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As would be expected, Last Crusade’s video is top-notch – by far the most visually impressive transfer of the three films. A perfectly clean video master has resulted in a striking anamorphic widescreen image packed with fine details, bright and well saturated colors, no artifacting, very little film grain and absolutely no visible edge enhancement. The quality is even throughout, with deep blacks and ample shadow detail. I can see this disc making its way into many home theater demo sessions! The movie occupies 7.3 gigabytes of a dual-layered disc, with the layer change occurring during a good spot at 1:05.54 into the movie, or 0:00.26 into chapter 20.
As a late 80’s movie, I had high hopes for Last Crusade’s soundtrack (remember, The Abyss was released the same year), and I was absolutely delighted by this DVD. The crystal clear Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack is record at a 448kbps bitrate (as are the other Indy movies) and sounds as good as many current films. It has strong and clear dialogue without any distortion, a rich soundstage, well used surrounds, plenty of subwoofer action and a full bodied orchestral score – there’s absolutely nothing here not to like. Also available are French and Spanish 2.0 tracks, English, French and Spanish subtitles, and English Closed Captioning data.
Special Features
As was mentioned earlier, the bonus features for all three films are stored on a separate fourth disc. Although advertised impressively as three hours long, remember that’s three hours between the entire trilogy – some modern DVDs have that much for a single film! But since these movies were created far before filmmakers started thinking of later “special feature” compilations, it’s amazing that they managed to collect what they did.
The Bonus Materials disc starts off with six menu options (three of them for incidental use such as a weblink, setup options and DVD credits). The main three options are “Indiana Jones: Making the Trilogy”, “Featurettes” and “Trailers”.
The first option leads to a submenu with lengthy individual documentaries for each film which comprise the bulk of the bonus disc’s running time. All three are full-screen video with stereo sound and include behind-the-scenes footage, retrospective interviews with people that worked on the film including George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, artwork, special effects and more. The original Raiders is treated to a 50 minute video and includes highlights such as a screen test with Tom Selleck, Harrison Ford’s “whip craft” lessons, removing hundreds of TV antennas from “Little Cairo”, hidden R2D2/C3PO hieroglyphs, arranging thousands of snakes, and so on.
Temple of Doom’s documentary is 41 minutes long and includes interesting tidbits such as Kate Capshaw learning how to scream, elephants eating costumes, dealing with the Indian government, working with bugs, building miniatures, dummies that kick, and the eventual creation of a new PG13 rating. The documentary for Last Crusade is 35 minutes long and describes casting Sean Connery, breeding rats, destroying boats, training seagulls (or not!) and building tanks.
A total of four featurettes are provided: “The Stunts”, “The Sound”, “The Music” and “The Light and Magic”. All are provided in full screen video and stereo sound, and range in length from 10 to 13 minutes. Each delves a little deeper into their subject matter than the individual documentaries do, but in a more generic sense across the entire trilogy. Finally, six trailers are available for the three movies, all with anamorphic widescreen video. The main theatrical trailers for Raiders and Temple of Doom have surprisingly been remastered into Dolby Digital 5.1 sound, while the rest are stereo.
All in all this is a great boxed set. The movies are absolute classics and have never looked or sounded better, and the extras are actually interesting (if not all encompassing). And really, what movie collection would be complete without Indiana Jones?
- Reviewed by Daniel Tonks on October 27, 2003.
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