Steven Spielberg doles out new information with every shot in the opening scene of Jurassic Park , slowly building up the suspense. It opens close on some trees, obscuring something. That something is tearing the trees out of the way, thundering towards us, bellowing booming noises. A couple of closeups then introduce terrified men wearing hard hats bearing the Jurassic Park logo. Some of them are ar
While the cast and crew were out in Tunisia, shooting the Cairo-set scenes for Raiders of the Lost Ark , they all got really sick from food poisoning. John Rhys-Davies, who played Sallah in the movie , apparently got so sick that he soiled himself during a scene that required him to bend over. The only person involved in the production who didn’t get food poisoning was Steven Spielberg, because he had brought his own food from home – which reportedly consisted of dozens and dozens of cans of Spaghetti-O’s – and didn’t eat any of the local food that everyone else was hav
Spielberg seemingly acknowledged this as proven by his Holocaust drama Schindler’s List and the works that followed. No longer were Nazis depicted as silly bad guys for someone to beat up. Instead, they were shown in all of their monstrosity and inhuman
Cartoonishly evil Nazis are practically a tradition of heightened World War II fiction, with Raiders of the Lost Ark featuring its famously occult-obsessed members of the Third Reich. As delightfully villainous as Major Toht and company may be, their characterizations still ignored the inhuman ideals that real-world Nazis belie
He is later revealed to be a Soviet spy. The American press vilifies him as his appointed lawyer, James Donovan, agrees to fairly argue his case in court. This opening shot captures the nuances of Mark Rylance’s performance as A
The love interests in Indiana Jones movies have been a bit hit-or-miss over the years, but surely everyone agrees that Marion Ravenwood is the best of them all by a wide margin. As heroic and fun as Indy is, Marion is just as entertaining and a true badass in her own ri
Spielberg’s WWII epic Saving Private Ryan , the one that induced PTSD attacks in war veterans, opens and closes with the same image: an American flag, blowing in the wind, color-graded with a very bleak, washed-out palette. Some critics have called these shots contradictory to the movie’s message. Saving Private Ryan is poised as an unpatriotic, anti-war film, yet it’s impossible to see the American flag as anything other than patriotic. The desaturated colors could be seen as Spielberg having his cake and eating it,
One of the most iconic moments in Raiders of the Lost Ark Treasure Maps Ark sees Indy facing a swordsman with ostentatious choreography. Indy just shoots the guy and moves on. This wasn’t in the original script. Initially, Indy was supposed to use his whip to yank the sword out of the guy’s hand, but since the entire cast and crew was sick from a bad case of food poisoning during the shoot in Tunisia, Harrison Ford suggested simply “shooting the sucker,” to cut down on how long it would take to film. Steven Spielberg loved the idea and decided to use
Lauded as one of the greatest movies ever made, Raiders of the Lost Ark introduced the movie-going world to one of its most timeless icons: Indiana Jones . Even though the dream team of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, who had each directed a record-breaker for the highest grossing movie ever made at this point, were behind the production, they struggled to garner any interest from the major Hollywood stud
Both these movies share a biblical theme in their MacGuffins, but the Ark of the Covenant is just a more interesting item. There is a real mystery behind what it is and what it can do. It all pays off wonderfully in the epic gruesome finale when the Nazis finally open it and get more than they bargained
While Raiders of the Lost Ark might have been the first-time audiences met Indy, The Last Crusade showed us Indy’s earliest adventure. The opening flashback features young Indy (played by River Phoenix) taking on some treasure hunt
While it’s fun to see Indy beat up bad guys, he is first and foremost an archaeologist which is one of the most interesting aspects of the character. The Last Crusade is truly the movie where Indy’s intelligence as a scholar shines thro
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas auditioned a ton of different actors for the roles of Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood. For Indy, they considered David Hasselhoff, Tom Selleck, Michael Biehn (who would go on to play Kyle Reese in The Terminator ), Mark Harmon, Christopher Guest (who starred in This is Spinal Tap ), and A Star is Born ’s Sam Elli
In a frenzied handheld shot that just points at whatever’s going on in front of it, more like a documentary than a docudrama, we see soldiers gearing up, assembling rifles, watching helicopters fly overhead – it’s hec