The summer of 2023 was strange one at the summer box office. There were a string of Hollywood mega-flops like The Flash (estimated losses: $200 million), Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (estimated losses: $100 million) and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (estimated losses: $100 million), but there was also some good news in the form of the Barbieheimer phenomenon that has catapulted two different movies – Oppenheimer, a three-hour epic, shot partially in black and white, about the father of the atomic bomb, and Barbie, a light comedy about a toy doll aimed at a primarily female audience – to global success. The Sound of Freedom, a film about child trafficking, became an unexpected sleeper hit through an unconventional marketing strategy that targeted primarily religious and conservative audiences. Yet despite receiving a much-needed boost – summer ticket sales are over $4 billion and over 17% ahead of last summer – the autumn was bleak for the movie business as the Hollywood strikes dragged on and films like Dune 2 were delayed since stars could not promote them. It seems as if William Goldman’s iconic aphorism, that in the film business, ‘no one knows anything’, is truer than ever. Films that were meant to succeed failed, and films that were meant to fail succeeded, and no one is quite sure why.
Perhaps the easiest solution to the summer’s box office puzzle is quality. The good films made money and the bad ones did not. It isn’t that simple, but this answer is mostly right. On the whole (the excellent and exhilarating Mission: Impossible film excepted), most of the box office catastrophes were bad films, or at least films that no one wanted to see. The superhero film craze is thankfully over, if the failures of The Flash, and Shazam: Fury of the Gods are any indications, and audiences are tired of endless franchises like the seventh Mission: Impossible or the tenth (!) Fast and Furious, or even the fifth Indiana Jones film. Now I’ve been a big fan of Indiana Jones for years, going as far as the hunt down the long out-of-print tie-in novels of dubious quality – one of them featured Indiana Jones meeting the wizard Merlin – and I didn’t completely hate Dial of Destiny, but I did not love it either. The script is fun, but the film is overlong and none of the action scenes stand out. Winning performances by the always excellent Harrison Ford, and franchise newcomer Phoebe Waller-Bridge save the film from being totally forgettable, but it is clearly the worst film of the franchise, a long way behind even the unfairly maligned Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
A few days after seeing Dial of Destiny I felt the urge to watch a great Indiana Jones and so I opted for Raiders of the Lost Ark, but, having seen it so many times before, I chose to watch it in a completely different way: In black and white and without any dialogue. The version of Raiders that I watched was not the original, but rather a re-edit done by filmmaker Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Ocean’s 11, Contagion). Soderbergh took the 1981 original and stripped it of colour and desaturated the image. He also silenced the dialogue and sound, threw out the iconic John Williams score and replaced it with Trent Reznor’s and Atticus Ross’s scores to The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The result is startling, and the film is very different from the family action-adventure film you remember.
Why did Soderbergh do this? Well, because he could. Soderbergh had conducted such cinematic experiments before: He had previously combined Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho with Gus Van Sant’s 1998 near-shot-for-shot remake into one film, as well as cutting down Michael Cimino’s four hour doomed New Hollywood epic Heaven’s Gate to a more manageable 106 minutes which he deemed ‘the butcher’s cut’. But Soderbergh’s motivation was more than mere film nerd curiosity – his re-edit of Raiders is an educational exercise. The late William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist, Sorcerer) was once asked what his advice for aspiring directors was. Friedkin replied that they should just watch Citizen Kane over and over again. Whilst glib, Friedkin wasn’t joking. Through Citizen Kane you can learn everything you need to know about filmmaking. If one watches it through the eyes of a director, trying to see why he made the decisions he did, you will develop a powerful instinct as for what works and what doesn’t. Soderbergh is applying the same principle. On his blog, alongside the film, Soderbergh posted some instructions: ‘So I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are. See if you can reproduce the thought process that resulted in these choices by asking yourself: why was each shot—whether short or long—held for that exact length of time and placed in that order?’ To make this exercise easier Soderbergh removed the sound, replaced the music with something more minimal, electronic, and crucially, unconnected to the goings-on on screen. He got rid of the colour and got rid of all the access leaving Raiders in as pure of a form as possible.
