THE TEMPLE OF DOOM and the Art of the Unintuitive Sequel: Spielberg Summer 2 Continues!

I’ve mentioned it many, many times before in this space, but sequels are as hard to make as they are commonplace.

When you’re suddenly tasked with quickly following up a surprisingly successful movie that you spent years of your life crafting, the temptation is so, so high to just repeat the beats that got you the success in the first place.  The example I always think of is the AUSTIN POWERS trilogy.  The first one?  A perfect combination of silly, smart, and stupid comedy, as well as a vessel for Mike Myers to simultaneously spoof the 60s spy movies he grew up loving and to cram in as many peepee, poopoo and penis jokes as he could manage.  The two sequels?  Save the introduction of Mini-Me in the second and a star-studded opening in the third, it’s…largely more of the same!  It’s the same jokes repeated (sometimes over and over), with the hope of recapturing the magic.

Of course, your other option is to go the entire other way from the original in order to try to create something new once again, at the risk of pushing away the audience that made your original a hit.  The two movies that come to mind are 1986’s THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 and 2017’s STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI.  The former followed up one of the most iconic horror movies of the 70s (as well as one of the most unnerving films to ever dig underneath my skin, pun only sort of intended) with a bunch of 80’s bloody, dark comedy, featuring a scenery-chewing Dennis Hopper front and center.  The latter launched a schism within the Church of Star Wars by asking bold, controversial questions that thrilled some audience members and alienated others (questions such as, “What if a 21st century STAR WARS movie had a story?”).

If the snark wasn’t obvious, I love both of those movies, just as much as I don’t really like the two Austin Powers follow-ups.  I’m an “unintuitive sequel” kind of guy.  My simple demand for any entry in a franchise is that you keep trying to surprise me, which sort of goes against what a Part 2 typically consists of.   How can you keep me on my toes when you’re just playing the hits in a higher key?  Sometimes, you just gotta play a different song and hope people stick with you.

Which brings me to INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, maybe the most famous "unintuitive sequel” that takes America’s favorite archaeologist, the enemy of Nazis and a man who believes artifacts should be sought for preservation and not for power, and puts him in a fight against an evil Indian cult, in pursuit of fame and glory above all.  Oh, and it’s set a year earlier than that RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK movie, with approximately zero of the characters you grew to love returning.  Where the first one had some wonder, this one is grim and dour.  It’s about as unintuitive a sequel as you can get.

It…split audiences at the time!  It even freaked some people out, launching a whole new type of movie rating!  It may not surprise you, then, that I’m largely a TEMPLE OF DOOM guy, even if I think it has one major, catastrophic flaw.  It’s probably the one you’re thinking of.  

Let’s dig into the TEMPLE OF DOOM!

INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM 

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Harrison Ford, Kate Capshaw, Ke Huy Quan, Amrish Puri, Roshan Seth

Written by: Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz 

Released: May 23, 1984

Length: 118 minutes

There are so, so, so many wild decisions made in the creation of INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM that make it a really fascinating watch.

First of all, the movie provides a logical answer to the question that plagues all sequels: “how do we continue the original story, one that was crafted as definitively stand-alone?”  The solution: make it a prequel!  This time, we’re in 1935, one year before RAIDERS, and Indiana Jones is not quite the man of historical ideology as we previously knew him.  This time around, he’s less motivated by “this belongs in a museum” than he is “let’s do this to be legends”.  The objects he seeks are shiny, and that’s enough.

He also has a sidekick in tow: the young boy Short Round (Ke Huy Quan), who splits his time between being a precocious child in danger, and a legitimately helpful fighter and member of the team.  I say “team” because there’s a third person in the mix:  a clueless nightclub singer named Willie Scott (Capshaw) that enters into the fold mainly by accident; she escapes from the opening skirmish at Club Obi Wan only with the unexpected help of Jones himself.

The notable thing about TEMPLE OF DOOM being a prequel is that it’s the kind of move that a franchise usually only makes in order to “fill in” mythology gaps (how did our main characters become the people that we know them as?).  Here, though, if anything, TEMPLE OF DOOM actually somewhat confuses Indiana Jones’ history; he seems fairly protective of Short Round in 1935, so one has to wonder why they’re no longer hanging out by 1936*.  Besides providing us a little bit of an arc as to how Indiana became a little less self-centered (which felt more like an excuse to allow Ford to play Jones a little gruffer this time around), there’s really no connective tissue to RAIDERS here at all.  Really bold!

*Yes, I know there’s an extended universe explanation, that they send Short Round off to boarding school.  My problem with it is that I don’t care.

