Raiders of the Lost Ark Review

Spielberg's staging is the reason this still plays. Geography is always legible, the escalation inside each sequence is clean, and the film establishes a rule then breaks it for a laugh, most famously by shooting a swordsman rather than fighting him. Douglas Slocombe lights the Well of Souls with practical torches and shafts of dust so the snakes are half-glimpsed, and the truck chase remains a stunt sequence of genuine physical risk, with Terry Leonard dragged beneath a moving vehicle in a single continuous shot.

Karen Allen gives Marion an abrasiveness that the sequels never replicated, and Paul Freeman's Belloq is a fine mirror villain: the same appetite with none of the scruples. John Williams's march sits somewhere between heroic and knowing. What holds it at this tier is the resolution. Indiana Jones is tied to a post when the Ark opens, and the plot arrives at exactly the outcome it would have reached had he stayed home. The ride is superb; the architecture is not.