Nostalgia may be at the forefront of many modern Hollywood projects, but it's nothing new. It seems that every generation loves a good callback to yesteryear, and 1981 audiences were no different. "Raiders of the Lost Ark" intentionally leaned into the stylings of grand serialized adventures — a genre that had long since gone away by the '80s and one that audiences were thrilled to see replicated here.
Writer Stephen Klain hailed in Variety that the film "is the stuff that raucous Saturday matinees at the local Bijou once were made of, a crackerjack fantasy-adventure that shapes its pulp sensibilities and cliff-hanging serial origins into an exhilarating escapist entertainment that will have broad-cased summer audiences in the palm of its hand."
In The New York Times, reviewer Vincent Canby suggested that "Raiders of the Lost Ark" took things one step further, being a manifestation of a collective nostalgia toward its vintage subject matter in a way that had never previously existed. Canby wrote, "It is an homage ... that transcends its inspirations to become, in effect, the movie we saw in our imaginations as we watched, say, Buster Crabbe in 'Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars' or in Sam Katzman's 'Jungle Jim' movies." In Fantastic Films magazine, writer Douglas Rice celebrated "Raiders of the Lost Ark," saying, "They didn't think that kind of film could be made anymore, because nobody would buy it; but everybody is buying it. They love it."
