my movie thoughts on 'Raiders! The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made'
I feel like if you look up "There's a lot to unpack here" in the dictionary, this movie's poster should be used as the image. Because whoa.
It wants to be a lot of things:
It's part documentary about these kids that saw 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' in the 80s and decided they were going to remake it themselves and spent the next 7 years working on it on and off between school and life and such.
It's also part documentary about 3 of these kids as adults and how their relationships changed as they got older, how their dreams changed.
And IT IS ALSO a documentary about 2 of these guys attempting to get the final scene of the movie filmed 30 years later at great personal expense.
AND ONE MORE! It is also a documentary about the cult following their fan film got in the underground film community years later.
I'm not sure the movie set out to do what the guys involved intended it to do, but it is definitely an interesting study in obsession? Or perhaps also this weird issue with filling fulfilled and how people define themselves? It definitely got painful near the end when the one guy's past started to become more apparent with the abusive father and drug habit and the abuse towards his friend...
But when the climatic moment happened, all I could think was "What the hell are you guys doing anyway?"
And when that final note came on screen that said the one guy had quit his job and joined up with the other guy to start a film studio I was like "nooooooooo!!!" because that just seemed to be a really irresponsible thing to do with his family and kids and what not. It felt like the other guy convinced him to do it and we really had NO background on what he had done with his life, except he was unhappy.
Yeah, that's a lot. And I don't think it actually succeeds at any one of these things. BUT it does become an interesting artifact about real relationships and dynamics in groups. It becomes a story about obsession and adults trying to recapture some part of their youth. It is about how so many of us that grow up loving movies use them to fill a certain part of our life, even if we don't quite know what that part is.
I don't think the guys that put this together saw how this was going to reflect back on them. As the credits started rolling, I wasn't sure any of what happened in 2015 was a good idea.
Have you watched 'Raiders!' - what did you think?
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