Did 1981 belong to Mad Max, Indiana Jones, or Snake Plissken?

1981 was a weirdly, historically great year for action movies, which means it’s a tough one for the purposes of this column. Because how am I supposed to pick? The year saw the release of three basically perfect action-movie masterpieces—all iconic, all vastly influential, all from some of the best directors ever to play around with the genre. Steven Spielberg’s Raiders Of The Lost Ark, the year’s biggest hit by far, remade action cinema into broad and accessible popular entertainment, giving it a fun and lighthearted tone without skimping on the violence, changing the perception of what these movies could do. George Miller’s The Road Warrior introduced the dusty punk-rock desert-apocalypse aesthetic that virtually every other dark-future movie would attempt to copy, and it raised the stakes on vehicular mayhem. John Carpenter’s Escape From New York presented a fun dystopian premise—the island of Manhattan transformed into a free-range prison where authorities would never venture unless, say, the president’s plane crashed there—and with Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken, it gave the world its clearest ’80s action-hero archetype, a gravelly and sardonic cynic with muscles and flowing hair and stubble and no tolerance for authoritarian bullshit. These movies were all tremendously important, and they all fucking rule. So how do you pick?

I had a hard time with this one. I thought about judging The Road Warrior based on its 1982 American release date, just so I could write about both movies. But that would be cheating, and it would also mean that I couldn’t write about First Blood. So I went with Raiders. Great cases could be made for all three movies, but Raiders gets the nod for a few key reasons. It’s the biggest, fastest, silliest movie of the three, and size, speed, and silliness would all be important qualities in the ’80s action movies that would follow. It’s canonical in ways that go beyond action movies. You could make a case that it’s the best movie Spielberg ever made; you could even make the case that it’s the best movie anyone ever made. And it’s the movie my dad showed me when I started to care about action movies. In the grand scheme of things, it matters the most.

The Road Warrior and even Escape From New York had more direct imitators, while only a few notable movies—Romancing The Stone, I guess?—even tried to be Raiders. But the movie’s tone—antic, funny, never too serious even though the stakes were high—would go on to echo throughout action movies. You can see it in Mel Gibson’s Lethal Weapon banter, in Jackie Chan’s intricately goofy stunt spectaculars, and in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s tendency to punctuate every killing with a one-liner. And it changed standards for stunts, for grand-scale escape scenes, and for the level of pure entertainment that the world could expect from a movie like this. This is a movie where a Nazi monkey sieg-heils a German officer, and it still got nominated for Best Picture. It broke the mold.

There were precedents, of course. George Lucas, who wrote the movie, built it out of the same Saturday-morning serial memories that he’d used to create Star Wars. (Star Wars didn’t get an entry in this column because it’s not grounded in anything resembling reality, whereas Raiders sort of is. In Raiders, people get punched and shot, and it looks like it hurts. That’s where I drew the line.) And Spielberg adapted some of the tone from the James Bond movies, though he nailed it better than any Bond movie ever had or ever would. But Raiders was still very much its own thing.

In my favorite scene from the movie, Indiana Jones is trying to steal a Nazi bomber, and he ends up fighting a wrench-wielding Nazi mechanic. While he’s doing that, a bigger Nazi, a mustachioed muscleman played by the former pro wrestler Pat Roach, sees the fight and immediately smiles. He gets to fight someone! So he takes his shirt off, then calmly walks out and proceeds to beat the shit out of Indy. Indy stays in the fight, mostly by pulling dirty Ric Flair tricks—throwing sand in the strongman’s eyes, pointing down at his shoes like they’re untied—but he’s clearly getting his ass beat. While this is happening, though, all hell is breaking loose. Indy’s girlfriend Marion, trapped in a gun turret, is machine-gunning every German in the area. Stuff is blowing up. Other soldiers are running to see what’s going on. None of it bothers the strongman. He’s got a good fight going, and he’s not going to let anything interrupt it—at least until a propeller plane chops him into pieces, spraying the swastika on the plane’s tail with blood. It makes no sense for this guy to continue fighting rather than, say, running for safety or just shooting Indy. But that doesn’t matter to him. This fight is what he believes in, and he’s going to see it through.

The sheer, dizzy visual wit of a scene like that—the nonsensical embrace of chaos—was a new thing. Compared to that, most of the movies I’ve covered in this column were tight, grim, composed things. The body counts were, by and large, way lower. But watching Raiders, you don’t really think about all the characters dying—unless, that is, those characters are literally having the faces melted off of their skulls. Instead, you admire its sense of grand-scale fun. That amazing opening scene—the one where Indy escapes spikes, arrows, pits, boulders, tarantulas, temple collapses, treacherous jungle guides, and poison-tipped darts—ends with a pilot making fun of Indy for being creeped out by a snake. Details like that, or the Nazi monkey, or the giant mechanic who just wants to fight, are what made Raiders truly great.

Raiders is as head-over-heels in love with movies as any Tarantino movie, and the sheer filmmaking is a thing to behold. Spielberg made the paramount logo fade into a real mountain peak, and he kept Indy’s face in shadow until the first jungle guide tried to pull a gun on him. And that command of the camera extended to the action scenes, too. Consider, for example, the one chase scene, which can hold its own against the final Road Warrior chase. The scene’s geography makes its own internal sense. Indy does ridiculous things, but he never does anything impossible. When one Nazi climbs over the roof and sends Jones plunging through the windshield, he still finds a way back onto the truck. He hangs on the hood, slips down under the hood, grabs the undercarriage until he can hook his whip onto it, and then climbs the whip until he’s on the back of the truck again. And then he climbs back into the cab and kicks the Nazi out again. It’s great, kinetic, thrilling, dangerous visual storytelling. For a scene like that to work, the stuntmen, cinematographers, editors, and second-unit directors all have to be completely locked-in. And throughout Raiders, all of them were.