Quick: Name your favorite bit from an Indiana Jones film. I mean "bit" expansively—it could be a quip, an extended action sequence, a scene of tension or tenderness, a shocking effect, a moment of playfully mischievous charm. One could say that the series, at its best, is marked by a profusion of these moments, but perhaps even more important is that the series is marked by them even at its worst.
Raiders of the Lost Ark, which kicked off the franchise in 1981, is a masterpiece of popular filmmaking, in which every single scene, shot, and line works individually, and somehow they all work even better together. Raiders created a magic movie alchemy that still maintains an outsize influence on blockbuster movies more than 40 years later.
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