Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
by Robbo
Posted on 10 May 2021
Rating -
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is a 1984 American action-adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg. It is the second instalment in the Indiana Jones franchise, a prequel to the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark, featuring Harrison Ford reprising his role as the title character.
Not wishing to feature the Nazis as the villains again, George Lucas, executive producer and co-writer, decided to regard this film as a prequel.
Set a year before Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones is in Shanghai where he survives a murder attempt by the crime boss, Lao Che.
Fleeing Shanghai by plane with his young Chinese sidekick, short round and the nightclub singer Willie Scott unbeknownst to them the plane is owned by the Lao Che shipping company. While the three of them are asleep, the pilots dump fuel and bail out over the Himalayas. Our three heroes narrowly escape by jumping out of the plane on an inflatable life raft.
After arriving in India, Indiana Jones is asked by desperate villagers to find a mystical stone, shivalinga and rescue their children from evil forces in the nearby Pankot Palace. Indy agrees to do so, hypothesizing that the stone is one of the five Sankara stones given by the gods to help humanity fight evil.
The trio receive a warm welcome from the officials at Pankot Palace and are allowed to stay for the night. The officials rebuff Indy’s theory that the Thuggee cult is responsible for their troubles. Later that night, Indy discovers a series of tunnels hidden behind a statue and sets out to explore them, overcoming a number of booby-traps.
The trio reach an underground temple where the Thuggees worship Kali with human sacrifice. They discover that the Thuggees now possess three of the Sankara stones and have enslaved the children to search for the last two, hidden in the palace catacombs.
It’s extremely difficult to follow up a successful film with another one. Very few sequels manage to be superior to their predecessor and unfortunately this isn’t one of them.
Temple of Doom is a much darker film, still utilising the religious themes and motifs of it’s predecessor but somehow not managing to capture the magic that made Raiders of the Lost Ark so good.
It still has great action elements from the opening car chase scene, the the jump from the plane on an inflatable raft sliding down the mountainside, over a cliff and into a conveniently placed river and the mine car chase through the tunnels of Pankot Palace.
The film is well made, ably acted and well directed but for me just lacks a little something.
I would rank this third on my list of Indiana Jones films behind Raiders of the Lost Ark and Last Crusade.
Having said all that, it is still a good film and well worth investing a couple of hours.
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