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I got home from a meeting last night and found my wife and oldest daughter had just sat down to start watching Raiders Of The Lost Ark. My daughter had not seen it yet and she really wanted to. It's been many years since I've seen that movie so I decided to sit down and watch it with them.
Wow. Things have changed a lot in movie making! I couldn't believe how amateurish the movie looked. The dialog was about as cheesy as it gets. The fight and chase scenes were laughable. And the special effects were not very well done.
The dialog was just not good. The lines at time were pretty silly but even worse was the way that Harrison Ford delivered them. He was pretty awkward on the set. Sometimes you could see him standing there waiting to say his line. He wasn't really listening to the other person. Harrison Ford has gotten better over the years.
The fight scenes were especially funny. They were nothing like what we see now. In particular, they were slow. The bad guy would throw a punch and Indy would dodge it. Then everyone would stand still for half a second while Indy set up to do his "punch". In the group fight scenes it was the same way. Everyone just standing around waiting for their turn in the choreographed sequence. When I first saw the movie way back in the 80's it didn't seem bad at all. Now that I've seen thousands of movie fight scenes I can tell how far we've come.
The special effects were probably pretty good for what was available at the time. I can't discredit the movie for that. There were a couple places where the effects were especially bad. In the scene were Indy falls into the snake pit there are a few times where you can see the reflections of the snakes on Plexiglas (or real glass) that was between Indy and the snakes. It is really obvious when Indy is on the ground and is face-to-face with a cobra. The second place with poor effects was the scene were Indy crawls under the moving truck. It was obvious that in many parts of the scene the truck was barely moving. Due to the camera angle at first it seemed like things were speeding along but if you focused on objects a bit in the background you could see that the truck was just crawling along.
I don't mention these things to say that Raiders was a bad movie. Instead it's amazing to see how far we've come. When Raiders came out in the theaters it was considered an incredible movie. People loved it. I wonder if the movies we see today will look just as dated and second-rate 25 years from now.
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