Screen:

...What hides behind the latter's clumsiness and klutzi-ness is the same unimaginative, passionless dolt who's hiding in front of them...

...Just as Zod, and Ursa are the too perfect counterpart for Superman, the befuddled Lois is too perfect a mate for Clark Kent...

...Despite all the exaggeration and braggadocio in Raiders, Indiana is in the end a rather credible hero...

...But it doesn' t help much to build her up as a character...

...He's having everything in the book thrown at him, and hoping that somehow he'll be able to get out with his skin...

...Its script by Lawrence Kasdan is based on a story by Philip Kaufman (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and George Lucas (American Graffiti, Star Wars...

...The only character in Superman II who could have topped these three is Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman...

...Indiana can hardly find a place for her to kiss him where the pain isn't too much to bear...

...The inferiority of Superman II is in part the poor quality of its villains...

...He's the quintessence of connivance...

...Raiders is the movie that gives the guy a chance to laugh...

...Lex is super-human himself m a way that balances Superman's strengths endearingly...

...If anything, Hackman plays his role in Superman II with even more ghoulish relish than before...

...He is second fiddle to Zod, Non, and Ursa, who are penal exiles from Superman's home planet, Krypton, and have powers equal to his...

...Maybe the filmmakers just decided, wisely, to accept the vagaries and contradictions that their collaboration was bound to create in Indiana...

...Its black trinity of Zod (Terence Stamp), Non (Jack O'Halloran) and Ursa (Sarah Douglas) is no match for Raiders' evil triumvirate of an international adventurer named Belloq (Paul Freeman), a Nazi officer (Wolf Kahler), and, best of all, a weak-sighted Gestapo agent in a black leather trenchcoat (Ronald Lacey...

...Spielberg and Lucas made it up as they went along...

...They're full of bored omnipotence...

...Except for being faster than a speeding bullet and able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, Superman is indistinguishable from Clark...

...This film represents a collaboration among some of the more strong-willed whiz kids in Hollywood...

...They also play their collective role with pure punk affectation...

...The fact is that when it suits the filmmakers for Indiana to be clean-cut and noble for a few minutes, that's the way he is...

...Perhaps Indiana's inconsistencies as a character are inevitable, since so many people with overactive fantasy lives were pushing and pulling on him at once...

...At the end of the film, somewhere around two hours later, he is still just a shadowy outline...

...Why I find Raiders a more engaging bit of nonsense than Superman II is somewhat hard to explain...

...It's a moment that contains, much more than his dramatic entrance at the beginning, the key to his appeal...

...Indiana is only trying breathlessly, desperately, to keep up with them...

...They have total contempt for the world (i.e., the planet Earth) and everyone in it...

...At one point when Marion asks him how he plans to accomplish something, he pleads, "How do I know...

...Raiders starts, middles, and ends with a plot...

...It is a tribute to Christopher Reeve's acting abilities that he can bring to the role of Superman the mind-flattening blandness and lack of range or subtlety it requires...

...She has always been inescapably dumb...

...Actually, in Superman II she does figure this out briefly...

...As executive producer, Lucas even had final say over Spielberg, who, with Jaws and Close Encounters to his credit, is a fairly heavy macher himself...

...What we have learned about him, we should perhaps not be surprised, is rather contradictory...

...Not exactly...

...He was the best thing in the first Superman, and takes the prize again in the new film...

...Instead of making her seem smarter than we thought, her insight lowers our estimation of Superman himself...

...On the eve of his departure to search for the "lost ark" referred to in the title - the Ark of the Covenant - he tells a colleague and mentor, "This is everything we got into archaeology for...

...Very little detail has been filled in...

...Certainly, most of the objections I've made to Superman's character, or lack of it, could be leveled at Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) in Raiders as well...

...On the other hand, his methods are those of a soldier of fortune .which is what his girlfriend Marion (Karen Allen) accuses him of being...

...When Clark, confronted by her, finally has to drop the act, we realize just how little acting there was in it...

...In the innumerable interviews he gave out while hyping Raiders at the beginning of the summer, director Steven Spielberg never tired of claiming, "All good movies start with character...

...Even Zod, Non, and Ursa make this apparent, for in being too much like Superman himself, they make us aware of what a bland fellow he is...

...Lex is just the ticket because he supplies to the movie all the personality that Superman lacks...

...and when it suits their purposes at some other moment for him to be shady and sinister, he acts that way...

...The big love scene that he has with Marion is a bit different from Superman's with Lois...

...The way he is roughed in as a character by Spielberg, Lucas, et al...

...It throws plot at the audience so fast and furiously that character development hardly has any room to get in edgewise...

...In fact, what makes this movie good - what makes it a lot better than Superman II - is that Indiana is completely at the mercy of forces beyond his control...

...This introduction is of course intended to establish Indiana with us as a man of mystery...

...The going over he gets from the filmmakers sets him up for the one the other characters give him...

...I'm making this up as I go along...

...The real edge that Raiders has over Superman II, however, is not in the villainy...

...It's in the heroism...

...But this time we see precious little of Lex...

...The character with which Raiders starts is a silhouette, a man in a Peruvian jungle standing against the light with his back to us...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...Raiders of the Lost Ark is a treat...

...He's an intensification of everything weak and vile in human nature...

...Spielberg and Lucas obviously think of the average moviegoer as some poor guy who feels that with all the crap coming down on his head in the world today, if he didn't laugh he'd cry...

...It also has about as much character development as a football game...

...is nothing compared to the way he is roughed up during the movie itself...

...Even Marion socks him right in the jaw, hard, the first time they get together...

...I don't know which movies those are, but they're clearly not Raiders...

...Even when he suddenly turns to whip the cocked pistol from the hand of a desperado sneaking up behind him, we don't get a clear look at the man's face under the brim of his rumpled fedora...

...Zod, Non, and Ursa sounds like the name of a punk rock group, and that's exactly how the three villains look in their black, shiny, skin-tight jumpsuits, their platform boots, and their death-mask make-up...

...He's not a super-hero strong enough to defend truth and justice and the American way...

...They're not so much from outer space as just spaced out...

...How bright could someone be who can never figure out what is so painfully obvious - that Clark and Superman" are one and the same...

...It's an ambiguous, not completely innocent remark, made, as it is, while packing his revolver and trusty bull whip...

...Superman II betrays its super-hero doubly by embroiling him in a love affair with Lois Lane (Margot Kidder...

...Zod, Non, and Ursa are too much Superman's equal, too much a mirror image of his celestial, ultimately rather dull self...

...He's just a guy who's riding the whirlwind and trying not to get tossed off...

...Raiders is as exciting as a Superbowl that goes into sudden-death overtime...

...How I miss him...

...On the one hand, he is a dedicated archaeologist trying to recover the world's antiquities...

...Superman II is, unfortunately, closer to treacle...

...Grin and bear it is very much the mentality of this movie...