Indiana Jones - Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)

The first Indiana Jones movie! The one that started it all! And yes, it was awesome. It starts in the jungle, just like you'd expect, with one grand and incredibly short trip into a tomb, but soon moves back to campus, and soon back to the wild again. This time it's to the sandy dunes of Cairo, where a search for the Ark of the Covenant (the one the ten commandments were carried in) is underway. It's not just a race to find the Ark, but a race to find it before the Nazis. Oh, and there's a girl too: Marion, played by Karen Allen. Harrison Ford is Indiana Jones (if you didn't know).

The music seems almost Star Wars inspired, the stunts are fantastic, the props realistic (all those spiders and snakes look pretty real though), and I'm thoroughly enjoying the oldskool milieu! This was the movie with the fabled face-melting scene too, incredibly well done; entirely without special effects. Even the occasional special effects don't look bad for a soon forty year old movie, from a time when special effects usually did look pretty lousy.

It's an adventure movie in class, with cleverness and comedy and great caliber. If my impressions are great because this is how I remember it or because it really is great is a different matter entirely, but considering this franchise has kept going strong for so long I assume it's the latter. Great watch.

 rated 4/5: fo shizzle