Spielberg, Lucas, Harrison Ford, and the most-imitated adventure film of the past forty-five years.
1936. Indiana Jones, an archaeology professor at a New England university, is recruited by U.S. military intelligence to locate the Ark of the Covenant before the Nazis can. The Nazis believe the Ark, if recovered, will make their army invincible. Jones travels to Nepal to find his former mentor's daughter Marion Ravenwood, who possesses a medallion essential to locating the Ark; then to Cairo; then to a hidden archaeological site outside the city.
The film tracks Jones across roughly two weeks of adventure: a Nepal bar fight, a Cairo marketplace pursuit, a Tanis dig site, a German submarine, a Greek island ceremony. The Ark is opened. The Nazis face supernatural consequences. The film closes with the Ark being crated and stored in a vast U.S. government warehouse.
Raiders of the Lost Ark is, by general critical consensus, the foundational text of the modern adventure film. Almost every Hollywood adventure produced in the past four decades has been measuring itself against Raiders. The Mummy franchise. The National Treasure films. The Tomb Raider films. The Uncharted video-game series and film adaptation. Spielberg and George Lucas's premise — a roguish academic adventurer in fedora and leather jacket, pulp-serial action set pieces, supernatural McGuffin — has become so culturally pervasive that it's hard to remember it was, in 1981, a deliberate revival of an older film tradition.
Spielberg and Lucas were openly drawing on 1930s and 1940s adventure serials — Republic Pictures' Zorro, Tarzan, and Flash Gordon serials of the period. The film's pacing (a new set piece every fifteen minutes, no scene allowed to settle), the score motifs, the title-card aesthetic — all are direct citations of a tradition that had been dormant in mainstream cinema for decades.
Lawrence Kasdan wrote the Raiders screenplay from Lucas and Spielberg's outline. The screenplay is, in working-screenwriter circles, considered one of the cleanest examples of pulp-adventure structure on the page. Almost every scene introduces a new threat, escalates it, and resolves it within three minutes. The famous boulder sequence in the film's opening occupies roughly four minutes of screen time and contains a complete three-act structure inside itself.
The screenplay also resolved the central tonal question that subsequent imitators have struggled with: how much should the audience laugh? Kasdan's answer is constant — the film is genuinely funny, but the comedy never undermines the threats. Indy's wry one-liners coexist with sequences of real menace. The balance is the film's structural achievement.
The most-quoted sequence in Raiders is roughly halfway through: Indy, exhausted in a Cairo marketplace, is confronted by a robed black-clad swordsman who performs an elaborate scimitar routine to intimidate him. Indy, after a moment of comic exasperation, pulls his revolver and shoots the swordsman dead.
The sequence is widely reported to have been improvised on set. Harrison Ford was reportedly suffering from severe dysentery during the Tunisia shoot. The scripted version involved an elaborate whip-vs-sword duel that Ford did not feel up to performing. Ford suggested shooting the swordsman; Spielberg agreed; the sequence was shot in one take. The improvisation is now one of the most-quoted moments in Spielberg's filmography.