Synthesizing [Raiders of the Lost Ark] out of trashy pop elements—occult and religous mumbo jumbo, cursed tombs, buried temples, cardboard Nazis—[Spielberg] has produced a work that is like a thirties serial, only grander, funnier, and blessedly free of interruptions….
In pop filmmaking, neither death nor history ever matters. Only thrills matter, and, trying for bigger and bigger thrills, Spielberg has done something almost offensive. He's thrown in the kind of inspirational religioso stuff that used to be such an embarrassment in biblical spectaculars—sudden shafts of light and silvery specters flying about and forming themselves into death's heads. When Cecil B. DeMille produced effects like these in The Ten Commandments, they may have looked trashy, but they weren't cynically intended, and they suited the hammily reverent tone of the rest of the movie. Raiders, on the other hand, hasn't the slightest trace of a religious impulse. None of the characters is motivated by religous belief, and the spirit of the movie is farcical and mock-heroic. Thus when Spielberg opens the Ark, and the clouds race upward into the vortex and all that, the effect is both overblown and creepy. How can he expect us to be awed by a religious spectacle that is totally without feeling? (p. 68)
