My very first Epinions review: The Adventures of Indiana Jones - The Complete DVD Movie Collection (the 2003 box set)
Blogger's Note: This review was written originally for Amazon sometime in November of 2003, then updated (twice) for Epinions. It is not about the four-movie box set which was released in late 2008 after Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, nor is it about the soon-to-be-released Indiana Jones Blu-ray box set.
Since the advent of the Digital Video Disc format in the late 1990s, there were two long-awaited movie trilogies: the Classic Star Wars films and the Adventures of Indiana Jones. The former was first released in September of 2004, but the daring fedora-wearing archaeologist had almost a year's headstart when Lucasfilm and Paramount Home Video released a 4-disk set in November 2003.
The Adventures of Indiana Jones box set consists of the first three films of the George Lucas-Steven Spielberg collaborative creation, 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1984's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and 1989'sIndiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Rounding out the set is the Bonus Material disc, which includes making-of documentaries, featurettes, trailers, and links to the Indiana Jones DVD site.
"Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the most deliriously funny, ingenious and stylish American movies ever made!" -- Vincent Canby, The New York Times
"If adventure has a name, it's Indiana Jones." -- tag line for Raiders of the Lost Ark
In the early summer of 1977, while directors Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were vacationing in Hawaii shortly after Lucas's "little sci-fi movie" premiered, a beachside conversation turned to the topic of upcoming projects the two friends had on their agendas. Lucas was exhausted from the arduous making of Star Wars, and Spielberg was finishing post-production on his UFO film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
"Well," Spielberg said, "I've always wanted to do a James Bond picture...."
According to Spielberg's introduction to Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Illustrated Screenplay, it was then that Lucas "told me about Archaeologist/Adventurer Indiana Jones and his heroic 'raid' to save the Lost Ark of the Covenant from the sinister clutches of none other than Hitler himself."
George Lucas had long been a fan of the Republic serials -- short episodic films that ran for less than a feature film's running time and told a story over several weeks (usually premiering over consecutive Saturdays -- hence the term Saturday matinee serials). These serials were often from action-oriented genres such as Westerns and science fiction (Flash Gordon) and featured tons of cliffhanger situations, wooden dialog, plot holes the size of China at times, and cheap special effects. Flawed as they were, though, they were apparently very popular and fun to watch.
After the success of his teen-oriented, nostalgia-laden American Graffiti (1973), Lucas considered two possible projects for a film aimed at young people. One centered on an archaeologist/soldier of fortune type of hero named "Indiana Smith," while the other, a sprawling space opera titled The Star Wars, told the story of a young hero named "Annikin Starkiller," who would eventually be renamed Luke Skywalker. He chose to make Star Wars first but placed "Indiana Smith" on the back burner until that fateful conversation on a Hawaiian beach.
After tweaking story ideas and a few other details -- Spielberg, for instance, didn't think "Indiana Smith" was such a hot name, so Lucas changed it to "Indiana Jones" -- a young screenwriter named Lawrence Kasdan (Body Heat, The Empire Strikes Back) was hired, and in a period of 73 days in mid-1980, Raiders of the Lost Ark was filmed in four countries (England, France, Tunisia, and the U.S.).
Set in 1936, Raiders of the Lost Ark pits professor-fortune hunter Jones (Ford) against a team of Nazis in a desperate race to find the legendary Ark of the Covenant, the sacred chest where the Hebrews had placed the fragments of the original Ten Commandments. Lost for nearly 2,000 years, the Ark is coveted not only as an object of great historical import, but as Indy's boss and friend Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott) points out, "an army that carries the Ark before it is invincible." Now, Adolf Hitler wants the Ark, and Germany has sent a huge team of archaeologists and soldiers led by the renegade Frenchman Belloq (Paul Freeman) to Egypt in hopes of finding it.
When a secret German cable from Cairo to Berlin is intercepted by U.S. Army intelligence mentioning the lost city of Tanis, a relic called the headpiece of the staff of Ra and Abner Ravenwood, Indy's former instructor and estranged friend, the government hires Indy to find Ravenwood and get to the Ark before the Nazis do. Soon, Indiana Jones will face Gestapo agent Toht (Ronald Lacey), Nepalese thugs, Arab swordsmen, and 7,000 snakes as he dodges bullets, swords and flying fists as he crosses half the world in search of the Lost Ark. Along the way he is joined by Ravenwood's feisty daughter (and former flame) Marion (Karen Allen) and Sallah (John Rhys-Davies), "the best digger in Egypt" and a loyal friend.
