a crafty native, a Nazi or a living booby-trap but he seemed to enjoy the movie.