The Adventures of Indiana Jones -- Complete DVD Movie collection Paramount Home Video 2003     Reviewed by Tony Buchsbaum	Before we get into my thoughts about the three Indiana Jones movies, let me share with you the thing I always found most interesting about them. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones goes after the Jewish mother lode, the Ark of the Covenant, said to contain the pieces of the original tablets that held the ten commandments. In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indy sets off to find three sacred Hindu stones, said to hold great power. And in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the Christian Holy Grail was the prize. Three movies. Three major religions. Three religious artifacts. You see the pattern as well as I do. But what does it say about Jones and the filmmakers behind his famed exploits? That Indy is an equal-opportunity archaeologist? Maybe all it says is that an artifact is an artifact, regardless of its origins. I think it's a pretty darned good idea for a book, a rich vein to mine, decoding these films for whatever buried treasure they hold about faith, religion and the artifacts we hold so dear. But then again, perhaps the films make the point, without ever actually trying to, that faith and the objects of worship are very different things. That the objects themselves are not to be worshiped as is the God that inspired them or gave them their power is. In other words, is it the ark that matters, or what it symbolizes? The stones -- or their power? The grail, or whether you believe it gives eternal life? To Indiana Jones, these pieces are relics to be preserved in a museum, religious artifacts only by origin. Indy's faith is in the objects as pieces of history. What they prove or disprove in a spiritual sense is of no consequence to him. Indy isn't in it for the money as Belloq is (see Raiders), in wielding God's power as Mola Ram is (in Doom), or in eternal life as Donovan is (in Crusade). Rather, Indy is in it for the chase. The discovery. His is a pure archaeology, a paraphrased throwback, if you will, to the old MGM motto: artifact for artifact's sake. Anyway, whatever the meaning behind all this, we're gathered here today to celebrate (and discuss objectively) the at-long-last release of the Indiana Jones films on DVD. Included in this must-have box are all three films, looking and sounding as wonderful as they should, and a fourth disc of extras, including lengthy making-of docs, cast and crew interviews, and more. I have what I think is a memory about Raiders of the Lost Ark. When it was released in 1981, MAD magazine did a parody of it called Raiders of the Lost Art, which seemed both funny and entirely serious at the same time. For it was absolutely correct, alluding to the filmmakers' revitalizing the lost art of movie serials. Cliffhangers. The stuff of Saturday afternoons at the Bijou. In a time when the local amusement park's biggest attraction was a rickety roller coaster, Raiders was a real thrill-ride. You bought your ticket, strapped yourself in, and held on. The best thing about the movie -- and its worst-kept secret -- was that it knew what it was and did nothing to hide it. There's a moment three quarters of the way through, after the ark is loaded onto a truck, when Sallah (played by John Rhys-Davies) asks Indy what he plans to do now. "I don't know," he says. "I'm making this up as I go." The line was perfect because one could almost see screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, holed up in some small office, wondering what to do next -- and then answering himself in the script. Raiders was a movie's movie. There was adventure after adventure, a feisty girl (played to a T by Karen Allen), ghosts, buried treasure, snakes, a bullwhip, a guy in a fedora, even Nazis. It was perfect, and it was made with an absolutely perfect tone that somehow combined a love for a lost art and a bid to revitalize it, all in one stroke. Although there were plenty of cliffhangers during the picture, the one thing Raiders didn't have was a cliffhanger ending. Indy rescues the treasure, God kills the Nazis, and the government gets the ark, which it promptly boxes up and hides in a massive roomful of identical boxes. It took three years for Lucas and Spielberg to bring Indiana Jones back, this time with a full-fledged serial title, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Where Raiders had been bright and light and clever, Doom was, well, just what its title said it was. It was dark, dirty, angry, and sometimes downright horrifying. It was hard to believe it was made by the same team. Indy had become a cartoon. To wit, in a blatant attempt to outdo the first film, Doom featured more stunt work in the opening sequence than everything in Raiders combined. There's a production number (in Mandarin, no less), a poisoning, a shooting, a madcap search for the poison's antidote and a diamond, a multi-story fall through awnings, a car chase, an airplane crash, and a raft-on-snow sequence that turns into a raft-on-rapids sequence after the raft tumbles over a cliff. And then the movie starts. Where the jokes in Raiders were smart, the jokes in Doom seemed designed to be either silly or gross. And the girl was a moody wuss, unable to hold a gun let alone shoot one. And then there's the whole villain who pulls beating hearts out of chests. The problem wasn't so much that Doom was dark, but as an Indiana Jones film it raised more than a few expectations, and each of those was dashed as the film unspooled. This wasn't a fun movie. It wasn't a Saturday afternoon serial, though it certainly tried to be, with its bug scenes and the jaw-dropping mine car chase at the end. It was a violent movie that kids wanted to see, but shouldn't. Such was the dichotomy that the Motion Picture Association of America, the guys who make the ratings, introduced a new one, PG-13, for movies more intense than PGs but not quite R-worthy. After that it took five years to get Indiana Jones back on the screen, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Thankfully, this movie was more like the original Raiders. The humor was actually humorous. The adventure was adventurous. And the story actually had meaning. Best of all, it starred Sean Connery as Indiana's father, Henry. The movie's title hinted at its depth, alluding both to the film's search for the holy grail and to the fact that this story wasn't so much about the grail as it was about Indy's crusade for a relationship with his father. Contrasted against Doom, Crusade was a welcome return to the bright light of the first film. The interplay between Harrison Ford and Connery was priceless, with the subtext of 007 sprinkled throughout. Spielberg has said in the years since that it made so much sense to cast Connery in the role because in so many ways, James Bond was the father of Indiana Jones. Crusade was as full as a Bond movie, with a beautiful girl who's slept with both Joneses, a villain who had a certain je ne sais quoi -- a class that belied his true evil -- and Nazis. It also had set pieces set in Venetian rat-infested catacombs, a tank, and even a Hindenburg-like dirigible. Its humor arose not from gross-out stunts, but from the characters and situations themselves, most notably those in which Indy and his father spar. It's the wall-to-wall father/son one-upmanship that defined and developed both characters brilliantly, providing new layers to Indy and introducing us to the man behind the man. Both men come face-to-face with death and then stare it down, but not so quickly that the other can't react with a groundswell of emotion, of imaginings of moments lost. If Raiders was for kids and Doom was for adults, Crusade is for the kid in us all, caught between childhood and adulthood, looking for a certain clarity between who we are and who our parents expect(ed) us to be. Perhaps, in the end, these movies aren't about religion at all, or even faith. Perhaps they're about the idea, the belief, that stories are the most important thing we have. Written or oral, factual or legendary, religious or secular, the stories we pass on to one another tell us less about the objects in the tales, and more about those who tell them. | January 2004   Tony Buchsbaum is the author of Total Eclipse. At night he works on another novel and a screenplay. Days, he writes advertising copy in Lawrenceville, NJ, where he lives with his wife and sons.	You see the pattern as well as I do. But what does it say about Jones and the filmmakers behind his famed exploits? That Indy is an equal-opportunity archaeologist? Maybe all it says is that an artifact is an artifact, regardless of its origins.