Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey, John Rhys-Davies

Synopsis:

The year is 1936. An archeology professor named Indiana Jones is venturing in the jungles of South America searching for a golden statue. Unfortunately, he sets off a deadly trap but miraculously escapes. Then, Jones hears from a museum curator named Marcus Brody about a biblical artifact called The Ark of the Covenant, which can hold the key to humanly existence. Jones has to venture to vast places such as Nepal and Egypt to find this artifact. However, he will have to fight his enemy Rene Belloq and a band of Nazis in order to reach it.

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The first three action-packed escapades of everyone’s favourite teacher turned archaeologist are now available as separate entities on Blu-ray (mercifully, the fourth instalment is absent). Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), the first in the series from Hollywood’s own golden idols George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, is still the strongest by far and remains a thoroughly rousing and nostalgic delight to return to. What’s more, Spielberg has thankfully spared us from seeing that huge boulder hurtling towards Indiana during the film’s breathtaking opening segment cleaned up with digital effects, Lucas-style.

This is still our childhood favourite, sans any digital facelifts or scene recontextualising. After revisiting Raiders of the Lost Ark, it becomes even more apparent just what an expert grip Spielberg has on his material here, which could have so easily descended into schlock and cornball in lesser hands. The countless imitators which followed – even stretching as far as Nicolas Cage’s anaemic National Treasure films, decades later – were never able to successfully mimic or mine what the (then) dream team of Lucas and Spielberg did here. Raiders is a film which looks far from dated, and is now part of that pantheon of timeless, escapist Hollywood action cinema that can be enjoyed over and over again in high definition.

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