Word: spielbergisms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WATCHING Raiders of the Lost Ark is somewhat akin to strapping yourself into a P-58 Mustang, which, as any old fighter pilot will tell you, was as close as you would ever want to come to strapping yourself to a cannonball. The Spielberg Lucas summertime epic starts off at a hellish pace and then refuses to slow down: there are Nazis and naked savages, reptiles and archeologists, pyramids, legends, car chases, curses, and even--albeit abstractly--a visit from the Supreme Creator. It is, in short something of an adrenalin mosaic: the first movie in a long time that...
...RARELY has there been such grace under velocity in a film. Speilberg and Lucas, of course, have the credentials to pull is off if anyone does. Lucas started out with American Graffiti before he hit upon the Star Wars saga, and Spielberg has made possibly the best thriller ever with Jaws before moving on to the constantly mutating Close Encounters, All of those movies managed to hold that line--exuding innocence without necessarily being shallow (though Star Wars, arguably, was not so successful at this). Spielberg and Lucas, along with Coppola, are the epitome of the new breed of film...
Lucas and Spielberg have also updated Jones's girlfriend to give her none of the stodginess but all of the cool of the great old heroines. Karen Allen plays Jones's companion with a wonderful blend of humor, cynicism and toughness--a hardy, reliable beauty whose prettiness is just a little bit off and who is a perfect counterpart to Indiana's laconic stoicism. Allen was wonderful in The Wanderers and then, for reasons best known to God, also starred in the abysmal Small Circle of Friends. Allen has always exuded more energy, though, than her troglodyte roles were willing...
...anyone down. Everyone, from Belloq (who comes off looing like Francois Truffaut's alter ego) or Toht have distinctive characteristics that are easily enough identified, and a hint of more. But if more were delivered, it would only weigh the movie down. For it is Spielberg's sense of timing that propels Raiders into the realm of the magnificent. He is a master of setting an audience up for the obvious terror and then defusing it, or feigning a breaking only to let things go one step too far. It is not easy to surprise a movie audience today...
...adventure so much as it is an adventure, both as fiction, and as a movie. The story, the directing, the acting--all of the elements--are just a little out of control, careening just a little too fast. And yet, almost impossibly, it manages to hold the curve. Spielberg and Lucas have brought high adventure both back into movies and, indeed, into movie making...