The official primary motivation for Spielberg and Lucas setting TEMPLE OF DOOM a year prior to RAIDERS was to avoid using Nazis as the primary antagonists again, which…fair enough, I suppose.*  This does wind up with them successfully avoiding that temptation to repeat the beats of the first movie, magnifying it to 120%, then calling it a day.  The eventual departure of Lawrence Kasdan from the project (more on that in just a sec!) opened the door to new collaborators: Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who also worked with Lucas on AMERICAN GRAFFITI.  Although there was an initial plan to bring Marion Ravenwood back for this one, that obviously didn’t end up occurring.  It appeared to be fated by the gods that INDIANA JONES 2 was going to be markedly different from INDIANA JONES 1.

*If only God had tried to avoid the same with the 21st century.

Of course, Lucas and Spielberg were in a mood when they made this, too, which undoubtedly contributed to its different feel.

That’s the second bold swing for TEMPLE OF DOOM; its tone.  Where RAIDERS has an old-fashioned, bright-eyed sense of adventure, in the spirit of Buck Rogers, or those old jungle serials of the 30s and 40s, TEMPLE OF DOOM is dark and dour, often crossing the line into actively mean-spirited.  RAIDERS has a very real deference to other cultures (at least, for an 80s movie set in the 30s), with the story delving into Christian theology without ever getting too judgy.  Jones finds friends, well-wishers and collaborators as he hops across the globe just as often as he finds burly men with swords.  The only group RAIDERS suggests is to be avoided at all costs are Germans.

TEMPLE OF DOOM, on the other hand, assumes a worldview that everyone is an evil piece of shit, and continued human interaction is unwise.  India is especially suspicious: its religious cults involve human sacrifice, child slavery, and the ripping out of still-beating human hearts.  Its high society eats a fine-dining meal consisting of scarabs, giant snakes (filled with smaller snakes), eyeball soup, and chilled monkey brains.  Even Jones himself becomes a scary antagonist for about a reel, the victim of mind-control.  The tone was abrasive enough that it convinced Kasdan, writer of RAIDERS, to drop the project altogether, stating “it’s so mean [...] there’s nothing pleasant about it”.  

Oh, and TEMPLE OF DOOM isn’t crazy about women, either.  Where RAIDERS provides us a spunky and capable heroine in Marion (even if, to be fair, she’s also constantly getting kidnapped or defeated in a fight), TEMPLE gives us Willie, a privileged and vacuous nightclub singer who never accepts reality for what it is, assumes a desolate and decimated Indian village has a telephone available for her to use and…just…never…stops….screaming.  Basically, ever.  

So.  To back up just a bit, I actually find its dark and bitter worldview to be really fascinating, even if only because it’s a case of a movie fully assuming the mood of its creators.  As it happens, both Lucas and Spielberg were going through major changes in their relationship status.  Although Steven was about to meet his future wife (Kate Capshaw, who plays Willie), George was in the process of divorcing Marcia Lucas, with whom he had adopted a daughter.  The bitterness and pain of this, along with Lucas’ natural desire to make second installments darker (see: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK), informs why TEMPLE OF DOOM is so acidic.  Hell, it may explain why Willie is such a buffoon; there’s a real hatred behind Capshaw’s character in this movie.

This takes me to my major reservation towards TEMPLE OF DOOM: I cannot bear Willie.

It’s not an original observation (people have been nailing the movie for this character for decades), but it’s one I desperately wish I could buck.  I’d love to watch TEMPLE OF DOOM one time and realize “hey, Willie Scott isn’t so bad!”  But it’s been almost forty years and it hasn’t happened yet.

Don’t misunderstand me: I understand the idea of Willie.  She’s obviously an extension of the “don’t do RAIDERS” again ethos, in the sense that she’s the complete opposite of Marion Ravenwood: she’s incapable, she’s loud, and she doesn’t appear to have any chemistry with Indiana Jones, nor does she have any interest in developing any.  In theory, she should be another fun obstacle in a whole movie made up almost entirely of obstacles for Jones to figure out.  I think the structure of Willie Scott as a character is valid, even smart.

But, the truth of the matter is….Kate Capshaw’s performance is grating.  And annoying.  And persistent.  And not fun for even a second.  And I think that’s the issue for me.  If Willie was a fun snobby, clueless rich girl, we might have had something.  But she’s not.  She’s just shrill, actively trying to keep the movie from moving forward at all times.  I don’t even think she pulls off the “sub-par nightclub singer” aspect to Willie all that well in the opening scene.  Yes, kicking the movie off with a vaguely lame musical number, sung in a different language, is a big swing, and part of the point is that Willie isn’t all that good.  But performing badly on purpose is a unique skill set that is arguably even harder that performing well on purpose (the master of this was probably Lucille Ball).  Capshaw doesn’t appear to possess it.  So, instead of thrillingly terrible, she’s just kinda awkwardly average.

So anyway, I just cannot warm up to Capshaw in this.  And that makes her the single most catastrophic change from RAIDERS to TEMPLE OF DOOM.

