Our ongoing series looking at movies that took the blockbuster genre to the extreme and perhaps to excess. Note that these reviews may contain spoilers.
By John J. Joex
Rating: 2 ½ out of 5 Stars
As the 1980’s began, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had achieved messianic status among Science Fiction and Fantasy fans for their big screen accomplishments which had completely changed the direction of film-making and made genre movies a hot property at the Box Office. Lucas had delivered the first two Star Wars movies by this time as well as his early dystopic film THX 1138. Spielberg had given us Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Then in 1981, these two deities teamed up and struck gold once again with Raiders of the Lost Ark. This film, which introduced the world to the intrepid archeologist Indiana Jones, followed a similar path to Star Wars as it drew heavily on the early movie serials for its inspiration but injected big budget flair to create an onscreen magic that audiences could only dream about prior to the beginning of the Blockbuster Era. It seemed by this point that Lucas and Spielberg could do no wrong and anything they touched turned to gold. But their movie-magic would start to fade as the me-decade progressed. Both still enjoyed Box Office success, but diminishing returns started to set in with the overly smarmy E.T. in 1982 for Spielberg and misstep of Return of the Jedi for Lucas in 1983 (and you can read more about that one at this link). Then with 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the superstar team-up hit its first major pothole.
If you doubt the creative misstep of this film, then let me indulge you for just a bit. If you have seen the first two Indiana Jones films, then think back to both Raiders of the Lost Ark and Temple of Doom and summarize the plot of each in your head. I’m guessing you can pretty quickly dash off a description of Raiders as involving Indian Jones’ attempt to recover the Ark of the Covenant, which holds the the remains of the Ten Commandments, and to keep it from the hands of the Nazis who want to tap into its supernatural powers. I’m also guessing that you can elaborate much further on that movie including Jones’ reunion with former lover Marion (played with spunk by Karen Allen) and his partnership with Sallah (a career performance from John Rhys-Davies) up to the final scene where the Ark gets locked away into a secret government warehouse. Now tell me a little bit about the Temple of Doom: it had Indiana Jones, and some blond girl, and some annoying Chinese kid, and someone got there heart ripped out in this ancient temple, and some other stuff happened. Am I about right here?
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom gives us a prequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark but it delivered very little of the inspiration or verve of the film it followed. It serves up a convoluted story that finds Jones along with his child side-kick Short Round (Jonathan Ke Quan) and unwitting tag-a-long Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) deposited in the Himalayas where they become involved with helping the oppressed people of a small village escape from the yoke of the evil people living in a nearby palace. The story, cobbled together by George Lucas, is completely of secondary concern, though, as director Spielberg focuses primarily on putting our heroes into endless perilous situations in a relentlessly paced movie that hopes to assault your senses to the point that you ignore the lack of story or character development. Whereas Raiders gave us at least a threadbare, though definitely unique and interesting, plot to string together its actions sequences, Temple cares little about originality or the story structure holding the film together. And while the first film lived and died by the performance of Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, it also populated the cast with characters and actors who hold their own next to his star power. Karen Allen provided a strong female lead that complemented the film’s hero whereas Kate Capshaw (who had much better days ahead of her) gave us little more than a blond bimbo and some eye candy. And where John Rhys-Davies nearly stole some scenes away from Ford, the young Jonathan Ke Quan gave us little more than the grating child side kick stereotype.
But ultimately what sunk this film was the sequel curse that would become quite prominent during the Blockbuster Era. This has found follow up movies focusing on the spectacle aspects of their predecessors and then amping that up to the nth degree. Ignoring the story elements and/or characterization that helped the original movie succeed, these sequels give us a non-stop visual assault hoping to hide the vapidity of the production behind the flash of its spectacle. Temple of Doom was not the first sequel to go that route during the Blockbuster Era (I would say that Jaws 2 holds that honor), but it did manage to derail a very promising film franchise that would never fully recover (Jaws was a very poor choice for an ongoing franchise). The third movie, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, was a little better but still fell well short of the original. And the less said about the fourth, the better.
Temple of Doom is not a complete disaster and it also did not represent the same cynical, market-driven turn that we saw with Return of the Jedi. But it is definitely highly representative of the type of film we would see all too often in the Blockbuster Era that would wow you as you watched it on the big screen to point of numbing your senses, but would have faded from your memory by the time you got home from the theater.
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