Bruno Rawls

All of the Indiana Jones movies have an inventive opening shot that matches the Paramount logo. In Raiders of the Lost Ark , it’s a distant mountain shrouded by jungle mist. In Kingdom of the Crystal Skull , when things went off the rails, it’s a pile of dirt, complete with a computer-generated gop Another factual error related to the Ark occurs when Indiana Jones speaks about the Ten Commandments tablets that were brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses. He references the Biblical story where Moses throws the tablets down and shatters them before putting them in the In the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark , Indy defies death to retrieve a sacred golden idol from an ancient temple. His double-crossing buddy Satipo isn’t so lucky, but Indy manages to avoid the booby traps and makes it out of the tem A lot about Marion Ravenwood’s role in Raiders hasn’t aged well, from Indy dating her as a teenager to the fact that she’s a damsel in distress in most of her scenes (except, notably, the plane set piece when she knocks out the pilot and saves Indy from the strapping mechanic beating him to a pu No moment sums up the Indiana Jones character better than this one. In the middle of the Cairo melee, a crowd clears the way between Indy and a master swordsman who wants to challenge him to a duel. The swordsman does a bunch of impressive acrobatics with his sword to show Indy the kind of opponent he’s up against. And instead of indulging the swordsman, Indy just takes out his revolver and shoots Schindler’s List , Steven Spielberg’s harrowing cinematic portrait of the horrors of the Holocaust, opens with a completely black frame. Then, a match is struck, dimly illuminating the fingers holding it as it lights a can Although a lot of his contemporaries, like Francis Ford Coppola and John Milius, tackled the Vietnam War on the big screen while it was still raging, Spielberg avoided explicitly commenting on the conflict in his films until 2017. The Post is really the story of the Washington Post’s battle with the Nixon administration and the power of the free press, but it opens on a U.S. Army base in Vietnam’s Hau Nghia Province in 1 In the movie, white men, such as Indy, the Nazis, and Belloq (Paul Freeman) all exert authority over ethnic cultures. Indy enlists local workers to dig up the entrance to the Well of the Souls, Belloq commands the Hovitos tribe (fictional descendants of the Chachapoya people) once he acquires the idol, and a Nazi member is seen dispatching a group of Egyptian attackers in Cairo. It just makes one feel really uncomforta Raiders can almost be interpreted as a revenge fantasy. Indy punches his way through legions of Nazis and a bunch of them are gruesomely killed by divine intervention when the Ark is opened, positioning Raiders as a staunchly anti-fascist mo In the interim, audiences can reintroduce themselves (and their children) to the awesome spectacle of the first film. Even 40 years later, it's one of the best adventure films ever made , but it also contains a ton of hilarious goofs and mistakes that managed to make their way into the final product. Some are blatantly obvious, while others need to be pointed out, but all of them are worth attent Abagnale’s subsequent explanation that he got away with impersonating a doctor, a lawyer and a pilot hooks us in for his unbelievable story. And it is unbelievable. So unbelievable, in fact, that this opening was necessary to really establish t Perhaps what sums up Raiders' greatness __ is that it reflects the importance of filmmakers having a vision and being allowed to make the kind of movie they want. In an age of shared universes and formulaic filmmaking, it's refreshing to see a director know exactly what he wants and how to translate it into movie ma He’s made all kinds of movies: historical dramas, biopics, action movies, science-fiction, suspense. Spielberg is a master of visual storytelling, and a large part of that is opening his movies with the perfect shot to immerse us in each story’s world straight away. So, here are Steven Spielberg’s 10 Best Opening Shots, Ran After inserting the staff into the correct hole, it still ends up being taller than he is. As Harrison Ford is over 6 feet tall and looks it, this is a rather obvious but largely forgivable goof. Few people would bother working out these measurements in their heads and would rather just enjoy the mo Arachnophobes scared of films featuring spiders and insects must have freaked out watching the opening of Raiders, when both Indy and Satipo discover tarantulas crawling all over them. It's a nerve-wracking scene, especially considering that the spiders are, in fact, real. However, they aren't native to South America, where the opening scene takes pl Like many movies of its era, there are some aspects of Steven Spielberg’s action-adventure classic Raiders of the Lost Ark Strategy Ark that haven’t aged particularly gracefully. For starters, it’s revealed that the hero first began his relationship with the love interest when she was still underage, which would absolutely not fly with today's audien