(courtesy IMP Awards)
Watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, it’s easy to use how it could have all gone very wrong.
This is a film that has the bravura and escapist blockbuster fun Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, but which also goes dark, very dark, to the point where it almost descends into horror, and yet somehow it emerges at its triumphant end feeling very much like one whole, thoroughly entertaining film.
That’s quite the balancing act between slapstick-laden, coincidence-heavy, jocular adventuring and occultic darkness that almost swallows our intrepid hero with elastic archaeological morals whole but Steven Spielberg, unsurprisingly manages to keep both halves feeling like they organically belong together.
It speaks to the superlatively gifted way in which this now iconic filmmaker, who was still relatively early in his career in his career when Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was released, moves between the light and the dark in his storytelling – in this case he was working to a screenplay by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, based on a story by George Lucas – keep them in tension throughout without one ever swallowing the other.
Time and again when you think the bleak darkness of the temple scenes, where pagan worshippers of the god Kali, or a variant thereof, is going to wipe out any memory of the wit and vivacity of earlier scenes such as the way in which Indy (Harrison Ford), the delightfully tenacious and brave Short Round (Ke Huy Quan) and reluctant companion Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) escape a crashing plane in an inflatable raft or Short Round drives them out of danger from a club full of Chinese gangsters in the opening scene, the movie rises up to hold each element tautly in its figurative hands, never once losing the beat of the film’s adventurous heart.
It is undoubtedly dark as hell in the middle act with everything from zombified worshippers to heart-ripping-out-of-chest priests to lava flows claiming sacrificial victims sending the story into far more horrific reams than its predecessors.
Any of the wit and vivacity of the opening scenes where Indy manages to escape from the hands of certain death, in more than one sense, is almost erased as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom go deep into the dark places of the human heart and stays there far longer than you might reasonably expect it to.
This is not cartoon violence at work nor is it the sort of stuff you can laugh off as some sort of blockbustery fun; this is very bad people, though it must be said people with a reasonable grievance against colonial injustice – which is treated like a curiosity rather than well-documented reason for revenge; for all its willingness to go deep into the broken parts of the human condition, its portrayal great evils like imperialistic exploitation and grievous loss of self-determination are treat superficially with the oppressed effectively treated as the bad guys, even if inadvertently – going all out to get some critically lost power back.
That their way of doing it tramples across the rights of still other people, in this case poor villagers to whom Indy promises to return their lost sacred stone and their kidnapped children, speaks to how one man’s revenge is another man’s hellscape.
This might all too intense a distillation of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom but the film goes to some very dark places again and again, and while it doesn’t always get the target right, it does a pretty good job of illustrating why people are always the greatest enemy of other people.
Their hero, of course, or is that anti-hero because don’t forget Indy is more Lara Coft Tomb Raider than he is the learned archaeologist he ostensibly is when he’s not gallivanting around a 1930s world on the slow but inexorable slide to the cataclysm of World War Two, is Indiana Jones and save for one black blood-imbibing moment when he falls under Kali-ma’s nightmarish spell (and display some rather fine musculature while under the influence, thank you very much), he very much lives out the part.
Most importantly, and this is a lovely part of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in the scenes involving he and Short Round.
While Willie Scott is far too much the screaming, shrieking heroine to really warm to, and you do have to wonder what on earth it is that Indy sees in her when he kisses her not once but twice, you instantly love Short Round, a street kid Indy adopts effectively after he tries to rob our adventuring archaeologist, who loves his saviour and surrogate dad with unalloyed, worshipful enthusiasm.
He is the one, in some key scenes, that actually saves the day and while Indy is the titular hero of the moment, it’s Short Round that really emerges as the MVP throughout the film, and part of the film’s charm is watching how the relationship between surrogate dad and son plays out and how it’s crucial to how well the darker elements are balanced with the lighter ones.
Another part of the appeal of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is the way its not afraid to celebrate our need for heroes and justice and the way it does that by going to those aforementioned dark places.
You might share, and you should if you have anything approaching a beating heart in your chest – just don’t let a certain pagan priest get near it if you know what’s good for you – the horror of Indy, Short Round and Willie, who likely won’t be accepting dinner invites to Pankot Palace again anytime soon, but because that it so unsettlingly nightmarish, you really appreciate all then more how Indy saves the day in the final act.
Some discordant character and social commentary notes aside, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is by and large every bit as good as escapist slice of joy and triumph of relative good over demonstrable evil than its predecessor was, entertaining you thoroughly as it reminds you that heroes, even antiheroes, are needed in our storytelling if only to remind how good we can be if only we let our better angels get the dominant seat of the monkey-brain set table.