Lawrence Kasdan's screenplay, based on a story by Phil Kaufman and George Lucas, keeps the whole endeavor moving like gangbusters and replete with 1930s-style humor in the vein of Michael Curtiz films (such as Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and Casablanca). Featuring great stunts (some performed by Ford himself, including the famous rolling boulder in the prologue), fantastic special effects that still hold up over 20 years later, adept directing by Spielberg and a terrific score by composer John Williams, Raiders of the Lost Ark is an adventure film which has truly endured the test of time.
Of all the action-adventure films to come out in the 1980s, Raiders of the Lost Ark ranks head and shoulders above the rest. The Die Hard series of the late '80s and early '90s is pretty good in its own fashion, but it depends far too much on R-rated violence and "shock and awe." The Indiana Jones films, on the other hand, have their share of gunplay and "ewwww" moments -- the shootout in Marion's Nepal bar, the thousands of snakes in the Well of Souls, the "face-melting" wrath of the Ark finale -- but it's all done so broadly and with a lightness to the whole endeavor that one has fun watching Raiders of the Lost Ark. I still remember the first time I saw this in a theater in 1981; we'd be clapping or cheering whenever Indy and his friends got out of a messy situation. Particularly memorable was the one guy a few rows behind me that, during the scene where Marion is trapped in a German "flying wing" bomber and shooting up Nazis with the plane's machine guns, stood up and shouted, "Yeah, baby, blast those suckers!"
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom:
Willie: Aren't you gonna introduce us?
Lao Che: This is Willie Scott; this is Indiana Jones, a famous archaeologist.
Willie: Well I always thought that archaeologists were always funny looking men going around looking for their mommies.
Indiana Jones: Mummies.
After the success of Raiders of the Lost Ark , series creator George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg took the Indiana Jones series into its dark second installment, 1984's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Written by American Graffiti's Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz and set in 1935 (making this film a prequel to the first film), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom takes its archaeologist hero (Harrison Ford) from a swank Shanghai night club to the rain forest of India as Indy, his orphaned sidekick Short Round (Ke Huy Quan) and his very reluctant companion Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw, who would later be Mrs. Steven Spielberg) go on a quest for an Indian village's sacred stone, which has been stolen by evil Thugee followers of the Kali cult.
Indy is at first reluctant to go on this quest for yet another mythical artifact, but when the villagers tell the archaeologist and his two companions that the followers of Kali, now based in Pankot Palace, have stolen their children, Jones agrees to pay the new Maharajah of Pankot a visit. His interest is peaked when a dying young escapee arrives at the village and hands Indy a scrap of cloth with a fragment of tapestry. Reading its Sanskrit inscription and by looking at the pictographs on the cloth, Indiana discovers that the villagers’ sacred stone is one of five Sankara stones, left to men by the Hindu god Shiva. When a puzzled Short Round asks Indy what a Sankara stone represents, the professor/adventurer replies, “Fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory.”
But Indy’s quest for “fortune and glory” takes a disturbing turn when the trio reaches Pankot Palace. The prime minister, Chattar Lal (Roshan Seth) appears to be just another Oxford-trained Indian bureaucrat, but in reality he’s one of Kali priest Mola Ram’s (Amrish Puri) lieutenants. Soon, Indy, Short Round and Willie go from honored guests to prisoners when they discover the goings-on behind the high walls of Pankot Palace.
Although Temple of Doom is an enjoyable adventure film, its dark tones (both in storytelling and visual terms) and a few gory scenes involving a really gross banquet and a human sacrifice made it the least favorite entry in the series. And even though it was rated PG, the criticism Temple of Doom received caused director Spielberg to be one of the advocates of the PG-13 rating that the Motion Picture Association of America created within months of the film’s release.
Nevertheless, the film’s action set pieces (some of them conceived for Raiders but left out for time constraints) are still thrilling, Spielberg’s directing is top-notch and John Williams’ 1930s-flavored score is, as always, brilliant. Although the other two films in the series are more fun and lighter in tone, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doomis still worth watching.
Just not, of course, right after dinner.
Willie: You know how to fly, don't you?
Indiana Jones: Um, no. Do you?
Professor Henry Jones: I didn't know you could fly a plane.