I chose to watch Soderbergh’s cut because I wanted to see the film in a different form – I had seen the film so many times as a child that I practically wore out the DVDs. I didn’t know how long I would persist with the exercise, after all the film can’t be entertaining without dialogue. Yet, I was totally hooked. Perhaps because I had knew the plot like the back of my hand, I watched the film anew, simply watching scene after scene. Several things jumped out at me. First of all, it looked beautiful. Indiana Jones isn’t a film particularly renowned for its beauty – it’s not a Terrence Malick or Wes Anderson film – but the black and white cinematography looked beautiful. Every shot was crisp, and it was always clear what was going on, everywhere from jungle to university to desert. The use of shadows, notably the protagonist’s iconic silhouette, stood out even more in monochrome. Aside from Soderbergh’s desaturation the main reason the film looks so good in black and white is the cinematography of Douglas Slocombe. Slocombe was a generation older than Spielberg and honed his craft in the 1940s and 1950s on the British Ealing comedies. Slocombe’s style then, even when shooting in colour was suited to black and white.
The second thing that stood out was the acting. Now this may seem paradoxical in a film with no dialogue, but the lack of dialogue clarified things further. Harrison Ford masters the use of facial expressions, subtly and sometimes not so subtly. He looks scared, exasperated, in pain, elated, often with just the raising of an eyebrow or a slight adjustment of his mouth. Karen Allen, as the heroine Marion Ravenwood took on a greater significance for me in this re-edit. Her performance matches the strength of Harrison Ford’s especially in a key scene in the film where she is interrogated over dinner by the villainous Belloq. She flirts and drinks with him, but is also secretly plotting her escape, and Allen plays this will great elan. The acting also compliments Spielberg’s camera.
Scenes toward the beginning of the film that are heavy on exposition – when Army Intelligence agents task Jones with finding the Ark of the Covenant, and when Jones and his friend Marcus Brody are having a drink at Indy’s house – are filmed by Spielberg with immense skill. Rather than relying on the staid shot-reverse shot formula, Spielberg chooses to film these scenes in long takes, relying on the actors’ blocking. Blocking is the movement and positioning of actors on stage or within the frame of a film. Good blocking makes an exposition scene interesting as the actors are creating interest and conveying information through their actions and movements. In the scene with the Army Intelligence agents, Indy and Brody stand on one side of the frame whilst the two agents sit down on the other, already making it clear where the audience’s focus should be. Throughout the scene a closed book can often be seen at the edge of the frame, and this is later opened by Indy, who shows the agents (and the audience) the Ark. There’s also a blackboard in the scene that is first flipped onto the other, blank side and then drawn on by Indy. It is little touches like this, that make what could be boring scene subconsciously more exciting. Soderbergh’s edit succeeds in making us notice Spielberg’s quiet brilliance, as without dialogue we are forced to pay attention to what is going on on screen, even when at first glance it may not look like much is going on at all.
Finally, Soderbergh’s edit makes the action stand out. Without dialogue, and importantly, without musical cues to tell us what emotions to feel, the action has to impress the viewer all of its own and impress it does. It is remarkable how much better-looking and more exciting the action scenes in Raiders are compared to anything in Dial of Destiny. There are no computer-generated effects, only well-planned action sequences and the blood, sweat and tears of a skilled stunt team. Many of the action scenes were even more exciting than I remembered them being. The climactic truck chase is thrilling, but crucially also very funny, playing out in black and white like a high-speed Charlie Chaplin movie, with Ford always being on the cusp of falling out of the truck but somehow managing to hold on despite all of the obstacles thrown at him. The scene with the German pilot and the spinning plane revealed an elegance that I hadn’t noticed before with the Spielbergian ticking clock elements (the plane propeller getting closer, the leaking jet fuel, and Marion stuck in the cockpit) constantly ramping up the tension. The film ends in a slight anti-climax, as the scene when the Nazis open the Ark, and their faces start melting requires colour in order to have its full effect. What so frightened me as a child, isn’t nearly as impactful in this cut, though the original remains as great as it always was, something I reminded myself of when I searched ‘Indiana Jones Nazi face melting scene’ on YouTube and proceeded to watch it eight times.
Soderbergh’s re-edit of Raiders reminds us what a great film it is, and I would recommend it as it is more than a mere curio for die-hard film fanatics, but a genuinely watchable and interesting film. Raiders of the Lost Ark was, and remains, a perfect piece of pop culture entertainment, made with care and passion by real artists. So perhaps we need more films like Raiders of the Lost Ark and less films like Dial of Destiny. That could prevent the film studios from losing hundreds of millions of dollars. That could save Hollywood. Just make good films! Sound easy right? But then again, what do I know? Well according to William Goldman, just as much as the top Hollywood executives.
This article originally appeared in Interkom magazine.