Glorious fun romp still holds up pretty well. Some of it is a bit creaky – all the jabbering natives smack slightly of racism, Spielberg tends to underline the jokes – but it’s still smart, imaginative and full of genuine thrills. The art direction is magnificent – there’s something magical about period action films, particularly ones set in the 30s; the special effects remain pretty good too.
Some plot holes which annoyed at the time still annoy (eg Indy getting on the submarine – what if it sinks?) but Lawrence Kasdan’s screenplay remains one of the best things he’s ever done and stands as a magnificent rebuke to all the idiotic action tentpoles running around over the last 30 years.
Harrison Ford’s perennially stressed Indiana Jones contributes immeasurably to making his adventures believable (Tom Selleck would have made it more tongue in cheek and cartoonish). Indiana was more of a hard-arse than I remembered – he raids tombs without thinking about it much, and dismisses Karen Allen’s complaints that he took advantage of her when she was a teenager with “you knew what you were doing”.
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