When George Lucas came to Steven Spielberg with the idea for a rollicking action-adventure about a globe-trotting explorer locking horns with the Nazis over an ancient Biblical artifact, the Close Encounters director saw an opportunity to give American cinema its own version of the James Bond franchise . The result was Raiders of the Lost Ark , one of the greatest movies ever made and undeniably the best adventure movie of all ti

Set at the height of the Great Depression, Walter Hill’s gritty, stylish directorial debut Hard Times stars Charles Bronson as Chaney, a bare-knuckle boxer who rises through the underground fighting scene with the help of a hustler named Speed, played by James Cob

A good example of this in Raiders of the Lost Ark is the prologue where Indy steals an idol from an indigenous tribe because his museum probably needed a new attraction . Even the Ark of the Covenant wasn’t spared, which by the end is just stashed somewhere in Area 51 despite it being a literal Biblical superwea

When Pixar released a trailer for a movie in which an old man makes his house take flight with a ton of balloons, skeptical audiences thought that the studio had finally jumped the shark. And then Up hit theaters and left that skepticism in its dust by using the story of a flying house as a giant visual metaphor for a widower dealing with gr

That being said, when they first tried to film the scene, none of the spiders moved when they were put on Molina’s back. This was because all of the spiders were male. After they added a female to the mix, however, the spiders got very animated and the shot was achie

(Lucas resisted casting Harrison Ford for a while, because he didn’t want him to become the Robert De Niro to his Martin Scorsese , but eventually, he couldn’t deny that Ford was perfect .) For Marion, they considered Michelle Pfeiffer, Debra Winger, Mary Steenburgen, Valerie Bertinelli, Jane Seymour, and Barbara Hers

Harking back to the pulpy adventure serials they grew up on, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas brought a delightfully old-school vision to action cinema in 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark . Ice-cool adventurer Indiana Jones is the quintessential Harrison Ford character and he got an unforgettable introduction in Raide

From Jaws to Jurassic Park , Spielberg's films demonstrate a great appreciation for "movie magic." This is evident in an anecdote from production designer Rick Carter , who asked Spielberg during production on Jurassic Park how the T-Rex suddenly appears in the Visitors Center during the finale. Carter was asking logically, but Spielberg responded "from the top of the fra

Indy is a stereotypical man’s man, someone who’s so manly that even as an academic his forte is punching people. Because he’s the hero, he gets away with casual misogyny, violence, and has to heroically dodge women’s affection (ex. One of his students). This doesn’t make him terrible, but his example is better left in the confines of cinema and mythmak

Re-watching Raiders in 2021 feels like you're watching a movie that could've been released last year. This longevity can greatly be attributed to the fact that a majority of the film is made practically, using real sets, locations, and stunt

From high-octane car chases to visceral shootouts, there are a bunch of different ways to thrill audiences in an action movie. One of the most fun aspects of the genre is fight choreography. If it’s staged, shot, and edited just right, brutal hand-to-hand combat can make for some intense action sequen

While this was part of a brainstorming session, and they did make some changes, if fans take a closer look at the dialogue with Marion and Indy's reunion, they would still see there is some subtext of an inappropriate relationship. When audiences address this discussion and the dialogue, it definitely leaves one feeling uncomforta

Since Raiders of the Lost Ark was inspired by the pulpy adventure serials of the 1930s , the early conceptual designs for the characters were a lot pulpier. The pulpiest of the bunch was the initial design for the Nazi villain, Arnold Toht. Whereas he’s just a sinister man in black in the final film, he was originally supposed to wear a cartoonishly kitted-out Nazi unif

One of the most renowned and influential works of world cinema, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is notable for its delightfully unrealistic fight choreography. The movie’s gloriously cinematic fight scenes have martial artists floating through trees with the lightness of a baller

While it takes place a few years before global war broke out, Raiders of the Lost Ark Updates Ark was still made with World War II firmly lodged in its mind. As if the Nazis didn’t make things obvious enough, Indy and his friends represent the Allied Forces that would later team up to end the

Spielberg’s filmmaking has all the hallmarks of great action cinema: inventive setups, increasingly raised stakes, well-constructed suspense , clarity of movement in the framing and editing, and most importantly, a palpable sense of