Raiders of the Lost Ark
The inaugural Indiana Jones film starring Harrison Ford as the iconic adventurer / college professor opens with Dr. Jones on an expedition to South America to filch an idol from a temple so that it can be displayed in a museum, with backstabbing aplenty as there would be throughout the main plots of future installments. This subplot doesn’t really have much bearing on the main narrative, like its first two sequels, and when Indy gets home, he hears that the Nazis are seeking the eponymous Ark of the Covenant due to a combination of Hitler’s interest in mystical artifacts and that the Ark itself allegedly makes armies that hold it invincible.
Sure enough, Indy agrees to get ahold of the Ark first, traveling first to Nepal where his old love interest, Marion Ravenwood, daughter of Indy’s old mentor Abner, has the headpiece of the Staff of Ra necessary to reveal the Ark’s location, where others who wish to find the artifact before him get into a tussle, and everyone moves on to its current resting place in Egypt, with several more conflicts in Cairo leading to the desert, where the Nazis waste their resources digging in the wrong location. Luckily, Indy and his trusty sidekick Sallah manage to find the Ark, resulting in a game of keep-away between them and the Nazis.
Given the ending scenes in the film, said game of keep-away seems incredibly unnecessary; Indy could have very easily just stayed home, and it would have ended largely the same way (save maybe for positive historical circumstances given the Nazis’ involvement), though he wouldn’t have hooked up with Marion, critical later in the franchise. It’s certainly an amazing movie and “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant,” but as I’ve said before, critics and audiences confuse that with “infallible,” and I think it’s sad I found out about the film’s glaring issues through Cracked and not any “professional” critics, which says a lot about the sorry state of any kind of entertainment journalism, really.