INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (1984) MOVIE NEWS & REVIEW

indiana jones and the temple of doom (1984) movie

Genre              |   Action Adventure

Classification   |   PG

Running time   |   116 minutes

Released         |   23 May 1984

cast

Harrison Ford ... Indiana Jones
Kate Capshaw ... Willie Scott
Jonathan Ke Quan ... Short Round (as Ke Huy Quan)
Amrish Puri ... Mola Ram
Roshan Seth ... Chattar Lal (as Rushan Seth)
Philip Stone ... Captain Blumburtt
Roy Chiao ... Lao Che
David Yip ... Wu Han
Ric Young ... Kao Kan
Dan Aykroyd ... Weber
​D.R. Nanayakkara ... Shaman

director

Steven Spielberg

writer

​Willard Huyck ... (screenplay by) &
Gloria Katz ... (screenplay by)
 
George Lucas ... (story by)

cinematographer

​Douglas Slocombe ... director of photography

music

​John Williams

film editor

​Michael Kahn
George Lucas ... (uncredited)

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box office result

Worldwide             $​​​​​​​333,107,271  

Australia                 $​​​​​ not available

North America       $​​​​​​​​179,870,271

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movie minutiae

Steven Spielberg's first sequel, though technically a prequel, as this movie takes place in 1935, before RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981) taking place in 1936, INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE (1989) in 1938, and INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL (2008) in 1957.

Steven Spielberg said in 1989, "I wasn't happy with TEMPLE OF DOOM at all. It was too dark, too subterranean, and much too horrific. I thought it out-poltered POLTERGEIST (1982). There's not an ounce of my own personal feeling in TEMPLE OF DOOM." He later added during the MAKING OF INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM documentary, "TEMPLE OF DOOM is my least favorite of the trilogy. I look back and I say, 'Well the greatest thing that I got out of that was I met Kate Capshaw. We married years later, and that to me was the reason I was fated to make TEMPLE OF DOOM."

Lawrence Kasdan (RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)'s Screenwriter) was asked to write the script. "I didn't want to be associated with TEMPLE OF DOOM", he reflected. "I just thought it was horrible. It's so mean. There's nothing pleasant about it. I think TEMPLE OF DOOM represents a chaotic period in both their (Lucas and Spielberg) lives, and the movie is very ugly, and mean-spirited."

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related movies

INDIANA JONES
AND
THE LAST CRUSADE
​ (1989)

INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (1984) MOVIE IMAGES

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INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (1984) STORY SYNOPSIS

​Adventure sequel. Intrepid archaeologist Indiana Jones, on the trail of fortune and glory in Old Shanghai, is ricocheted into a dangerous adventure in India. With his faithful companion Short Round and nightclub singer Willie Scott, Indie goes in search of the magical Sankara stone, and uncovers an ancient evil which threatens all who come into contact with it.

INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (1984) MOVIE REVIEW

Reviewed by Mark Geraghty   |   Review date 23 May 2015

​​Pop Movee Rating

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981) was always going to be a hard act to follow, so what better way to circumvent viewer's expectations than to have its sequel actually be a prequel!

Genius!

INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM is a much simpler film than its predecessor in most respects. The story is less complex. It's hero is more heroic. It's villains are more villainous. It's entirely more one-dimensional than RAIDERS, but that doesn't make it a bad film by any stretch of the imagination. It's thematic undertone is far darker, as the film tackles issues of both child labour exploitation and child abuse, both physical and psychological. There are harrowing moments within TEMPLE OF DOOM that don't make for easy viewing...

The film sets off at a cracking pace in the city of Shanghai; namely Club Obi-Wan (a neat tip of the cap to the STAR WARS character played by Alec Guiness). Indiana Jones is in search of a rare diamond and, in doing so, seems slightly less like the academic archaeologist and more like a soldier-of-fortune. Given the prequel status of the film (set in the year 1935, a year before RAIDERS), Harrison Ford actually plays Indy in a slightly regressive fashion, emphasizing some of the more immature parts of his personality above his nobler traits.

It could be argued that the main adventure of THE TEMPLE OF DOOM proves to be the catalyst for Jones to mature into the more accomplished, philanthropic version of himself that we see both in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and time frame of THE LAST CRUSADE (1989) events that take place a couple years thereafter. There's no question that Jones and his travelling colleagues are greatly affected by the disturbing events they are exposed to throughout the film.

