For the next few weeks, we will be counting down our 25 favorite blockbusters! Read all of the entries here.

**4. Raiders of the Lost Ark (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1980)**

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

The hissing "loooook" from Alfred Molina

The idol

The sand

The sinking platform

The boulder

The Belloq reveal

The snakes

The John Williams theme

The drinking game

The clothes hanger

The burning medallion

The bald Nazi and the plane rotor

The sword display and the gunshot

The bad dates

The moment Indy discovers they're digging in the wrong spot

The moment he finds the right spot

The rocket launcher stand-off

The realization of what the ark will actually do

The melting faces

The top men

The warehouse

You can watch any ten minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark and see something amazing.

I was going to leave this blurb there, with a list of moments that would, in isolation, act as the high points of any movie. As far as moments go, Raiders of the Lost Ark has more of them than any movie on this list. But I want to get into something else, and I hope this doesn't seem irrelevant.

I'm writing about the first Indiana Jones because nobody else initially wanted to tackle this write-up. I get it, of course. How do you write something new about this movie? Everybody loves it, and we all love it for the same reasons.

But then I remembered working in a bookstore in 2013 or 2014, when one of my coworkers explained that he liked Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Another coworker brought up a Big Bang Theory episode in which one of the screeching, hopeless nerds ruined Raiders for her screeching, hopeless nerd boyfriend by pointing out that if you took Indiana Jones out of his own movie, nothing about the story would change. The Nazis would still get the ark and they'd still die and this is presented as a "glaring story problem." I hadn't seen this acted out until I looked it up on YouTube five minutes ago, and I have to say, now that I have full context, it still strikes me as total bullshit.

There's this CinemaSins-y pretentiousness that's existed online for at least a decade now, where we judge movies against an unwritten Joseph Campbell-style set of rules for storytelling. People get mad when plots don't resolve "correctly," or they see a movie pull off a great action scene without cuts and chastise another for not doing the same.

It looks like when the Big Bang Theory episode aired, a bunch of Internet people got it in their heads that the movie had been ruined and that the Mensa braintrust of "What if a nerd said the word 'Thundercats' to a lady who is not a nerd?" writers had shot their holy cow. The 21st century Algonquin Round Table opened the audience's eyes to something they should have seen years ago.

I don't think these people know what a movie is. Raiders of the Lost Ark is about characters who think they can harness power beyond their (or anybody else's) station. If you need it to function as wish fulfillment, you can easily take it in under that lens, but if you need a hero to do literally everything in a movie, I don't know what to tell you. This is like being mad that the velociraptors in Jurassic Park get taken down by the T-Rex and not Sam Neill. Nature will defeat the people who try to control it.

Indy's whip is the perfect tool for a character who's just barely hanging on. He looks great and everybody loves him, but he's still at the mercy of whatever giant force, be it the German army or God's covenant with his creation, decides to push him around. That's the entire point of the warehouse at the end. You can survive God's wrath and another big force will undermine the victory. In many ways, there is no victory. But the road there is so incredibly fun that the movie itself doesn't feel dour.

And even if this movie wasn't about those giant forces, come on. We don't need every movie to follow the Cannon formula by featuring an unstoppable badass having in impact on everybody and everything encounter. We don't need to yell "gotcha!" at movies that (intentionally) aren't built like Swiss watches. And we sure as shit don't need to pretend Raiders of the Lost Ark is anything but a perfect piece of blockbuster cinema.