Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

I find it hard to believe that Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is over thirty years old now. I was too afraid to watch it for the longest time, at least by little kid standards; I was seven when it came out, but I didn't see it until a good three or four years later, when my then best friend enthused so endlessly that I had to take a look, even if I did hide my eyes for the scary bits. 

There were a lot of scary bits, too - bugs! Eyeball soup! Fake skeletons! Still, as my bravery grew I realized there was nothing quite so horrible as that nasty face-melting scene everyone remembers from Raiders of the Lost Ark (not linking to it, because I don't want to risk having to see any stills.) Still, it was a romp, a fun rollercoaster ride with fun-sized shocks and silly physical comedy, even if the obligatory love interest was incredibly annoying.

I'm not quite sure when I stopped watching it, or when I started reading reviews by people who thought it wasn't the greatest adventure film ever made. Certainly, I don't think that was the reason I didn't see it for fifteen or twenty years; more likely, they simply stopped showing it on TV for a while. For the past few years, however, it's been in regular rotation on BBC3, so eventually I found myself wanting to take another look.

All I can say is that we've come a long way since 1984, and luckily, those times fade further into the past as each day goes by.

The Indiana Jones films are all based on the radio adventure serials of the 1930s; the plot, therefore, tends to be less of a story and more of an armature to be dressed with romance, comedy and stunts. In Temple of Doom, this mostly concerns a cult located deep within the mountains of India - I'm not sure which mountains these are, but cliff faces and jungles and precarious rope bridges abound. The important thing, however, is that the cult have taken control of some mystic stones belonging to a small rural village. Without the stones, the villagers are helpless in the face of famine and disaster, albeit not so helpless that they can't somehow cause the air crash that brings Indy (Harrison Ford) to them along with the inevitable sidekicks - in this case, Korean kid Short Round (Jonathan Ke Quan) and shrill nightclub singer Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw). 

Inevitably, it's up to Indy to destroy the cult, save the village and win the girl. The narrative armature, however, dictates that none of these outcomes are ever in any real doubt, so as often happens, it becomes all about the journey.

The good

As spectacle, yes, Temple of Doom  works. It's big, it's loud, it's nonstop, and it has all those lovely, slightly shonky 80s sets that somehow look all the more convincing for being made of plaster of paris and children's paint. I have to admit that I still love the visuals, from Willie's dress in the opening scene in the Shanghai nightclub, to the firepits at the heart of the cult's mountain hideout. If there's one thing I love, it's the sort of cavernous, overdone sound stages where every expense has been spared to make it look as though little expense has been spared (description stolen from Douglas Adams), and the film provides these in abundance.

Some of the action sequences are nicely timed, too; a mine cart chase towards the end of proceedings is immense fun, while an escape from a small plane brought countless James Bond movies to mind.

Everything is as self-assured as you'd expect from Spielberg and Lucas, as confident and cynical as Indiana Jones himself, and if the film falls a little short on the joy and wonderment front, it grabs the attention from the first frame and holds it to the last with remarkable efficiency.

The bad

...But what if Spielberg and Lucas weren't evil? What if they weren't of an age when sexism and racism were the highest form of wit, and comedy gold came in the form of any non-Western accent?

Unfortunately, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom doesn't answer these questions. Instead, it damns its creators with a display of political incorrectness that was apparently seen as slightly shocking even at the time - in this day and age, it all looks practically prehistoric.

We have Indy, therefore, as a white messiah to a village of helpless, impoverished Indians; at the end of the film there's even a scene where he's surrounded by hundreds of adoringly grateful brown people desperate to lay their hands on him. This neatly sums up the tone of the entire film, in fact, where anybody who isn't a white American male is either a victim, a villain, comic relief or some combination of these.

Witness poor, hapless Willie Scott, as played by poor, hapless Kate Capshaw. She's portrayed exclusively as a spoiled, shrieking harridan. She complains endlessly when deposited in the jungle after bailing from the plane crash I mentioned earlier, and screams when, say, being doused with water by an elephant or suddenly encountering a large snake. Indy and Short Round are irritated by her, and when they laugh at her repeated comeuppances, the audience is encouraged to be complicit.

The IMDB tells me that Capshaw remains married to Spielberg, which to my mind suggests a profound deficiency in the self esteem department.

Even when the film was released, much was made of its supposedly darker tone. I can buy this, sort of - child slavery and ritual murder aren't necessarily the first subjects that would come to mind as thematic elements for a jolly family adventure romp - but for me, the real darkness comes from the endless glibness of the production and directorial teams, so comfortable and self-satisfied within their coccoons of privilege that they couldn't conceive of the sheer wrongness of this film's politics.

The verdict

You could disengage your brain for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and have a passably good time; possibly even a very good time, if you're very young or not very bright. Really, though, there's any number of movies out there that offer equal or better thrills without the sublimated sense of white male supremacy. Go watch The Phantom instead, or Con Air, two very different examples of how to nail a silly summer action blockbuster.