Fleeing Shanghai by plane, Jones, entertainer Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) and Short-Round (Ke Huy Quan) are left for dead by their pilots, acting under orders from the nefarious Lao Che (Roy Chiao), from whom the trio have just escaped. In signature fashion, Jones forces them to jump for their lives inside a soon-to-be-inflated liferaft. Using it first as a parachute and then for its actual intended purpose, the adventurers came to rest at the foot of a village that has been wracked by famine and whose children have been stolen by the Thugee Cult, whose base is the much-feared Pankot Palace. Indy decides to help the local villagers when he learns that their prosperity was robbed from them when the Thugee not only abducted their children, but also the mystical Sankara stone that helped protect their people and way of life. When Short Round questions Indy about what they should expect to find, he tells him "fortune and glory". As it turns out, he's a long way from the truth and their going to find it out the hard way.

TEMPLE OF DOOM takes longer to build than RAIDERS, but it packs a lot into its second half and from the time Indy, Willie and Short Round arrive at the Palace, the events of the film occur almost in real-time from late in the afternoon through to the early afternoon of the next day. Spielberg, who was at the top of his action game in the early 1980s, has no trouble staging the action and, by comparison to RAIDERS, there's a much greater level of soundstage filming by which events can be controlled with far greater ease than on location. Spielberg makes good use of the underground setting of Pankot's Thugee Cult domain conjuring thoughts of what Dante's Inferno might have been imagined as a motion picture.

The performances in TEMPLE OF DOOM are more like caricatures than actual nuanced characterizations...

Harrison Ford slips back into Indiana Jones with minimal effort and, save for the opening scene, isn't really called upon until the second half of the film gets underway in the bowels of Pankot Palace. His bickering relationship with Willie throughout the first half of the film is (like RAIDERS) an even more bizarre riff on the 1930s and 1940s Gable-Leigh or Bogart-Hepburn love-hate relationships that made audiences fall in love with the Silver Screen era of the 1940s and 1950s. Unfortunately, the chemistry just doesn't exist between Ford and Capshaw, which may have been more to do with what was going on behind-the-scenes, as Spielberg and Capshaw started dating during the film's production and, to this day, she remains Mrs. Katherine Spielberg! 

Besides Ford, Capshaw and Ke Huy Quan, there's not much else to talk about...

Amrish Puri as the positively evil as the scenery-chewing Mola Ram. He takes great delight in sacrificing just about anything and everything around him and his removal of a still-beating heart from one of his victims caused a degree of outrage back in 1984 that saw Spielberg accused of taking a mainstream film just a little too far into the domain of human sacrifice and, by association, Devil worship. It's heavy stuff, for sure, but it's within the context of the scene and it's not representative of the entire film. As mentioned, the script by long-time George Lucas collaborators William Huyck & Gloria Katz does feature some unpleasant scenes depicting the abuse of children who work in the Thugee mine. This, also, did not go unnoticed at the time and, even to this day, marks TEMPLE OF DOOM as a very different film to the other three Indiana Jones adventures.

TEMPLE OF DOOM is not regarded in the same league as RAIDERS, but it never aspires to present the profound consequences the first film explored with the Ark of the Covenant falling into the wrong hands.

It's far less ambitious, but much more personal...

Stopping the Thugee has real meaning for Indy because he gets to see the impact of his actions at the end of the film on real people; mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers. Despite its reduced scope, audiences still went to see it because, setting aside the fact it's an Indiana Jones movie, TEMPLE OF DOOM is an above-average action adventure movie crafted by one of the great film directors. Spielberg's ability to lift a script from middle-of-the-road and create a excellent film from it is on show throughout the movie. Unfortunately, it took another five years before another Indiana Jones movie was released and THE LAST CRUSADE (1989) was much closer in tone to RAIDERS than TEMPLE OF DOOM. This has served to heighten the difference in tone of DOOM to the rest of the series...

That is, until THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL (2008), but that's a whole other review.

INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (1984) USEFUL LINKS

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - Wikipedia
​Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) - IMDb​
​Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) - Rotten Tomatoes

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