Director Steven Spielberg Was Stumped Over Raiders Of The Lost Ark's Biggest Reveal
There are a lot of great moments in Steven Spielberg's 1981 action-adventure film "Raiders of the Lost Ark," but nothing quite comes close to the film's intense climax. After following archaeologist Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) and feisty bar owner Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) on their journey to try and stop the Nazis from stealing a biblical artifact, said Nazis actually manage to open the artifact — the Ark of the Covenant, the holy box that once held the Tablets of the Law, which contained the ten commandments passed down to Moses by God in the old testament. They open the box to try and get a peek at what's inside, only to have their Nazi faces melted right off like a bunch of action figures hit with a blowtorch. It's one of the most satisfying moments in cinema history, but according to Spielberg, it was also pretty much done by the seat of his pants.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly in 2011, Spielberg revealed that the one thing in "Raiders" that felt like a real challenge was figuring out what to do with the big climax, because what was in the script simply wasn't feasible.
Raiders of the Lost Ark's finale was too complex to film
Another of the movie's best moments, when Indy shoots a swordsman, comes from a moment of improv (even if screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan hated it), so there was already precedent for winging it a bit on "Raiders." Spielberg explained his trepidation when it came to the big finale:
"The one thing in Raiders I was a little bit dubious about was what happens when they open the ark. What actually is going to come out of the ark? There were a lot of crazy things in the script that came out of the ark. I wasn't sure how much we could actually get on the screen. We made a lot of it up when we were in postproduction."
In the script, the opening is absolutely bonkers, with descriptions of a "light so bright, a power so fearsome, a charge so jolting, that there is nothing in our world to compare to it" and a "sound so intense and so odd and so haunting that the suggestible among us might imagine it were the whisper of God," which are basically impossible to convey via film, so Spielberg and his team had to get creative. They managed to convey some of it, like the streaks of white light that shoot out of the Ark, but the rest all ended up being a bit of strobing and some amazing Nazi face-melting. I, for one, am not complaining. As impressive as Kasdan's description of the moment is, who doesn't love a Nazi getting their face melted off?
The legacy of the Lost Ark
"Raiders of the Lost Ark" features several masterclass moments in storytelling right alongside simpler bits of face-melting joy. It established the Indiana Jones character for audiences and helped pave the way for several sequels of varying quality, though nothing was ever quite as great as "Raiders." Seriously, it's not just the first but also the best Indiana Jones film, and it's almost hard to quantify just how much of an impact it had on popular culture. It gave us "snakes? Why did it have to be snakes?," Indy switching out a weighted bag for an idol to escape a death trap, and so many more indelible cinematic moments. It's an incredible film that seems to be a bit of magic, only possible through the combined talents of a dream team that included Kasdan, Spielberg, George Lucas, producer Frank Marshall, editor Michael Kahn, and many more.
Spielberg's quote is a good reminder that sometimes what works well on the page simply can't be translated to the screen, and being able to play around and find solutions to problems in post-production is a vital part of being a filmmaker.