The exhaustingly titled “Raiders!: The Story Of The Greatest Fan Film Ever Made” has arrived at a cultural moment where fandom is under a microscope. It’s the era of Gamergate as well as the multiplex reign of superhero movies, a time where all things once labeled as “dorky” now blithely bob along with the other flotsam and jetsam of pop culture’s overflowing estuaries. ‘Raiders!’ doesn’t engage with modern geek ephemera, of course; it instead focuses on a classic, “Raiders Of The Lost Ark,” and a few particular fans who decades ago began production on a shot-for-shot remake of the film as a labor of love and an attempt at escapism.
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But the period gap doesn’t lessen ‘Raiders!’’s value as contemporary cinema. Even in a modern context, it’s required viewing, not because it’s the strongest doc you might hope to see in 2016, but because it’s the most thorough and heartfelt chronicle of fan devotion as a life choice since 2010’s “Best Worst Movie.” What kind of person do you have to be to utterly devote yourself to a pop-cultural totem and make its existence an essential component of your own? That’s the question directing team Jeremy Coon and Tim Skousen chase after over the film’s 90-minute running time. Their goal is to study “the fan” as an archetype by getting acquainted with Chris Strompolos, Eric Zala, and Jayson Lamb, a trio of Mississippi boys who have dedicated most of their lives to their D.I.Y. adaptation of a Steven Spielberg masterpiece.
The answers Coon and Skousen arrive at both validate and undermine our initial preconceptions about Strompolos, Zala, and Lamb as human beings. By their own admissions, they were a geeky lot with a fondness for the expected trappings of the outcast class, like comic books. As ‘Raiders!’ progresses, we see those interests coupled with a need to retreat from reality’s harsher vagaries, such as domestic instability. The film is a portrait of childhood interrupted and a lesson in empathy: We understand where the impetus to make “Raiders Of The Lost Ark: The Adaptation” came from, and why movies present appealing alternatives to real life. Mercifully, there is a sunnier capstone to the heartbreaking revelations Coon and Skousen stumble upon as they spend time with their subjects. If you’re looking for happy endings here, you don’t have to look hard.
As the film’s opening title card tells us, Strompolos, Zala, and Lamb started work on their homespun homage to “Raiders of the Lost Ark” back in 1982; they spent the next seven summers of their lives continuing that work to near-completion. When ‘Raiders!’ reconnects with Strompolos and Zala as adults, they’re securing funding to finish the one scene they couldn’t film: the famous airplane fight. Coon and Skousen flip back and forth from archival footage, plus bits from the fan film itself, to their own footage of the guys and their crew, made up of friends, family, and movie-industry associates, busting ass to get the airplane sequence in the can and call it a wrap.
‘Raiders!’ strikes a relationship between yesterday and today without structure. It’s tempting to imagine that Coon and Skousen didn’t sketch a blueprint for shooting their movie, or make a plan for marrying the struggles Strompolos, Zala, and Lamb face as men (particularly Zala, who nearly loses his job as the shoot drags on) with what we learn about their boyhoods. As a result, ‘Raiders!’ has a tendency to repeat itself and chase its own tail. But maybe there is no proper structure for a film like this. Maybe the nature of ‘Raiders!’ opens it up to plot-bleed; scenes focused on the present flow into scenes focused on the past, which give way to stories about Chris, Eric, and Jayson from adolescence to adulthood, and every so often John Rhys-Davies appears in talking head segments to praise their achievement and wax poetic on the “pursuit of treasure” in life. (He even compares filmmaking to pack hunting. It’s glorious.)
So on one hand, ‘Raiders!’ is a bit of a mess, a documentary that is artistically undisciplined but technically sound; it’s coherent even though it isn’t cohesive. On the other hand, Coon and Skousen effectively drill down on why “Raiders Of The Lost Ark,” in its original and copied forms alike, is so special, and why putting 30 years into the latter ultimately proved worthwhile for its creators. It’s a rare thing to love movies, or to love a movie, with the kind of deep, abiding sentiment that Strompolos, Zala, and Lamb have for “Raiders Of The Lost Ark.” By the time ‘Raiders!’ ends, we understand the truth of that love: For these three fans, Spielberg’s film isn’t just a film. It’s their childhood on celluloid. So what does that make their adaptation? You may see no clearer act of catharsis in theaters as the summer movie season carries on.
‘Raiders!’ makes no bones about its stars’ flaws (Strompolos most of all), but the film isn’t an act of contrition. It’s an unabashed crowd-pleaser that celebrates the best of what being a fan is all about. There’s a tighter, leaner film in here somewhere, but in a way the clutter feels right: Coon and Skousen’s affection for their material matches Strompolos, Zala, and Lamb’s enthusiasm for their favorite movie. [B]