> Don't get me wrong... Pushed to choose, I would pick it as my all-time favorite action/adventure movie. I absolutely love it; The characters were great, not to mention believable... they were not yet the broad (though truly funny) cartoons they eventually became in the sequels. The action was top notch (and aside from the ark's fire, all practical FX and stunts, so it holds up very well to the test of time.) And the adventure itself was truly sprawling and beautifully paced.
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Which put it head and shoulders above many films then and now. The film was a pleasure to watch.
> No, what makes it odd was the way it treated the lead character. Indiana Jones was a complete loser in that film. Admittedly, the coolest loser ever, but still... even Charlie Brown had to take some pity on the guy. How big of a loser was he? He was such a loser that he spent the climax of the film tied to a pole being completely ignored by the villains. He didn't have a single tiny contribution to their ultimate defeat. His last card (to blow up the ark) was a bluff... it was called, and his role in things was over.
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I think you are missing the point.
1. Indy was the lone hero set against a powerful enemy. He manages to
survive against impossible odds and still keeps on going. He was never put forward as a superhero.
2. Bear in mind also that some of the inspiration for the film comes from the old serials of the 1930s and 1940s. They were all about insurmountable odds and cliffhangers.
3. At the end of the film he realises the danger they are all in and works out how to survive it, bringing himself and the female lead out unharmed. This is more than the Nazis managed.
> What's more, the ending renders his whole adventure pointless. The Ark could obviously take care of itself... there was never any danger in the Nazi's being able to use it.
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But this was not at all obvious to the protagonists. They only found this out the hard way. Are his actions any the less heroic for being proved unnecessary
after the fact?
> Indiana's main goal of getting the Ark to a museum was never realized... the prize is taken away from him yet again, lost to a warehouse.
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If I recall correctly, he is discussing the ark with an agent and is asying that it is a powerful object and needs to be secured. The "belongs in a museum" fixation actually comes from the third film.
The method of hiding it, of course, is to put it in a huge warehouse in an anonymous box. There are other implications in that scene, but I won't go in to them.
> Of course, he does get the girl, and thus his true reward... So that's not too shabby, I admit. Still, it wasn't until I recently rewatched it that I reflected on what a bizarrely anti-climactic role Indy played in his own movie. Yet it still launched him as a hero for the ages. Go figure.
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It was a good film with a hero people could relate to. What's to figure?
