MOVIES I LOVE: INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM

SPOILERS!!!!

Welcome back to Movies I Love, Today I take a fond loom back at one of my personal childhood favorites: Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom. So, how does it hold up? Honestly....surprisngly well.

In this prequel to the smash hit Raiders of The Lost Ark, Indy (Harrison Ford) finds himself stranded in India with sidekick Short Round (Johnathan Ke Quan) and nightclub singer Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) after narrowly escaping one of his foes. He stumbles upon an impoverished village that has seen better days. The people of the village attribute their misfortune to a theft of a sacred stone that was once held there, a stone that is also believed to be one of the Sankara Stones (of which there are 5, it is believed that when all 5 are brought together the owner of them shall be given great power or some such nonsense). With the children of the village spirited away, Indy is tasked with a holy mission to travel to nearby Pankot Palace (an area believed to hold great evil within) to retrieve the stone and free the children. What Indy never could have foreseen is that his new adventure will put him through the ultimate crucible as he is tested like never before.

Harrison Ford is comfortably at home playing the roguish charmer Indiana Jones (He also is a great screamer). He is a bit rougher than usual as he threatens women, kills dozens of people, beats children (though in his defense he wasn't quite himself during that part), and seems to only be doing this mission for the "fortune and glory". It seemed to me that a good portion of this film is actually about how Jones becomes a better person. I personally like this rougher version of Indy, though I'm sure there will be a good amount of people that won't. Johnathan Ke Quan is actually pretty awesome as Short Round, Indy's kid side kick. I didn't find him nearly as annoying as I had remembered, in fact I think he adds a good deal to the film and was surprised that he could actually hold his own quite well. He's humorous, but also pretty cool and gets his fair share of action scenes (and even is counted on to save Indy and Willie at a few points). I also liked the relationship him and Indy share throughout the film, they are partners but also so much more than that.

Now, onto what I consider to be the weakest part of this film: Willie Scott. Indy, we need to have a serious talk about your taste in girlfriends. Kate Capshaw portrays Willie Scott, a performer/singer at a Shanghai nightclub. She is certainly very pretty, and is a very good screamer. I don't so much blame Capshaw as I do the writers (though it does seem she hasn't been in much else of note). Willie Scott is one of THE WORST female leads in film history. She never contributes anything to this film (ok, she does save Indy and Short Round at one point....still doesn't redeem the character though). All she does moan, whine, cry, scream, run, and wait for Indy to save her (interesting enough one of the only times she does not scream is when she is being lowered to her doom into a fiery lava pit....what up with that?). I had had enough of her by the time the end credits rolled. This film would have been a ton better without Willie in it.  How in the world did this beloved franchise go from making strong female leads in the first film to THIS just one film later (True, this film had a different team of writers which could explain this and the vastly different tone found here)?! I'd say unacceptable.

The tone found in Temple of Doom is quite different than what was found in Raiders. Temple of Doom is a dark, intense, brutal film that is offset by odd moments of silliness that don't really gel with the rest of the film. We have Indy becoming temporally hypnotized into being a bad guy, Indy and Short Round are whipped (that's right a child is whipped here, actually several children are whipped in this film), a man has his heart ripped out of his chest and then is lowered into a fiery lava pit where he is set ablaze and burns to death, a man is crushed by machinery (kind of like Judge Doom in Roger Rabbit), people are machine gunned to death, Indy is poisoned, Indy and Short Round are nearly impaled by spikes, a man is speared by a flaming shis kabob, and on and on and on. I'm well aware that this is one of the issues that a good deal of people have with this film. They think that an Indiana Jones film should not be so dark (and I do feel quite bad for the kids that watched this in theaters, no way they could have expected this). That said, I personally LOVE this more adult tone here. I like seeing our heroes in great peril, and watching them have to fight to survive. To me it seems real because of course Indy would find himself in these kinds of situations a good deal. This is one of the big films that helped to create the PG-13 rating, and it's not hard at all to see why.

Now, Temple of Doom is a prequel and this both adds and detracts from the overall film. On the plus side we know that Willies really is nothing more than a short fling (Raiders proves this fact since she is seen nowhere in the film and is not even referred to), naturally this makes me quite happy. On the negatives though, we never get an explanation as to what happened to Short Round. The bond Indy and him share is a fairly strong one, and I really liked the character. By making this a prequel, we lose this fun character. Oh well, at least he got this film. Another negative is that by the end of this film Indy seems to have a newfound belief in religion...a belief that disappears completely in the first film. So.....what happened? Did Indy look back on this adventure later and decide that it was all just hocus locus and that he had been momentarily fooled as well? Either way, it's disappointing that we lose this cool bit of character development. It's also interesting that Indy has a very small speech at the end where he kind of disses museums. This is interesting because his whole thing in Raiders is "IT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM" (It can be argued that the reason he feels this way in Raiders is because a museum is one of the only places where the ark could be reasonable safe).   I'm well aware that Raiders was intended to be its own thing, the filmmakers didn't make it with a sequel or prequel in mind. While I'm able to overlook my small quips with it being a prequel, it can not be denied that the film does indeed lose a small bit by going this route (or maybe by not planning Temple out so that the developments we have at the end of this one would make sense with what we see at the beginning of Raiders).

Truly Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom is a film where anything goes (the film even tells us this in it's opening MUSICAL DANCE NUMBER IN CHINESE, that itself breaks reality by dancing onto a large stage that in no way could exist in the nightclub). I'm well aware of why some people really do not care for this film (in fact, there are those that insist that Temple of Doom is a worse film than Crystal Skull....Crazy, I know) and their complaints are valid ones. However, despite my own issues with the film I still love it like crazy and count it as my personal favorite Indiana Jones film. It's refreshing to see an Indiana Jones film that is so ballsy and different. Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom is a highly entertaining 80's roller-coaster ride, faults and all.

5 STARS- BETTER THAN SEX