Review: Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones 4-Movie Collection Arrives on 4K UHD

Paramount Home Entertainment’s UHD discs add to an already impressive 4K roster for Spielberg’s filmography.

Indiana Jones 4-Movie CollectionConceived by George Lucas before he set out to bring his Star Wars space opera to life, Raiders of the Lost Ark found Steven Spielberg entering the 1980s with his most lavish production yet, a colossal tribute to the action-adventure serials of his youth. A globe-spanning epic that follows the tomb-raiding exploits of debonair, sardonic archaeologist Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), Raiders of the Lost Ark was a smash hit in a year when studios were hankering for a windfall after the collapse of the New Hollywood model. The film’s success kicked off a franchise that set high-water marks for the Hollywood blockbuster moving forward.

Raiders of the Lost Ark was released at the peak of Spielberg’s commercial powers, and it remains a remarkable achievement in action cinema, a David Lean-like epic reconfigured into pure pulp thanks to elaborate stunt choreography, colossal production design, and special effects that have held up shockingly well against 40 years of subsequent technological upgrades. From the opening sequence of Indy outrunning a bolder in a dank and cobwebbed tomb to the finale that finds a Gestapo officer’s face being melted off his skull, almost every moment in the film has wormed its way into the pop-cultural lexicon. That Raiders of the Lost Ark is itself rooted in the narrative devices, aesthetic traditions, and problematic politics of serials that were a half-century old at the time of its production only makes its long-lasting endurance all the more impressive.

By the time the first sequel, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, rolled out in 1984, it was clear that Spielberg was eager to explore darker material. The film finds Indy dealing with an Indian cult that engages in child slavery and human sacrifice, adding an even grimmer twist to the hero’s navigation of booby traps and villains. Unfortunately, the racist ideologies around the periphery of Raiders of the Lost Ark come to the forefront in Temple of Doom, with the bad guys flattened into bloodthirsty savages and Indy’s pint-sized companion, Short Round (Jonathan Ke Quan), defined by his thickly accented one-liners, as when the pair walks on scattered human remains in a lair and the boy remarks, “Feel I step on fortune cookie!”

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Such wince-inducing moments are all the more lamentable given that Temple of Doom, as a technical achievement, is possibly Spielberg’s most exhilarating action movie. The opening alone restages and improves upon the best moment from 1941, while the creature-filled crevices of various subterranean chambers and grisly moments of envelope-pushing gore find Spielberg embracing gross-out horror to great effect. The extended climax, which at one point turns into an almost literal rollercoaster ride on minecarts through a collapsing volcano, possibly tops any sequence from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Even on a compositional level, this is bravura work, with Douglas Slocombe swapping out his bronzed, Lawrence of Arabia-esque earthy cinematography for expressionistic bursts of orange flame and plunging shadows.

As much as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is a reset of sorts, given that it feels like a conspicuous return to the less troublesome optics of having Indy plow through Nazis in search of another Judeo-Christian holy relic, it also finds Spielberg taking Indy in more reflective directions. The stunts and production design are still sublime, but the franchise’s third installment is most memorable for the witty, caustic, but ultimately tender exploration of Indy’s estranged relationship with his father, Henry (Sean Connery, matching Ford in laconic irascibility). The absentee father is a recurring figure in many of his films, but Last Crusade represents, perhaps unexpectedly, his richest reflection on frayed father-son bonds.

When The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull premiered in 2008, Spielberg had already confronted the fallout of the War on Terror in War of the Worlds and Munich, so the series’s shift to the Cold War era was more than just a means of accounting for Ford’s aging. But there’s a reason that this fourth film’s high point is the first act set in the nuclear testing zones of the American Southwest, as it marks the only point in which its referential foundation lines up with what’s depicted on screen. Having already delved an estranged father-son relationship in the prior film, Spielberg puts little enthusiasm into replaying his pet theme with Indy now in the role of the absentee parent, and a Ford boringly trades his character’s once deadpan wit with a crotchety snarl that leans too far into meanness. The supporting cast fares no better, from Karen Allen’s frustratingly defanged portrayal of Marion to an over-the-top Cate Blanchett, whose Russian accent recalls Natasha from an old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon.

