contrived Comic Books

...Then there is the obligatory ironic ending: The ark is crated up by theU.S...

...Unfortunately, in this film the loose ends keep on unraveling...

...Later he and Marion take the ark aboard a ship bound for home...

...who the raiders are remains something of a mystery...

...But Indy, with Marion's help, discovers the true location of the buried Ark, about 600 yards away from where Belloq and his nasty friends are digging...

...To be sure, the first 10 minutes of the film are breathtaking, as fedora-sporting Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) hacks his way through the steaming jungles of Peru in search of a lost Inca treasure...

...With Indian headhunters hot on his heels, he braves a booby-trapped cave, dodging spears flying out of the walls, leaping over chasms opening up before his feet, diving under a stone wall suddenly dropped from above, and battling creeping tarantulas and a traitorous native guide...

...The story supposedly hinges on the choice Clark Kent (Christopher Reeve) must make between his superpowers and his love for Lois Lane (Margot Kidder), who has discovered his secret identity, since surrendering to her would mean no longer being the Man of Steel...

...After an hour-and-a-half of mindless adventure, he gives us a glimpse of his patented meaningless metaphysics: The music roars, the heavens thunder, lightning flashes, and an otherworldly force bursts onto the screen...

...Raiders tells us less about society as a whole, I'm afraid, than about Hollywood, which of late seems to be laboring under the illusion that today's moviegoers are subliterate teen-agers unable to distinguish between good and bad comic books...

...When the payoff finally comes around, it doesn't pay off...

...As if the earlier mechanical groundwork for this gag were not bad enough, the flabbiness of the writing and directing of the twosome's escape from the Well gave me plenty of time to wonder why all those snakes were down there in the first place...

...Belloq, now cooperating with the Nazis, has a head start on his rival...

...After some stupendously dopey stunts, he commandeers the treasure truck, wipes out the escort vehicles, arrives in Cairo, and speeds into a waiting warehouse that is quickly concealed by friendly Egyptians who set up a bazaar in the street in front of it...

...Poor Marion suffers a great deal of pain in the film (she is bound and gagged repeatedly, slapped around, threatened with a fiery poker...

...The filmmakers (Richard Lester has replaced Richard Don-ner as director, for the sequel, with Alexander and Ilya Salkind repeating as the producers) still have not understood that when the Man of Steel is winging it "faster than a speeding bullet," his cape should flap behind him...

...In the 1979 original, the writers at least drew upon the comic books, especially during the scenes on Krypton and on the Kent farm, and the film had some pleasantly corny characters and situations...

...Once again, though, we're given one of those awkward character hooks-marion's ability to drink men under the table-that we know we're supposed to file away for future reference...

...Indy tells Marion he'll join her in Cairo and mounts a horse in pursuit...

...load the ark onto a truck and head back to Cairo in a heavily armed convoy...

...and that he has a long-running feud with a Frenchman of dubious loyalties named Belloq (Paul Freeman...

...It would seem that he could have his cake and eat it too, but no...

...Or worse, perhaps films are now made by people who are no brighter than the dullest members of the audience they have in mind...

...In fact, Raiders of the Lost Ark proceeds like one of those Saturday matinee serials that leave you more irritated than frustrated by the words "to be continued next week...

...government (never mind how Indy got it back home, or why God isn't sore at him) and trundled into a warehouse...

...All the bad guys are zapped, while the pure at heart survive because Indy knows enough to tell Marion to keep her eyes closed (the ostrich theory of good and evil...

...Indy evidently wronged her and her father many years before, but the nature of his offense is never made clear enough to generate the romantic tension Kasdan seems to be trying for...

...But I would not recommend enduring the agonies of Superman II merely to have questions handy two years hence for Superman III...

...At the end of the movie, after defeating the interlopers, Kent inexplicably resumes his double identity and renounces Lois...

...The last 15 minutes of the film are particularly incoherent...

...The story, set in 1936 and on four continents, clunks along in several virtually self-contained segments having little connection to one another, alternating bursts of action with fits of tedium...

...But the opening is so outrageously hair-raising that the rest of the film seems anticlimactic...

...Just when you think he is home free with the booty (that is, when you think the filmmakers have run out of hilarious perils for him to escape), Indy sets off the cave's final defense: A gigantic stone sphere starts rumbling after him through the underground corridors like a ball bearing through a pipe, flattening everything in its path and leaving him no exit save the way he came in, if he can make it...

...In any case, Indy blows it again (imagine a thriller whose heroes did allow themselves to get trapped), and the baddies truss him and Marion to a pole while they prepare to let loose the force of the ark...