Indiana Jones: Fly, yes. Land, no.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
After having taken a definitively dark turn in 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, director Steven Spielberg and executive producer George Lucas decided that the third installment of the series should be thrilling, lighter in tone and more upbeat and humorous. In other words, they wanted to recreate the Saturday-matinee serial fun of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Lucas, Menno Meyjes and screenwriter Jeffrey Boam wrote a story that once again sent the archaeologist/adventurer Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) on the quest for another legendary artifact -- the Holy Grail. And to avoid the inevitable “ho hum, been there, done that” syndrome that sequels often suffer from, they decided to include a father-son dynamic to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade by casting Sean Connery as Professor Henry Jones.
Although Last Crusade follows the basic structure -- borrowed from the James Bond series -- of the other movies by starting the film with the end of a previous adventure before introducing the main storyline, the film tweaks the formula by showing us Indy's first big adventure: in 1912 Utah, when the future archaeology professor is a Boy Scout (literally) living with his widowed father, Henry Jones. While on a Boy Scouting sojourn in the mountainous desert, young Indy (River Phoenix) wanders into a cave and sees a group of ruffians pilfering the long-lost Cross of Coronado. “That cross is an important artifact,” Indy says to a fellow Boy Scout. “It belongs in a museum.” Indy sends his friend for help, steals the Cross of Coronado from the ruffians, but ends up being chased as he attempts to escape on foot, horseback and even a circus train. In this interlude, Indy acquires most of the traits established in the earlier films -- his fear of snakes, his affinity for the whip (and the origins of the scar on his chin) and, yes, his choice of the leather jacket and snap-brim fedora. (One of the best scenes in the series: the handsome rogue who was hired to find the Cross by the collector known in the credits as “Panama Hat” tells Indy, “You lost today, kid. But that doesn’t mean you have to like it.” And in a show of admiration for the kid’s spunk and courage, takes off his hat and places it on Indy’s head. Spielberg holds the camera on the hat, and in the blink of an eye, we flash forward 26 years and to the conclusion of Indy’s search for the Cross of Coronado.)
Panama Hat: Small world, Dr. Jones.
Indiana Jones: Too small for two of us.
Panama Hat: This is the second time I've had to reclaim my property from you.
Indiana Jones: That belongs in a museum.
Panama Hat: So do you.
After this exciting prologue, The Last Crusade gets underway when American millionaire Walter Donovan (The Empire Strikes Back’s Julian Glover) commissions Indy to find the missing leader (and his important papers) of Donovan’s Holy Grail recovery team. Several clues have been found near Ankara, clues that might lead to the location of the legendary cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper -- a cup that also caught some of His blood at the Crucifixion. But when Indy temporizes, Donovan tells him the identity of the missing team leader...and our favorite archaeologist/adventurer starts out on yet another globe-trotting trek to chase an ancient treasure.
Indiana Jones: Listen. Since I've met you I've nearly been incinerated, drowned, shot at, and chopped into fish bait. We're caught in the middle of something sinister here, my guess is dad found out more than he was looking for and until I'm sure, I'm going to continue to do things the way I think they should be done.
Soon, Indiana Jones, his friend and boss Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott), Elsa Schneider (Allison Doody) -- a young, sexy Austrian archaeologist who works for Donovan -- and Indy’s friend Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) set off on a quest to find the legendary Grail.
Professor Henry Jones: They're trying to kill us.
Indiana Jones: I know, Dad.
Professor Henry Jones: This is a new experience for me.
Indiana Jones: It happens to me all the time.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, with its crisp script, thrilling music by John Williams (with its pastoral-sounding "Henry's Theme" and riffs on the familiar "Raiders' March") fine directing by Spielberg -- who balances action set pieces and the father-son element adroitly -- and a convincing father-son chemistry between Ford and Connery, is one of the best action films made in the 1980s, and its recent release on DVD proves that it, like the other films in the series, has aged well.
With great casts, amazing stunts and effects, thrilling scores by John Williams, and deft directing by Spielberg, these three films defined adventure films in the 1980s and their popularity still resonates more than 20 years after the premiere of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
About the DVDs: I think they are good. They have been digitally remastered and given the "royal treatment" by Lucasfilm and Paramount. The menus are astonishing, and the sound mix is good. I can only speak for myself and not for other fans who, judging by other reviews, have been disappointed by this collection of long-awaited films. True, there is no audio commentary by George Lucas and/or Steven Spielberg, but no DVD of a Spielberg film (and I have several in my collection) has that feature. It's something Spielberg hates doing ("Now, in this scene, watch how I cleverly made a reference to Raiders' famous 'Indy-shoots-the-guy-with-the-sword!' ") and it's not really necessary, even for students of film. I have discovered that director's commentary is worthwhile if the director and others involved in the track actually have something meaningful to say.
