Since the next film is coming out, I netflixed this one for Isa, because she hadn’t seen it.
“Can we watch Indiana Jones?” she asked me.
Score one point for the entity that changed this movie’s name. In case you didn’t know, it is now Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I think is blasphemy.
Well, that may be how you feel about learning, as I did, that the film has been digitally re-mastered as well.
The music has been redone. The sound, the erasing of the shadow of glass between Indy and the cobra, everything.
Sure, the technical aspects of the finished product are amazing. But this was a cheesy action-adventure made in 1981 about the Nazi era, itself stylistically referencing forties movies. The movie I watched last night looked like it could have been made yesterday, but with the actual celluloid struggle erased, we have no context left to place this film in. So many layers of pastiche have been erased, one thinks, what is this film now?
For example, the animation scene of the plane flying from San Francisco to Nepal has been replaced by something that looks straight out of a power point presentation. At least the original one was using forties technology, and certainly was supposed to mimic WW II movies of planes crossing the Pacific.
And so on.
I don’t think I’ve seen the film in at least twenty years, so I was reminded of the lack of any other women in the film, besides our dear Marion. The Spielbergian plot device to get her into the beautiful white dress was simple: “Put it on,” the French bad guy commands. Then later, she is given another white, silky number that she has been commanded to wear.
Maybe this can still fly as a film with the “eighties-ness” gutted from it.
Regardless, I’ll never forget the countless hours slaving away at the Atari video game. That’s about as eighties as it gets.
Jack Silbert, curator