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Still, there are moments where Spielberg’s undiluted capacity for image-making is on fine display, as when Indy hides in a fridge to avoid being incinerated by a nuclear blast. And if the centerpiece jungle chase plays too much like a video game cutscene, enduring it is an acceptable price to pay given that it clearly served as a test run for the more impressive, fully animated action sequences in The Adventures of Tintin. Fundamentally, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is an attempt to consider the iconography of Indiana Jones himself more so than the pulpy references that inform him, and as an experiment in Fordian deconstruction of mythic imagery, the film is fitfully engaging. As an Indiana Jones adventure, though, it falls flat, reflecting Spielberg’s disinterest in crafting action yarns. If The Last Crusade finds Spielberg experiencing growing pains in coming to terms with his clout as a filmmaker, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in some ways represents an unlikely predecessor to the deconstructive interests on display in films like Lincoln and The Post.

Image/Sound

Paramount Home Entertainment’s UHD discs add to an already impressive 4K roster for Steven Spielberg’s filmography. All four films have been remastered from their negatives and given sparkling new transfers bolstered with Dolby Vision. The first three films look breathtaking, as the transfers significantly boost the sweltering yellow and brown color schemes of deserts and ruins, as well as reveal new depths to textures on fabrics and faces.

At times, the heightened sharpness does reveal the seams at work in the many compositing special effects, but this a series that delights in easily spotted fakery, so this is less a flaw of over-sharpened detail than a more precise visualization of an innate trait of these films. Yet most interesting of all may be the new color grading applied to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Janusz Kaminski’s shimmering, cartoonishly colored cinematography has been somewhat toned down, granting more tactile presence to a film that always looked too smooth.

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On the audio front, all four films have been remixed for Dolby Atmos, and the results are reference-quality. Subtle foley and ADR effects, from water trickling down cave walls to random dialogue from anonymous mouths at bustling bazaars, are carefully dot the side channels, while John Williams’s scores and the roar of propeller planes, collapsing tombs, and other colossal noises overwhelm the entire soundstage. And through it all, dialogue is never drowned out. If anything, it sounds clearer than ever—so well separated in the center channel that even the previous, superlative Blu-ray mixing sounds comparatively murky.

Extras

Paramount’s 4K UHD set ports over all the extras from the 2012 four-movie Blu-ray set onto a supplementary Blu-ray disc here. That may be disappointing to some, but the archival extras are quite comprehensive, starting with an hour of on-set footage from Raiders of the Lost Ark, as well as making-of documentaries on each film that run between 30 minutes to nearly an hour. There are also copious shorter featurettes on various aspects of the films, ranging from their sound design to their stunt choreography to their special effects, like a brief video on the notorious face-melting scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Overall

Paramount has upgraded already strong transfers with meticulously remastered color grading and remixed sound, ensuring that these retro blockbusters feel as contemporary as ever.

Score: 
 Cast: Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey, John Rhys-Davies, Denholm Elliott, Kate Capshaw, Amrish Puri, Roshan Seth, Philip Stone, Jonathan Ke Quan, Sean Connery, Alison Doody, Julian Glover, Cate Blanchett, Ray Winstone, John Hurt, Jim Broadbent, Shia LaBeouf  Director: Steven Spielberg  Screenwriter: Lawrence Kasdan, Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz, Jeffrey Boam, David Koepp  Distributor: Paramount Home Entertainment  Running Time: 483 min  Rating: PG, PG-13  Year: 1981 - 2008  Release Date: June 8, 2021  Buy: Video

Jake Cole

Jake Cole is an Atlanta-based film critic whose work has appeared in MTV News and Little White Lies. He is a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle and the Online Film Critics Society.

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