Recommended: Yes
The Adventures of Indiana Jones box set consists of the first three films of the George Lucas-Steven Spielberg collaborative creation, 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1984's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and 1989'sIndiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Rounding out the set is the Bonus Material disc, which includes making-of documentaries, featurettes, trailers, and links to the Indiana Jones DVD site.
"Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the most deliriously funny, ingenious and stylish American movies ever made!" -- Vincent Canby, The New York Times
"If adventure has a name, it's Indiana Jones." -- tag line for Raiders of the Lost Ark
In the early summer of 1977, while directors Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were vacationing in Hawaii shortly after Lucas's "little sci-fi movie" premiered, a beachside conversation turned to the topic of upcoming projects the two friends had on their agendas. Lucas was exhausted from the arduous making of Star Wars, and Spielberg was finishing post-production on his UFO film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
"Well," Spielberg said, "I've always wanted to do a James Bond picture...."
According to Spielberg's introduction to Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Illustrated Screenplay, it was then that Lucas "told me about Archaeologist/Adventurer Indiana Jones and his heroic 'raid' to save the Lost Ark of the Covenant from the sinister clutches of none other than Hitler himself."
George Lucas had long been a fan of the Republic serials -- short episodic films that ran for less than a feature film's running time and told a story over several weeks (usually premiering over consecutive Saturdays -- hence the term Saturday matinee serials). These serials were often from action-oriented genres such as Westerns and science fiction (Flash Gordon) and featured tons of cliffhanger situations, wooden dialog, plot holes the size of China at times, and cheap special effects. Flawed as they were, though, they were apparently very popular and fun to watch.
After the success of his teen-oriented, nostalgia-laden American Graffiti (1973), Lucas considered two possible projects for a film aimed at young people. One centered on an archaeologist/soldier of fortune type of hero named "Indiana Smith," while the other, a sprawling space opera titled The Star Wars, told the story of a young hero named "Annikin Starkiller," who would eventually be renamed Luke Skywalker. He chose to make Star Wars first but placed "Indiana Smith" on the back burner until that fateful conversation on a Hawaiian beach.
After tweaking story ideas and a few other details -- Spielberg, for instance, didn't think "Indiana Smith" was such a hot name, so Lucas changed it to "Indiana Jones" -- a young screenwriter named Lawrence Kasdan (Body Heat, The Empire Strikes Back) was hired, and in a period of 73 days in mid-1980, Raiders of the Lost Ark was filmed in four countries (England, France, Tunisia, and the U.S.).
Set in 1936, Raiders of the Lost Ark pits professor-fortune hunter Jones (Ford) against a team of Nazis in a desperate race to find the legendary Ark of the Covenant, the sacred chest where the Hebrews had placed the fragments of the original Ten Commandments. Lost for nearly 2,000 years, the Ark is coveted not only as an object of great historical import, but as Indy's boss and friend Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott) points out, "an army that carries the Ark before it is invincible." Now, Adolf Hitler wants the Ark, and Germany has sent a huge team of archaeologists and soldiers led by the renegade Frenchman Belloq (Paul Freeman) to Egypt in hopes of finding it.
When a secret German cable from Cairo to Berlin is intercepted by U.S. Army intelligence mentioning the lost city of Tanis, a relic called the headpiece of the staff of Ra and Abner Ravenwood, Indy's former instructor and estranged friend, the government hires Indy to find Ravenwood and get to the Ark before the Nazis do. Soon, Indiana Jones will face Gestapo agent Toht (Ronald Lacey), Nepalese thugs, Arab swordsmen, and 7,000 snakes as he dodges bullets, swords and flying fists as he crosses half the world in search of the Lost Ark. Along the way he is joined by Ravenwood's feisty daughter (and former flame) Marion (Karen Allen) and Sallah (John Rhys-Davies), "the best digger in Egypt" and a loyal friend.
Lawrence Kasdan's screenplay, based on a story by Phil Kaufman and George Lucas, keeps the whole endeavor moving like gangbusters and replete with 1930s-style humor in the vein of Michael Curtiz films (such as Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and Casablanca). Featuring great stunts (some performed by Ford himself, including the famous rolling boulder in the prologue), fantastic special effects that still hold up over 20 years later, adept directing by Spielberg and a terrific score by composer John Williams, Raiders of the Lost Ark is an adventure film which has truly endured the test of time.
Of all the action-adventure films to come out in the 1980s, Raiders of the Lost Ark ranks head and shoulders above the rest. The Die Hard series of the late '80s and early '90s is pretty good in its own fashion, but it depends far too much on R-rated violence and "shock and awe." The Indiana Jones films, on the other hand, have their share of gunplay and "ewwww" moments -- the shootout in Marion's Nepal bar, the thousands of snakes in the Well of Souls, the "face-melting" wrath of the Ark finale -- but it's all done so broadly and with a lightness to the whole endeavor that one has fun watching Raiders of the Lost Ark. I still remember the first time I saw this in a theater in 1981; we'd be clapping or cheering whenever Indy and his friends got out of a messy situation. Particularly memorable was the one guy a few rows behind me that, during the scene where Marion is trapped in a German "flying wing" bomber and shooting up Nazis with the plane's machine guns, stood up and shouted, "Yeah, baby, blast those suckers!"
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom:
Willie: Aren't you gonna introduce us?
Lao Che: This is Willie Scott; this is Indiana Jones, a famous archaeologist.
Willie: Well I always thought that archaeologists were always funny looking men going around looking for their mommies.
Indiana Jones: Mummies.
After the success of Raiders of the Lost Ark , series creator George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg took the Indiana Jones series into its dark second installment, 1984's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Written by American Graffiti's Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz and set in 1935 (making this film a prequel to the first film), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom takes its archaeologist hero (Harrison Ford) from a swank Shanghai night club to the rain forest of India as Indy, his orphaned sidekick Short Round (Ke Huy Quan) and his very reluctant companion Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw, who would later be Mrs. Steven Spielberg) go on a quest for an Indian village's sacred stone, which has been stolen by evil Thugee followers of the Kali cult.
Indy is at first reluctant to go on this quest for yet another mythical artifact, but when the villagers tell the archaeologist and his two companions that the followers of Kali, now based in Pankot Palace, have stolen their children, Jones agrees to pay the new Maharajah of Pankot a visit. His interest is peaked when a dying young escapee arrives at the village and hands Indy a scrap of cloth with a fragment of tapestry. Reading its Sanskrit inscription and by looking at the pictographs on the cloth, Indiana discovers that the villagers’ sacred stone is one of five Sankara stones, left to men by the Hindu god Shiva. When a puzzled Short Round asks Indy what a Sankara stone represents, the professor/adventurer replies, “Fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory.”
But Indy’s quest for “fortune and glory” takes a disturbing turn when the trio reaches Pankot Palace. The prime minister, Chattar Lal (Roshan Seth) appears to be just another Oxford-trained Indian bureaucrat, but in reality he’s one of Kali priest Mola Ram’s (Amrish Puri) lieutenants. Soon, Indy, Short Round and Willie go from honored guests to prisoners when they discover the goings-on behind the high walls of Pankot Palace.
Although Temple of Doom is an enjoyable adventure film, its dark tones (both in storytelling and visual terms) and a few gory scenes involving a really gross banquet and a human sacrifice made it the least favorite entry in the series. And even though it was rated PG, the criticism Temple of Doom received caused director Spielberg to be one of the advocates of the PG-13 rating that the Motion Picture Association of America created within months of the film’s release.
Nevertheless, the film’s action set pieces (some of them conceived for Raiders but left out for time constraints) are still thrilling, Spielberg’s directing is top-notch and John Williams’ 1930s-flavored score is, as always, brilliant. Although the other two films in the series are more fun and lighter in tone, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doomis still worth watching.
Just not, of course, right after dinner.
Willie: You know how to fly, don't you?
Indiana Jones: Um, no. Do you?
Professor Henry Jones: I didn't know you could fly a plane.
Indiana Jones: Fly, yes. Land, no.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
After having taken a definitively dark turn in 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, director Steven Spielberg and executive producer George Lucas decided that the third installment of the series should be thrilling, lighter in tone and more upbeat and humorous. In other words, they wanted to recreate the Saturday-matinee serial fun of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Lucas, Menno Meyjes and screenwriter Jeffrey Boam wrote a story that once again sent the archaeologist/adventurer Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) on the quest for another legendary artifact -- the Holy Grail. And to avoid the inevitable “ho hum, been there, done that” syndrome that sequels often suffer from, they decided to include a father-son dynamic to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade by casting Sean Connery as Professor Henry Jones.
Although Last Crusade follows the basic structure -- borrowed from the James Bond series -- of the other movies by starting the film with the end of a previous adventure before introducing the main storyline, the film tweaks the formula by showing us Indy's first big adventure: in 1912 Utah, when the future archaeology professor is a Boy Scout (literally) living with his widowed father, Henry Jones. While on a Boy Scouting sojourn in the mountainous desert, young Indy (River Phoenix) wanders into a cave and sees a group of ruffians pilfering the long-lost Cross of Coronado. “That cross is an important artifact,” Indy says to a fellow Boy Scout. “It belongs in a museum.” Indy sends his friend for help, steals the Cross of Coronado from the ruffians, but ends up being chased as he attempts to escape on foot, horseback and even a circus train. In this interlude, Indy acquires most of the traits established in the earlier films -- his fear of snakes, his affinity for the whip (and the origins of the scar on his chin) and, yes, his choice of the leather jacket and snap-brim fedora. (One of the best scenes in the series: the handsome rogue who was hired to find the Cross by the collector known in the credits as “Panama Hat” tells Indy, “You lost today, kid. But that doesn’t mean you have to like it.” And in a show of admiration for the kid’s spunk and courage, takes off his hat and places it on Indy’s head. Spielberg holds the camera on the hat, and in the blink of an eye, we flash forward 26 years and to the conclusion of Indy’s search for the Cross of Coronado.)
Panama Hat: Small world, Dr. Jones.
Indiana Jones: Too small for two of us.
Panama Hat: This is the second time I've had to reclaim my property from you.
Indiana Jones: That belongs in a museum.
Panama Hat: So do you.
After this exciting prologue, The Last Crusade gets underway when American millionaire Walter Donovan (The Empire Strikes Back’s Julian Glover) commissions Indy to find the missing leader (and his important papers) of Donovan’s Holy Grail recovery team. Several clues have been found near Ankara, clues that might lead to the location of the legendary cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper -- a cup that also caught some of His blood at the Crucifixion. But when Indy temporizes, Donovan tells him the identity of the missing team leader...and our favorite archaeologist/adventurer starts out on yet another globe-trotting trek to chase an ancient treasure.
Indiana Jones: Listen. Since I've met you I've nearly been incinerated, drowned, shot at, and chopped into fish bait. We're caught in the middle of something sinister here, my guess is dad found out more than he was looking for and until I'm sure, I'm going to continue to do things the way I think they should be done.
Soon, Indiana Jones, his friend and boss Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott), Elsa Schneider (Allison Doody) -- a young, sexy Austrian archaeologist who works for Donovan -- and Indy’s friend Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) set off on a quest to find the legendary Grail.
Professor Henry Jones: They're trying to kill us.
Indiana Jones: I know, Dad.
Professor Henry Jones: This is a new experience for me.
Indiana Jones: It happens to me all the time.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, with its crisp script, thrilling music by John Williams (with its pastoral-sounding "Henry's Theme" and riffs on the familiar "Raiders' March") fine directing by Spielberg -- who balances action set pieces and the father-son element adroitly -- and a convincing father-son chemistry between Ford and Connery, is one of the best action films made in the 1980s, and its recent release on DVD proves that it, like the other films in the series, has aged well.
With great casts, amazing stunts and effects, thrilling scores by John Williams, and deft directing by Spielberg, these three films defined adventure films in the 1980s and their popularity still resonates more than 20 years after the premiere of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
About the DVDs: I think they are good. They have been digitally remastered and given the "royal treatment" by Lucasfilm and Paramount. The menus are astonishing, and the sound mix is good. I can only speak for myself and not for other fans who, judging by other reviews, have been disappointed by this collection of long-awaited films. True, there is no audio commentary by George Lucas and/or Steven Spielberg, but no DVD of a Spielberg film (and I have several in my collection) has that feature. It's something Spielberg hates doing ("Now, in this scene, watch how I cleverly made a reference to Raiders' famous 'Indy-shoots-the-guy-with-the-sword!' ") and it's not really necessary, even for students of film. I have discovered that director's commentary is worthwhile if the director and others involved in the track actually have something meaningful to say.
Recommended: Yes
Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older
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