I squeezed this one in while the SW: Reborn project was on hiatus.
Full Rez cover & disc art available here: http://rapidshare.com/files/123712545/TempleDVDcover1.zip.html
Here’s what I did:
-Added Lucasfilm logo to match Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
-First shot of the film is a statue of an idol taken from a documentary called “Sacred Planet” which happens to blend in perfectly with the angles of the Paramount logo.
-Cut Kate Capshaw’s opening song and dance number and replaced it with a sequence taken from the middle of the film to evoke a much more mysterious, foreboding tone akin to Raiders and more appropriate for a movie titled “The Temple of Doom”.
-Added new titles with correct font to match the other three films in the series.
Here’s a few quick stills:
-The film now opens with the elephant ride through the jungle up to Pankot Palace.
-After Indy and the gang meet the Prime Minister, we fade from an exterior shot of the Pankot sunset, to Indy walking down the steps inside Club Obi Wan. A subtitle reads: “Shanghai, The Previous Day”.
-Cut Indy’s line “…or anything goes.” (A reference to the now cut dance number.)
-Cut Willie’s unfunny line about Nurhachi being a “real small guy”.
-Cut sidekick Wu-Han’s over-the-top death scene…although, to make it work I had to unfortunately cut Lao Che’s line “Don’t be sad, Dr. Jones. You will soon be joining him.”
-Reduced Willie’s screaming as they fall through the canopies (as much as possible without losing sound effects).
-Cut Short Round’s superfluous line “Holy smoke! Crash landing!” Now he simply says “Wow!”
-Cut Short Round’s line “Hold on to your potatoes!”
-Cut Short Round saying “Wow!..wow…” as he’s crashing through things on the Shanghai streets.
-Flipped a few shots of the rickshaw to correct continuity. Sailor and girlfriend keep swapping sides. (That’s bothered me for years.)
-Cut Short Round’s Anakin-like line “This is fun!”
-Cut Dan Aykroyd’s cameo scene. His fake English accent was annoying and his scene adds absolutely nothing to the story. Indy’s line “Owe ya a gin!” is all that remains.
-Reduced Willie’s screaming as they fall out of the airplane on the raft. (as much as possible without losing sound effects).
-Cut the extremely dated effects shot of the plane crashing on the mountain behind them.
-Cut the village shaman’s line about “Like monsoon bring darkness over all country…” because it wasn’t an answer to Indy’s question “What has happened here?” So, we cut instead to his line “They came from palace and took Shivalinga from our village.” It makes much more sense now, to me anyway.
-Cut the shaman repeating “bring back to us…bring back to us…” over and over again.
-Cut Indy and Short Round’s scene at night outside the village. Their conversation about fortune and glory didn’t add anything to the story and only served to “clue us in” that the “good luck rock” might be valuable, which is obvious anyway when Indy looks right at the camera and says “Shankara!”. The scene had terrible acting. Terrible special effects. And it bears all the signs of a post production pick-up shot.
-Now we transition from indy studying the cloth the boy gave him and saying “Shankara!” to him climbing onto the elephant the next day, beginning the elephant trek.
-Cut Indy’s line “Quit monkeying around on that thing…”
-After Indy says, “We’re not going to Dehli, Doll, we’re going to Pankot Palace.” I cut the rest of Willie’s over-the-top whining and went directly to the push-in shot of the village shaman praying.
-Cut Short Round telling the elephant “You’re my best friend…you’re my best friend.”
-Cut out some of Short Round continuing to laugh at Willie after she was tossed into the puddle. It was a little more than we needed.
-Cut the camp in the jungle scene. Way too much screaming. Plus, it looks like they’re on a movie set. The scene is funny but doesn’t really add anything to the narrative and is not at all in the spirit of Raiders, IMO.
-Since the next section of the film was pulled out and placed at the beginning for this edit, after Willie exclaims “I’m a singer! I could lose my voice!” we fade to the exterior sunset at Pankot.
-The dinner scene is completely reworked. No Beetles, no eyeball soup, no monkey brains. Only a snake minus the surprise is all that remains. A comparativly subtle reaction to the snake from Willie and Short Round is all that’s needed. The scene now has a much darker feeling to it as Indy insults his hosts by mentioning the rumored re-emergence of the Thuggee cult and the plot is nicely moved forward without cutting back to shock-schlock every two seconds. ADigitalMan proved to me in his edit that this scene could be saved, but I thought it could be taken a little further by removing the monkey brains as well. They’re great nostalgia from the 80’s, as it’s one of the signature things people remember about this movie, but seeing it now, to me it just looks very fake. Takes me out of the movie. So, my version is played very serious and we fade from an ominous look from Indy at the table to him and Short Round in the hall on the way to bring Willie some fruit…
-Re-edited Indy getting strangled in his room. It takes waaayyy to long for Short Round to wake up with all that crashing going on. So, in this version, he wakes up a lot sooner.
-Cut Short Round opening the door where the dead bodies pop out. Makes Shorty look stupid.
-Cut Willie pushing on the “breasts” of the statue. There was no point, she already had one door open that she wouldn’t go into. Why try to open another one?
-Cut entire sequence with Thuggee victim getting his heart ripped out and being lowered into the pit. Personally, I don’t really enjoy watching sustained images of organs being pulled out and guys screaming helplessly as they’re engulfed in flames. It’s just not the kind of thing I like to watch repeatedly. I’m sure some of you will disagree, but I really felt it could be made more enjoyable to watch if a lot of this stuff was toned down. The Thuggees are evil enough being creepy demon worshippers and having stolen the shankara stones AND all the village’s children.
-Cut scene with Indy and Short Round in cage with children. “You drink blood, you not wake up from nightmare.” It was just a weird scene, and full of unnecessary exposition. I think it’s scarier to NOT know what the blood does to you when they pour it down Indy’s throat.
-Cut Indy announcing an offering of “flesh and blood” to Kali. Indy’s mind is controlled by Mola Ram now…we get it.
-Cut Willie’s line “I’m not going to have anything nice to say about this place when I get back.” Overlapped Chatter Lal’s dialogue with her pleading for Indy to help her. It feels more natural this way.
-Cut Willie spitting in Indy’s face and him rubbing it in while smiling.
-Reduced some of Willie’s screaming as she’s lowered into the pit.
-Cut Short Round pleading “You’re my best friend, Indy!”
-Eliminated shot of huge fireball licking toward Willie from the pit and a few of the cutaways to her.
-Cut lackey getting konked on the head with sledgehammer ala Looney Tunes.
-Cut Mola Ram trying to rip Indy’s heart out as they’re climbing up the collapsed drawbridge. No more “Indy! Cova ya hot!”
New runtime: 1 hr 40 mins
Full DVD via Rapidshare:
http://www.faneditforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4369
Here is a 700mb avi xvid release courtesy of Boon.
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/4250246
-ID