...What did they eat...

...Frederic Wertham in The Seduction of the Innocent...

...Nothing in the whole wretched business is as bad as the screenplay by David and Leslie Newman from Mario Puzo's story...

...It has all the elements of the kind of adventure epic that always lures me to the movies (though later I often wish I had resisted): exotic locations, fistfights, swordplay, gun battles, spectacular stunts and special effects, nefarious villains, a damsel frequently in distress, a hero in a leather jacket and a slouch hat...

...that he is an academic as well as an adventurer (an utterly unnecessary plot device...

...they seal him up in the Well of Souls with Marion...

...The flying itself is particularly egregious...

...Had they been reproducing, generation after generation, in that closed tomb...

...The first sign that things are going wrong crops up shortly after the Peruvian expedition...

...It reveals that Indy is an archaeologist whose specialty is finding long-lost loot...

...Somewhere in Egypt, several hundred miles south of Cairo, the search commences in earnest...

...Even the special effects are lousy, and the superimposition and blue-screening used to create the flying sequences resemble a home moviemaker's double-exposures...

...We never find out how she got to Cairo, who arranged for the warehouse and all those helpful merchants, or why -despite the many hours that have supposedly passed by the time she reappears-marion is still wearing the dress that was torn into rags as she extricated herself from the Well...

...Had they been buried along with the ark 3,000 years ago...

...Upon reflection, though, 1 realized that the problem with Marion is characteristic of the entire film: everything from Ford's fedora to the Cairo bazaar to the jungles of Peru looks right, but nothing makes sense...

...Why the damned box could not have been opened in Egypt is one more mystery...

...Then there's another big action scene, a showdown with some Nazis, and the story proper begins at last...

...I first thought the filmmakers were indulging some kind of weird SM fantasy from one of those ghoulish comic books that were condemned 25 years ago, when Lucas and Spielberg were growing up, by the notorious Dr...

...This initial sequence shakily attempts to set up what follows...

...that he is afraid of snakes (a phobia we know will be significant because it is sketched in with such clumsiness...

...Indy and the Germans are searching for it because each of their governments wants to harness its mystical power for the coming World War????don't ask me how, and don't expect any answers from Kasdan's script on this either...

...Moreover, producer George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg are young veterans in the art of entertainment (Star Wars and Jaws, respectively...

...In the sequel the Newmans and Puzo have wholly invented their tale and, for the most part, the characters...

...That doesn't faze our intrepid hero?not to mention the screenwriter and the producer, who must have saved some money by shrinking the geography of the location shooting...

...The Nazis temporarily recover the ark, and Indy hitches a ride on the conveniently nonsub-merging German submarine that is carrying it and Marion to a remote island (the name of which flashes all too briefly across the screen) where Belloq is planning to unleash that mystical power we have been hearing so much about...

...When the lid of the chest is lifted, Raiders suddenly turns into Close Encounters, and Spielberg's contribution, not very evident throughout the rest of the film, is finally clear...

...Lawrence Kasdan's script has Indy journeying to Nepal, where he is reunited with his mentor's daughter, Marion (Karen Allen...

...Yet somehow these ingredients add up to an only intermittently satisfying concoction...

...The cavern is filled with thousands of snakes, of course, and they writhe around our poor hero and his longlost love...

...Perhaps some of these puzzles will be resolved in the already announced sequel to this sequel...

...Sadly, their collective imagination is smaller than Kasdan's, and the resulting plot holes are larger...

...Belloq & Co...

...Superman opts for the heart, but when three criminals from Krypton arrive on Earth, discover their own superpowers, and decide to take over the planet, he somehow manages to regain his strength...

...It is not good for a thriller's pace to slacken to the point where such questions occur, instead of being steamrollered out of mind by the relentless plot machine...

...I wouldn't dare offer any broad cultural generalizations about this confusing, ultimately piddling entertainment...

...In appreciation of Indy's efforts, apparently, they do not simply shoot him...

...The ark of the title is the lost ark of the covenant...

...The latter seems to be the case with Superman II, an enterprise more pathetically simple-minded than Raiders...

...He has begun excavating what he thinks is the site of the Well of Souls in the Temple of Solomon, where according to legend the ark is to be found...

...The next day, however, Indy is mighty surprised (even if we are not) when Belloq, having looked over the next hill and spotted Indy's dig, shows up with machine guns and Nazis to claim the ark...

...I suspect that Spielberg and Lucas were simply carried away by how fetching she looked?battered and heroic, bedraggled but beautiful...