The good news, though, is that it’s pretty much the only change from RAIDERS that doesn’t work for me.  Even its frenetic pace, which constantly threatens to be way too much, never quite becomes exhaustive.  Seriously, it’s hard to overstate how fast TEMPLE OF DOOM moves once it begins.  In just the opening reel alone, we get a shootout in a nightclub, a car chase, Indiana Jones and co. hopping out of a crashing plane in a slowly inflating liferaft.  Before it ends, we get a mineshaft roller-coaster ride, a full-on brawl inside a temple, collapsing rooms with spikes and bugs, and a precarious chase on a rope bridge.  It just goes and goes and goes, with just a couple of pitstops for some exposition along the way.  

And, you know what?  It’s great.  I know Scorsese made the infamous remark that Marvel movies were more like theme park rides than films to him, which I never took as fully negative (even though I think it was meant to be) or even really untrue.  But, to me, TEMPLE OF DOOM has always truly had the pace and rhythm of an exquisitely-made roller coaster, the true combination of theme park ride and film.

Also, outside of the aforementioned Capshaw, I think the main performances on display here are pretty great.  Ford playing a slightly more cynical and less-beaten-down Indy is a lot of fun, but it’s even more interesting to see glimpses of the man he’ll become down the line in his interactions with Short Round, as well as his indignity at the slavery of children.  Speaking of Short Round, Ke Huy Quan’s child performance is one of the more comfortable and natural ones in the history of the medium, with something like twenty simply perfect line deliveries.  The moment that I rewound over and over as a kid was him, though, doesn’t involve a line at all: it’s him at the maharaja’s palace, screaming and running away from the line of female dancers approaching him. 

I even think Amish Puri is one of the more underrated villains in the entire Indiana Jones filmography.  Yeah, Mola Ram is painted very broadly, but it’s a fun broad (standing in stark contrast to Willie Scott), an unrepentant leader of a human sacrifice cult, and boy does this guy like sacrificing humans.  Puri’s career was otherwise exclusively based out of India, but he made his name off of villain roles.  His particular skill there translates beautifully in TEMPLE OF DOOM.  He’s imposing, scary enough that it freaked me out just a bit as a kid, and you can’t wait for Indiana Jones to get the upper hand by the end.  If you’re not going to do Nazis again, how much more would you want than that?

The last major thing I love about this movie*?  The beautiful sets.  In particular, the titular doom-filled temple looks so tactile and real, even though it’s so clearly a movie set.  Don’t you want to just wander  around and start touching stuff, just to see what would happen?  Don’t you want to go exploring, just to see what you’d find?  This is an element of filmmaking that we’ve just totally lost now that we have blue-screen, green-screen, and The Volume, and it’s a fucking shame (it’s also a big reason why the fourth Indiana Jones movie is such a letdown, but we’ll talk about that in a couple of years).

*Besides Dan Aykroyd’s micro-cameo towards the beginning.

TEMPLE OF DOOM’s reviews were mixed at the time, although its reputation has improved enough over the years that its Rotten Tomatoes score currently sits at 77%.  No less an authority than Roger Ebert gave it a perfect rating, and, for what it’s worth, Pauline Kael preferred TEMPLE OF DOOM to RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.  But many, many others found it unpleasant, and too dark.  A lot of parents agreed, and Spielberg once again found himself at the business end of some complaints, alleging that the movie was too hard-edged for the PG rating it was given.

The thing to remember there is that, in 1984, the MPAA had only four possible ratings: G, PG, R and X.  Yep, there was no intermediary rating between the more family-friendly PG and the decidedly adult R.  We have Steven Spielberg and INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM* to thank for the implementation of the PG-13 rating, which is now maybe the most crucial (and lucrative) rating a movie can get nowadays.  The course of Hollywood history was forever changed by the decision to run the other way (creatively speaking) from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.

*As well as GREMLINS, which also came out in 1984 and received similar criticism about its content.

Spielberg himself has tended to distance himself from THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, stating that the “greatest thing [he] got out of it was that [he] met Kate Capshaw”.  I feel like he may be taking the wrong lesson out of the experience in many ways.  From here, he would enter a period of “responsible film-making”, and one has to wonder if back-to-back films that came with complaints as to its contents started getting to him.  It shouldn’t have.  Messing with ET twenty years later ended up being a big mistake, and I feel like downplaying the power and fun of TEMPLE OF DOOM is an equal error.  No, it’s no RAIDERS, and, yes, you desperately miss Karen Allen.  But it’s also one of the better pure adrenaline action films of the 80’s, with superior filmmaking on display to offset some of its more unpleasant aspects.

And even those unpleasant aspects represent the kind of risk-taking that more big budget sequels should have the guts to perform.  Even when it’s not fully working, the movie is never uninteresting, and that’s probably enough to put it in the top 10% of all sequels ever made.

Ultimately, you’d have to have your heart ripped out of your chest to not at least respect INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM.