Movie Tasting: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
My personal favorite of the franchise; but objectively the most horrificaly aged. (Wine pun!)
ACTION SCENES: 6
TOTAL ACTION TIME: 42/118 min. (35.6/100)
CHOREOGRAPHY: 7/10
STUNTS: 6/10
EDITING: 5/10
FINALE: 6/10
MISCELLANEOUS MENTIONS:
This movie is absolutely non-stop, with few breaks between action, so I'm giving it an extra point to make up for its lack of "individual" action scenes: 1
TOTAL ACTION JUNKIE SCORE:Â 66.6
READ HOW THE ACTION JUNKIE SCOREÂ WORKS
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WINE PAIRING:
You could go one of two ways with this one:
1) Either something super fruit-forward and easy going like a California Merlot or Zinfandel, an Aussie Shiraz, or an Italian Primitivo or Chianti.
2) Something exotic but also funky and a little "off", like a Chilean Carmenere or a South African Pinotage, both of which are known for exhibiting a funky fungal quality, or even "burnt rubber"Â element.
Temple of Doom is not objectively the best Indiana Jones movie, but it's my personal favorite. It has aged horrifically - I would love to live in a world where we can have fun with outlandish pulp advnetures that send up any and all cultures in equitable ways, and each absurd caricature would be fair play. But that ain't the world we live in, or have ever lived in.
But for good or ill, Temple is the most faithful of the Indiana movies regardling its pulp novel influences. Kicking off in a dazzlingly cliche 30's nightclub in Chinatown, we meet a very different side of Harrison Ford's Indiana, dressed to the nines in a James Bond white suit and black bowtie and looking sweaty and uncomfortable in it. I don't know if that was on purpose but I like to think so - this is a character who can pull of tweed and a bowtie in a college campus setting, but when trying to look debonair, bourgeoisie, and high class he just looks out of his element. A perfect showcase of how Bond and Jones differ as pulp creations.
After a mercifully brief intro scene, the action kicks into high gear. We meet nightclub singer Willie (Kate Capshaw) and child sidekick Short Round (the now forever superstar Ke Huy Kuan) and the movie essentially never lets up from there. There's a fist fight, a gun fight, a chase sequence, then we cut to a crash landing sequence, some white-people-in-a-foreign-land comedy relief sequences that are all far more memorable and effective than they have any right to be, then we're at the royal palace with that hysterical dinner sequence (far and away THE highlight of the whole movie, as ridiculous and offensive as it absolutely is), more comedy relief mixed with an assassination attempt, then - BOOM! - we're into the underground Temple of mother lovin' Doom and essentially an entire 45 minute string of set pieces than never pause for a breath.
Clocking in at 42 minutes of action out of a svelt 118 minutes total, Temple is the most action-packed Indiana Jones flick by a fair shake. The sheer "pulpiness" of the proceedings make even the non-action scenes feel energetic and always moving forward. Outside of landing in India in the first place, and meeting the poor locals, nearly every scene in this film is physically propulsive, moving the story and the characters ever forward, never standing still, never taking more than a single minute to story build. It's tempting to watch this movie and say "there isn't much of a story", but that isn't actually true. The politics and mythology behind the film's plot is actually quite intricate. The movie covers it all, but as briefly as possible. It tackles plot with a blink-and-you'll-miss-it approach. Whereas it'll spend 5 solid minutes watching a man's still beating heart being pulled from his chest and cast into a fiery pit.
The action here is on another level from the other Indiana movies, too - the stunts are more prevalent, and more inventive. The mining car chase sequence and the finale on the rope bridge are both huge set pieces that the other IJ film's don't even approach.
Spielberg, of course, has since come to realize how offensive everything in Temple of Doom actually is, and the realization scared him off of doing anything except Nazis in all future sequels. Last Crusade, Crystal Skull (okay, they were technically Russians, but if no one had said they were Russians, would any of us have thought they WEREN'T Nazis?), and even Dial of Destiny, all Nazis. Which is admittedly the safest bet, especially for a Jewish creator to tackle.
But it's a shame Jones became a purely Nazi cock-blocking machine - Temple of Doom showed that there was a paradigm here for wildly different takes on the same character, swinging (often literally) through multiple different kinds of pulp adventures. Instead, thanks to the world being the shitty place for BIPOCs the world over and every other non-WASP, we quickly pulled the plug on that approach. For the best? Undoubtedly. But still a shame.
I do see Temple of Doom as a precursor to over-the-top aestethics of Tim Burton's Batman flicks, Dick Tracy and The Phantom movies, the entire late 80's - late 90's era of neon-colored pulp heroes and villains, culled from golden age comics as well as pulp novels. I think this movie has a legacy that's brighter and easier to embrace than the offensive stereotypes that it perpetrated within its own runtime. It's still an insanely fun film - the funnest of all the Indiana flicks, if you can get past the culture shlock shock.