Kritiken

Raiders is not a movie that lacks for classic moments, but its fiery climax ranks among Spielberg’s greatest sequences.

It was meant to hark back to the "fun" movies of an earlier period, but for all its economy of budget and shooting time, it had the usual Spielberg epic reach, the romps and car chases and death-defying moments of the serials now expanded into an effortful 115 minutes. It was thus a far cry from studio pictures back in the day, when even the "prestige" films were expeditious in comparison.

Raiders is a setpiece-fueled dynamo. That is to say, the film builds its energy and its power through its own internal one-upsmanship: Each scene is more indelible than the last -- conceived, written, shot, acted, edited, and scored in such a way that the damned thing just winds you up tighter and tighter as it moves along. But, unlike its many imitators, Raiders' setpieces themselves work because they have a strong backbone of character.

The obvious highlight [of the Indiana Jones movies] is Raiders of the Lost Ark, a film as perfectly paced and briskly entertaining as anything in Spielberg's filmography, and the most productive point of intersect between his and George Lucas's shared interest in reflecting on and repurposing the swashbuckling, cliffhanging exploits of those Saturday-morning serials they compulsively namedrop.

A monument in the Cold War's conservative cinema of reassurance, RAIDERS... is today undeniably a fairy tale about the origin of the atomic bomb. While in reality, nuclear weapons were the intentional outcome of a race between America and Germany's large-scale militarization of the physical sciences, here they are represented not as a technological invention of bureaucratic rationalism but as an archaeological re-discovery, of the Old Testament's famously powerful Ark of the Covenant.

Try to summon up a composite image [of the major characters] anywhere, a feeling or idea that you can salvage when the movie's over, and you're mainly stuck with an arsenal of disconnected poses and disposable functions.