Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom (1984)

Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom (1984)

8/10

Starring

Harrison Ford
Kate Capshaw
Amrish Puri
Roshan Seth
Philip Stone

Directed by Steven Spielberg

I have seen the Temple of Doom more than I can count; I just never tire of seeing Dr. Jones trying to stop the Kali priest (Mola Ram) from ripping out his heart.

The movie has wonderful visual effects from the heart removal scene where Mola Ram removes the heart of the human sacrifice and we behold the beating heart in his hand while the individual is still alive, then the heart catches fire as the sacrifice is lowed into a fiery death hole. That scene is a huge high for me.

The Kali-Ma slave blood ritual, where Jones is forced to ingest blood so as to be a Kali-Ma slave, I believe that was the low for me in this flick, from his zombie behavior back to his normality seemed to wishy-washy for me.

Although its initial release faced heavy criticism for the intense violence, child slavery, black magic, and the ritual human sacrifice depicted in the movie, but as time went by it has become a critical acclaim, holding an 85% approval rating in Rotten Tomatoes.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was done in 1984 and it is the second film in the Indiana Jones franchise. Although it was done 3 years after Raiders of the Lost Ark the timing of the events were set to be before Raiders of the Lost Ark, making Temple of Doom a prequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark as temple of doom was set in 1935 while Raiders of the Lost Ark was set in 1936 and The Last Crusade was set in 1938.

The movie plot has our protagonist Jones team up with Short Round (a Chinese, eleven year old sidekick) and also at Indy’s side is a night club singer named Wilhelmina "Willie" Scott. Together the 3 of them find themselves being persuaded to go save a village from destruction and help recover their Sankara stones, which was the source of the village’s good fortune.

The children of the village have all been taken and used for labor for the cause of Mola Ram (a demonic Thuggee priest) who uses the kids to search for the remaining Sankara stones so as to bring the rise of Kali who will then rule the world.

The movie was a financial success but many attributed the movie’s dark side to be as a result of the breakups that both George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were facing at that time.

The movie too has faced criticism in India for its inappropriate portrayal of the goddess Kali who in this movie is portrayed as evil. Also the food being served when Indy, Short Round and Willie were at the palace was seen as culturally inappropriate (baby snakes, eyeball soup, beetles and chilled monkey brains) are not cuisines in the Indian diets.

It won Best Visual Effect in the Academy Awards.

All I can say is that this is a movie I have come to love and accept as a classic and a most see in the Jones series.

It beats Raiders of the Lost Ark in its entirety when it comes to its plot. In the Raiders of the Lost Ark if Indiana Jones had not interfered everything in the movie would have happened as it did. His interference just delayed the Nazi from finding the Ark (which they eventually did) and then dying from opening it, which would have happened if he had just let them find it earlier.