Fevered Thoughts on Raiders

What is quite probably the last CWRU Egg Hunt ever was at the Science Center yesterday. I felt like death: hot forehead, constantly cold, muscle fatigue, sleepiness, aching joints, and honest-to-God shivering. I got through the day OK, and today I feel a lot better. I was planning on taking Monday off as a sick day, but now I'm reconsidering.

Raiders of the Lost Ark is on The Sci-Fi Channel, and I was fortunate enough to catch it at the "taking the idol" sequence. If you had told me when I first saw this film that the guide who steals the idol and promptly gets skewered on the way out would deliver a really nice performance of a sympathetic, albeit slightly chubby, Doc Oc in a Spider-Man movie, I wouldn't have believed you.

Catching Raiders of the Lost Ark from the beginning lets you witness what an impressive film this is from a technical standpoint. Apparently, a small group of kids spent ten years remaking this movie, shot for shot, with home consumer-grade video equipment. I wondered what kind of attention to detail is necessary to even begin such an endeavor, and it, too, is impressive.

Careful attention to detail makes me ask questions. Question like, if Indiana Jones gives Belok his revolver after escaping the temple collapse, does that mean the revolver he produces later on while packing to fly to Nepal is new? Probably. Did anyone else notice that in his lecture, he talks about how the most dangerous thing in archaeology is folklore? He discusses how a legend about a golden coffin caused a burial chamber to be vandalized. Yet two scenes later, he's waxing philosophical to the U.S. intelligence agents about all of the things that may or may not have happened to the Ark of the Covenant. Maybe it was taken from the Temple of Solomon by an Egyptian pharaoh. He may have buried it in a secret subterranean chamber called the Well of Souls. Of course, as is par for the course in movies and RPG games, old legends are always completely factual and all prophecies come true almost immediately. No one knows what happened to the Ark, but he's more than happy to stitch several uncorroborated legends together and pretend it's plausible.

Maybe I'm looking too deeply into this. After all, it's all-but-explicitly stated early on that Dr. Jones is a grave robber willing to obtain any artifact without compunction for the moral implications it may possess. Why do people love this man again?