Movie Review – Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom

Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom (1984)
Written by George Lucas, Willard Huyck, and Gloria Katz
Directed by Steven Spielberg

I did a lot of imaginative play as a kid, as do most kids. I’m about to sound like an old man, but this was a time when television was the biggest distractor in the house, and without cable, it wasn’t much of one. The movies and shows I would watch would inspire the play I did, often by myself or maybe with a younger sibling, if I could convince them to play along. I became a Ghostbuster using a backpack, yarn, a paper towel tube, and a shoebox. I was a Ninja turtle using the same backpack for a shell, a wrapping paper tube, and a piece of cloth with eye holes cut out. Indiana Jones was as simple as a cowboy hat and a jump rope.

While Indiana Jones was a part of my childhood, I have never been one who clung desperately to nostalgia. Revisiting these things causes them to pale in comparison to the half-remembered fragments in my mind. So, this week, I will be talking about the Indiana Jones films and how they can’t remain for me now what they were for me then. I have grown, and my view of colonialism and museums has shifted dramatically for the better. If you are someone who uses Indiana Jones as a means to escape the real world, then these reviews will not be for you because we are going to get very real with these films. 

To avoid making Nazis the central villains again, Spielberg and Lucas decided on a prequel for the following Indiana Jones picture. Opening in media res, we find Dr. Jones (Harrison Ford) at the tail-end of an adventure in Shanghai where he attempts to exchange a Chinese emperor’s urn with a crime boss for a rare diamond. Double crosses occur, and Indy brings along nightclub singer Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) on his airborne escape. The plane is owned by the same crime boss, so the pilots abandon the vessel, leaving Indy, Wilie, and sidekick Short Round (Ke Huy Kwan) in India. They come across a village where their lingam stone and children have been stolen. They say the threat comes from Pankot Palace, a mountain fortress associated with the Thuggee cults. Indy and their friends pay a visit, and things seem fine, but that night, they discover a hidden dark secret. 

Temple of Doom is not a great movie; it’s an okay movie. The problems arise from a childish view of the world, which wasn’t quite grotesque in the first movie. Of course, Raiders of the Lost Ark played into many of the “exotic” tropes of colonialist media with dangerous jungle tribes and the like. However, the Nazis were the central villains, making it better. However, here the bad guys are scary dark-skinned Indian people. You might say, “Well, why can’t Indian people be villains in a blockbuster movie?” They can, but when their villainy is predicated entirely on weird conjectures about their culture, you’ve crossed a line into racism. 

The infamous dinner scene is one of the most extreme examples of this. I have eaten at Indian restaurants several times, as I’m sure many of you have. I have never seen chilled monkey brains or squirming eels on the menu. I typically order tandoor chicken or tikka masala, so I may have missed those. There is a caveat that this is a meal eaten by the twisted evil folks inhabiting Pankot Palace, which might be okay if not for an earlier scene. When the trio is given the info on the missing kids in the village of Mayapore, we have Willie reacting with disgust at the plate served there. Indy admonishes her not because the food is good but because it would be rude not to eat it. The takeaway from this movie, if you didn’t know better, would be “Indian people eat fucked up gross food.” When I talk about the childish view of the world, this is the most obvious example in the picture.

The thing about a Spielberg movie is that the director has some of the best technical chops in the business. He understands the language of cinema and uses his camera like a paintbrush. There are so many fantastic shots in this movie, clever small things that you probably don’t consciously recognize, but part of your brain is aesthetically pleased by them. Unlike Raiders, Temple leans into the comedy far more which will continue into The Last Crusade. Temple feels the most connected to the film serials it was inspired by, especially with the inclusion of the kid sidekick and the over-the-top nature of some of the set pieces. The mine cart ride sequence is a beautifully delivered action set piece; I would never argue against that.

I didn’t find the chemistry between the three leads to be all that convincing. Willie is a poorly-written female character, the complete opposite of Marion Ravenwood, which I suppose was the point. But what was the point then? It’s not like American cinema was experiencing a dearth of damsels in distress, especially someone as much in the vein of Olive Oyl as this one. The way she and Indy are forced by the script into a romantic entanglement felt as authentic as pressing Barbie and Ken together while saying, “Now kiss!” It seems like he’s into it because she is conventionally attractive, and that’s where the love story stops and ends. 

Short Round is fine, but I don’t really get a sense of him as a character, more someone for Indy to bounce quips off of that isn’t a love interest. He references a trope, but I need more than references in my movies. I need the people making the movie to say something about what they choose to include. Temple is a far better action blockbuster than most, but that doesn’t mean I let it into my personal movie hall of fame, no questions asked. I think the gross stereotypes of Indian people, including some actors I’m pretty sure we’re in brownface, make this a hard one to give an easy pass to. 

Where Raiders showed some restraint and was evenly paced, Temple is loud and obnoxious. It feels like someone constructing the basis of a theme park ride at moments. Doing something wildly different from the first movie was a good idea. It’s just the thing they decided on was terrible. If Short Round has returned in any of the subsequent films, it might have improved his appearance in this movie. As someone who reads a lot of comics, including some of the Golden Age material, Shorty is very much a racist trope from pulp literature that has been “cleaned up” a bit for the audiences of the 1980s.

The first 30% of the film is moderately entertaining, but I have always felt my eyes glaze over the moment Indy discovers the hidden temple and the mines. The film grinds to a halt as we have Indy come under the possession of an evil wizard. His supporting cast isn’t great, so they can’t carry the movie’s emotional weight. Ultimately, Temple suffers from an identity crisis. It wants to be a silly, comedic, family-friendly thing with the inclusion of Short Round and the children in the mines. However, it is also pushing mainstream depictions of violence and the grotesque to new limits of the period making it one of those films responsible for the invention of the PG-13 rating. As we’ll see in my review of The Last Crusade, that is a movie that clearly understands its tone and story and remains consistent. Temple is just a big mess that isn’t fun enough to justify its many problems.