Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Perfect cast and a good story

Great Film overall

Don't listen to the negative reviews

I've been following these guys for many years, just after the internet starting buzzing about them. I am glad that they are finally getting all of this recognition, and that they were able to "finish" their film.This documentary does a neat job summing up the journey they have been on, with both its highs and its lows. It also manages to balance between the two narratives it is following, one being the process of making the film itself (starting when they were just kids), and the other one being the process to getting to finish the final scene of the movie.It's the story of the old film that is the interesting one, while the filming of the airplane scene feels it's mostly in the documentary to justify the topic being relevant. I'm sure they knew this on some level, as the focus on the airplane scene is more towards the guys themselves than it is on the actual filmmaking they are doing.It's typical of the genre, and maybe it's needed to fit a modern day audience, but I wish that they didn't lean so much on the drama of it all. I'd much rather watch a documentary giving the story to me straight, instead of trying to build so much excitement. That said, this movie does not do that a lot, but enough that I got slightly annoyed at it.Other than that, I think they handled the subject well, and it gave a good glimpse into the brilliant fan movie, and the resilience of youth.

Typically this is the sort of documentary I would avoid. I love documentaries and I love film, but a group of kids who recreate "Raiders"? Sounds stupid.Luckily, others were less dismissive and numerous sources have praised both the kids' film and this documentary. It made me curious, and as it turns out, there is a great story here. There is the plot that these folks are filming the final shots of their remake, but there are so many other parts of this. I don't know why we should care about these kids and their families, but the film convinces us that we should. Romance, drug problems, abusive stepparents... all of that is here.

I suspect that all of as geeks, no matter what it is we are geeky about, having wanted to create something to express our passion for what it is we enjoy so much. For example, I spent much of my time in high school writing and trying to get to film a James Bond fan film adapting the original Ian Fleming novel of Moonraker. I never quite pulled it off but I'm not the only one who a dream like that. Back in 1980s Mississippi, a group of childhood friends decided to do a shot by shot remake of Steven Spielberg's Raiders Of The Lost Ark. In doing so they would would create a tale worthy of a Hollywood film and the subject of the documentary Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made released in 2015, now available on home video and streaming.The documentary essentially tells two different narratives. The obvious one has the documentary makes documenting the making of "the Raiders tape" as it came to be known. They do use so through footage from the finished adaptation, outtakes, and more recent interviews how this fan film came to be made to begin with and how it came to wider attention than it ever should have thanks to pirate video copies and eventually the internet. Watching these sections of the documentary makes for incredible viewing in its own right as we watch a group of twelve year old's become young adults across the seven years it took to make it and the lengths they went to to do so. How did a group of people so young pull off the truck chase and fight sequence? What about the burning bar sequence? The answers are here as told by those who were there, parents who watched it all go down, and by those who watched the film later and were amazed by what they saw including John Rhys- Davies.Yet that's only half the story. The other narrative is one that is every bit as inspiring and taking place decades later. After a Kickstarter campaign, these now adult filmmakers get back together in the Mississippi town they shot so much of it in to film the one sequence they never shot: the fight sequence around the Nazi flying wing and the explosive conclusion to it. In trying to film this one sequence and more than a hundred shots, we're presented a story every bit as dramatic as anything they did decades before as weather and real life threaten to leave it unfinished. Watching the difficulties of film making, the lengths they have to go to, what is put on the line, and all in the need of finishing up a childhood dream makes for some of the most engrossing viewing I've experienced in recent memory.Yet as much as it's about young filmmakers coming back to finish something they started three decades earlier, it's also a personal journey as well. You watch them grow up, you get to see them as adults talking about the experiences, their personal lives, and how the latter could often impact the making of the film. We hear about their struggles and falling out with one another in the years after their adaptation was finished. We also get to hear how their friendships were restored, how the film brought them back together and with an ending that would be ludicrous in a Hollywood movie if it wasn't the truth. It proves, once again, that fact can be every bit as dramatic as any work of fiction.What makes this so watchable in the end is that, in the final analysis, it's about a dream. It's about pursuing that dream in the face of adversity, of naysayers and those who wonder why you would bother doing it to begin with. Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made is a film for every artist and dreamer out there and for anyone with even a spark of creativity in their soul. It's ninety-six solidly inspiring minutes, a love letter to fans, fan films, and anyone who has ever dreamed of doing anything big.

Greetings again from the darkness - from the Dallas International Film Festival 2-15. Most documentaries are pretty simple to recap: A filmmaker makes a movie about a topic or person. However, simplicity just doesn't fit here. Filmmakers Jeremy Coon and Tim Skousen made a movie about the making of a movie that is a movie re-made in honor of a movie that was already made. This isn't Coppola's Hearts of Darkness which portrays his difficulty in making Apocalypse Now. Far from it. This is a modern day look back at two/three geeky eleven year old boys making a shot-for-shot remake of Steven Spielberg's classic Raiders of the Lost Ark.Coon and Skousen catch up with forty-somethings Eric Zala, Chris Strompolos and Jayson Lamb as they are trying to put together the financing and logistics to film the final scene of their unfinished movie Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. These are the same boy that started the process in 1982 and filmed each of the next seven summers until they graduated from high school.If you are a total film geek, you have probably heard of their film and know that it has been an underground film favorite for years. But you may not know the real life details behind it and certainly not the modern day drama of Eric and Chris as they try to complete it. How about some interviews with their mothers? How about the real world possibility that Eric risks losing his job to complete this thirty plus year old kid's summer project? How about the personal struggles of Chris over the years, or the fallout with Jayson as he is left out of this final chapter? Director Eli Roth was instrumental in spreading the word of this film project throughout Hollywood, and the boys even got invited to meet with Spielberg. Mostly we are left with the fascination that young boys can have such passion and persistence over so many years. When asked about whether they missed out on their childhood, Chris responds "We filmed childhood". A true and fitting response, that doesn't tell the whole story. Fortunately, Coon and Skousen do.