Celluloid Heroes

…just because some man in a red coat gives you a sword it doesn’t make you a hero…

C.S. Lewis’s much-loved fantasy cycle shares no small amount of DNA with J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. Both were Oxford fellows who belonged to the same literary group, the Inklings. Tolkein was also primarily responsible for Lewis’s conversion to Christianity. The seven-part Narnia cycle is quite a bit more accessible than the Rings trilogy, however, and the movie version shares a similar relationship to Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Tolkein’s work. This is a Lord of the Rings movie for people who don’t want to sit through Jackson’s nine-hour trilogy.

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Blessed me? God’s been a real sport to me!

I don’t know why, but over the years, the best films based on the works of Stephen King have been those based on material that didn’t fit into the stereotypical mold of the horror-meister, like Stand by Me, Misery and David Cronenerg’s adaptation of The Dead Zone. The straight spook-and-slash flicks have been cranked out by hacks who lean entirely on the gooey red stuff and toss King’s characterization and texture over the side. On the other end of the spectrum was Stanley Kubrick’s arid interpretation of The Shining, where the director’s distance from the material seemed to be measured in light-years.

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It’s not the years, honey. It’s the mileage.

As a standalone movie, judged apart from its lesser sequels, Raiders of the Lost Ark is a pure, unfiltered dose of joyful escapism. Rarely has the medium of film been so successfully used for the purpose of pure entertainment. Free from director Steven Spielberg’s tendency for suburban navel-gazing, cute kids and distant parents, as well as producer George Lucas’s later bloated mythic pretensions, Raiders tosses overboard every piece of narrative flab as the story hums along like a well-tuned V-8 engine.

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