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Sunday, October 14, 2012

BD Impressions: Raiders of the Lost Ark

2:57 PM / BD Impressions / 7 Comments

The long-awaited INDIANA JONES: THE COMPLETE ADVENTURES has finally made it to Blu-ray, containing all three films in the Indiana Jones trilogy and, erm, THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL. I'm not sure I'll have time to do BD Impressions pieces on all four films, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to cover the first and, as is so often the case, best film, 1981's RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.

The film: I'm unabashed in my love of RAIDERS. It's fantastic: action-packed, heart-stopping, funny as hell. While some people would point to JAWS or CLOSE ENCOUNTERS as their favourite Spielberg film, this one has always got my vote. I saw it as a young kid and, like so many films first experienced at that age, it wormed its way into my subconscious to the extent that, even though I didn't revisit the film until several years later, when I finally did I found I knew it more or less off by heart. And it's one of those special films where knowing what's coming next is no bad thing: the fun lies in its familiarity, and it just gets better with age. I've always found Harrison Ford to be a fairly wooden actor, but oddly enough it doesn't hurt this film one iota, and in many cases his slightly stilted delivery actually adds to the comedy. Karen Allen is brilliant - she was always my favourite Indy leading lady, and the stuff she gets up to here just reinforces how wasted she was when they brought her back for CRYSTAL SKULL. Unlike Mrs. Spielberg in TEMPLE OF DOOM, who served a similar function, her schtick is endearing rather than infuriating, and I love the fact that she's neither a screaming damsel in distress or an unbelievable Strong Independent Woman(TM): she's brash, goofy and actually a bit of a lightweight, even though she clearly thinks of herself as a hard-ass. And of course there are the villains: in particular, Ronald Lacey makes for one of the most sinister movie Nazis ever, which takes some doing.

I can't really say anything else about the film that you haven't heard before. If you've seen it, I've a suspicion you'll agree with all of the above. If you haven't seen it... what the hell is wrong with you, and why are you still reading this? See it now! 10/10

Image quality: For this Blu-ray release, much has been made of the fact that RAIDERS has received a new 4k scan from the camera negative, which I take to mean that, for TEMPLE OF DOOM and LAST CRUSADE, older masters have been reused. I haven't looked at them in any detail yet, so I'll restrict this discussion to RAIDERS, which looks extremely impressive indeed. Shot in anamorphic Panavision, the image has the smooth, fine grain look you'd normally expect from this process. Colours look much warmer than the cooler-looking DVD version that was released nearly a decade ago in the THE ADVENTURES OF INDIANA JONES box set (and was reviewed very positively at the time), but aside from the rather blown-out contrasts during the opening credits (taken from a source at least a couple of generations removed from the negative, naturally, since RAIDERS is a pre-DI title and they haven't been re-composited for this release), the overall balance of colour, contrast etc. is very pleasing to the eye. Either way, the present colour timing comes with Spielberg's blessing, and while that doesn't automatically count for everything (remember the FriedkinVision FRENCH CONNECTION BD from a few years back?), I reckon it stands for a lot more than looking at older DVDs and automatically assuming THEY were accurate and this isn't. Quoting TLEFilms' Torsten Kaiser on the subject:

Re: RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK: Pretty much "the same picture" as with [the 2012 European BD release of THE TERMINATOR]: close (to the original mostly), but not 100% perfect; but compared to everything before on video masters A HUGE LEAP forward. Everyone who ownes an LPP of the re-issue will know.

(Source: Blu-ray.com forum)

There are a handful of minor glitches that prevent this disc achieving perfection. The aforementioned opening titles with their constrained dynamic range are one; another is this shot of the spiders on Alfred Molina's back, which has a very strange appearance - almost like the effect of watching a 3D film without glasses. I don't know whether it's some sort of compositing side effect, but it doesn't look like an optical so I'm inclined to assume not. There's also a shot at around 01:55:00 where Indy hides from the Nazi U-boat where heavier-than-usual grain has clearly been digitally reduced, but that's really the only shot in the entire film that shows obvious signs of digital manipulation. Otherwise it's an extremely impressive presentation - one of the best I've ever seen for a catalogue title, and continues the almost unbroken streak of Spielberg films receiving top drawer treatment on BD. 9.5/10

Raiders of the Lost Ark
label: Paramount; disc country: USA; region code: ABC;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 2.39:1

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