Tripwire Reviews Indiana Jones Movie Collection 4K Boxed Set

Does This Belong In A Museum?

Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows grabs his fedora and his whip to take a look at Paramount’s Indiana Jones Movie collection 4K Boxed Set, out now…

Indiana Jones Movie Collection 4K Boxed set

Director: Steven Spielberg

Stars: Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey, Kate Capshaw, Ke Huy Quan, Sean Connery, Denholm Eliott, Alison Doody, John Hurt, Ray Winstone, Cate Blanchett

1981, 1984, 1989, 2008

Forty years from the debut of Spielberg and Lucas’ adventure hero, Paramount has commemorated this with a new boxed set that offers the four films in 4 K Blu Ray. People get the regular Blu Ray and the 4K version of each film plus a bonus disk of extra features. The bonus disk includes the same content you got if you picked up the 2012 Blu Ray box.

First up is Raiders Of the Lost Ark, now rebranded as Indiana Jones and the Raiders Of The Lost Ark. From the moment you see that mountain at its opening all the way through Ford’s first adventure as Jones battling to stop the Nazis from acquiring the Ark Of The Covenant, Raiders Of The Lost Ark looks beautiful in 4K. Even forty years on, Kasdan and Lucas’ script and Spielberg’s directing all combine to create a seamless work of modern cinema. Even scenes like the opening of the Ark at the end and the desert battles between our eponymous hero and a succession of doomed Nazis are lifted by the 4K process. Indiana Jones and The Raiders Of The Ark is still one of the finest mainstream movies of the past forty years, a love letter to the work of people like David Lean and Howard Hawks that still manages to feel fresh and modern.

Three years later, Indiana Jones and The Temple Of Doom, a prequel that sees Jones fight the Thugee in India, takes a much darker turn than its progenitor. Karen Allen is replaced by the future Mrs Steven Spielberg, Kate Capshaw, and the archaeologist gets a kid sidekick in the shape of Short Round (Huy Quan). For many years, the heart removal scene was cut from the UK release but it has been restored over the past few releases. Temple Of Doom doffs its fedora to the likes of Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King and George Stevens’ Gunga Din but it has a much nastier feel to it than Raiders Of The Lost Ark and it suffers from a script that isn’t as sharp as its predecessor. The best thing about Temple Of Doom is the musical opening that introduces us to Willie Scott (Capshaw) but it goes downhill after this. The Indian setting of Pankhot Palace, actually Sri Lanka, has an artificiality that drags the viewer out of proceedings and the film feels a lot less cinematic and grand than Raiders Of The Lost Ark. The 4K restoration does give it a bit of a lift but it can’t repair the flaws at the heart of the production.

Five years on and we come to Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, where we get to see Indiana Jones’ father, Henry, played by Sean Connery, for the first time. The Last Crusade also gives us the origin of Jones’ whip, his hat and his facial scar in a clever pre credits vignette starring the late, great River Phoenix as young Indiana Jones. After the darkness of The Temple Of Doom, The Last Crusade sees Indiana Jones return to a lighter tone and it does lift the quality of the series. Visually with the 4K restoration, The Last Crusade feels even more widescreen and cinematic with its set pieces looking classic yet contemporary. Connery and Ford do have onscreen chemistry and Walter Donovan (played by Julian Glover) and the duplicitous Dr Elsa Schneider (Alison Doody) are suitably malevolent villains here. The Last Crusade does feel like an oldfashioned Tarzan adventure and it is almost the equal of Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

Finally, there’s Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull. Released nineteen years after The Last Crusade, despite a spirited first twenty minutes, its script fails to gel. The story of the aliens coming down to South America just doesn’t really compare with its three predecessors. It is nice to see Ford and Karen Allen back again but The Crystal Skull lacks the bonhomie and invention of its progenitors. Also, actors like Cate Blanchett as villainous Russian Irina Spalko and John Hurt as Professor Oxley are totally wasted here with a script that is weak. Also the dodgy CGI towards the second half of the film lets it down too. It does look fairly sharp but considering this is a film that’s only 13 years old anyway, the 4K doesn’t really have much to do to enhance its look.

It is rounded off with a bonus disc of extra features but these are the same bonus features and making of extras that you got with the 2012 Indiana Jones box set. They are fun if you haven’t seen them though.

Indiana Jones 4-Movie Collection 4K Ultra is a worthy purchase for fans of the movies although the weaknesses of Temple Of Doom and Crystal Skull can still be seen even with the restoration. You do wish that they offered a few new extra features that we hadn’t seen before though. Raiders of The Lost Ark is still magnificent and to see it restored is almost worth the price of admission here. The Last Crusade is still a close second for me as an Indiana Jones film and Temple Of Doom still has enough to please the Indy fan. The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull is really only for Indiana Jones completists still. So is it worth picking up? On balance, it is worth getting to see Raiders Of The Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade in this beautifully restored format and for people who haven’t seen the bonus features before. Four stars is for Raiders and The Last Crusade

Here’s the 4K set’s trailer too