Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Unlike lots of people their age, neither Laci nor Matt grew up with the Indiana Jones films. But at least one of them has fallen in love with the franchise as an adult, especially this first film. The two talk about the origins of Raiders of the Lost Ark on a beach in Hawaii in 1977 as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas built sandcastles together. One imagines they were very well-crafted and functional sandcastles, Lucas’s a little too clinical, Spielberg’s a little sappy. Still, they were good castles, is what we’re saying.

Matt recalls his first time watching Raiders of the Lost Ark at the relatively late age of 16, while Laci has mushed all the Indiana Jones movies together and experiences all of time as one instant. But she loves Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones! He’s doing a lot of work, she says.

Then the podcast goes very thoroughly through the film, recapping Raiders of the Lost Ark in excruciating detail. Harrison Ford and Karen Allen are great, of course, but Paul Freeman as René Belloq kind of steals the movie.

Does the film do enough with Indiana Jones’s fear of snakes? Is the Raiders of the Lost Ark car chase the best in movie history? Is the plot of this movie too hard to follow? This and much more is litigated over this spirited two-hour Raiders of the Lost Ark movie review.