Raiders! The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made(2015, d. Tim Skousen, Jeremy Coon)
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An occasionally slight but extremely endearing documentary about the most ambitious fan film ever made. In 1982, a group of young boys set out to make a shot-for-shot remake of
Raiders of the Lost Ark; it would consume their lives for the next 7 years before they finally completed it. Well,
almost completed it. There was one scene they were never able to film; the fight between Indy and a giant goon underneath a Nazi airplane. Well now, some 25 years after they first finished the film, the boys, now all grown up, have reunited to finally capture that scene and put an end to their titanic undertaking. In those intervening years their personal little film had gained a cult following through festival showings, word of mouth and celebrity fans; amongst them Eli Roth, who features as one of the talking heads in this documentary.
The film jumps back and forth between two narratives. There is the story about the original making of their film, complete with numerous clips from it, and then there is the story about the boys reuniting to film the scene they were never able to, or at least attempt to. Both threads prove to be interesting and entertaining in their own way, though some of the drama in the contemporary section does feel a touch manufactured and forced. My favourite moments are definitely the stories from their childhood that detail just how they recreated so many iconic scenes, complete with the accompanying clips. Those clips prove to be quite a mixture. Some of them are charming in terms of just how bad they are. Some of them are actually very impressive given the circumstances and the scope of the scenes they are attempting to replicate. And then some of them are just insane! These kids were dragged along by and underneath trucks, and set each other on fire in their efforts to duplicate the iconic scenes as close as possible. The fact that no-one was seriously hurt and that the house didn't burn down is something of a miracle.
One of the things that
Raiders! does really well is show just how important movies can be to us in our lives, particularly during our teenage years. As the film progresses we learn more about the respective home lives of the kids involved at the time of making the film. We learn about divorcing parents, about financial struggles, and about broken and abusive homes. We see how Steven Spielberg's original film, and their subsequent attempts to recreate it, offered them an escape and a haven of sorts. And the level of determination and persistence they threw at the project is quite amazing.
The film also proves to be an effective chronicle of friendship. As the years went by during the initial production the relationship between the boys would change. Girls would enter their lives and come between them, and priorities would change. While they did stick together to finish the film it was clear they were drifting apart. And that drift became more substantial without the project to unify them. As they grow up and enter adulthood they go in very different directions. While one becomes a responsible family man with a corporate job, another falls under the allure of drug addiction. It just highlights a sad fact in life that your closest friends in childhood often do not remain that way. In fact at this stage in the film I was reminded of the finale to
Stand by Me where we learn what became of the four young boys at the heart of its story.
It seems that a lot of the time, for a documentary to really make an impact and gain attention it has to tell a powerful story, often about a serious or unsettling subject. This certainly is not one of those. No one is going to watch this and find it to be a life affirming or altering experience. However it is a very fun little diversion, that I think would particularly appeal to fans of
Raiders of the Lost Ark. It is a love letter to
Raiders, to film in general and to the dedicated geekdom that such films can inspire.
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