Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Posted by J on August 23, 2008
Should we ever be banished to a desert island and be offered the choice of an Indiana Jones movie to take, 
we might take this one. Granted, it’s a great conundrum. We could anguish over this choice for ages. Much like we’d anguish over which toilet bowl cleaner to bring along.
When stories are based on forgotten pulp fiction, they’re likely to become pulp fiction. This Indiana Jones has dance numbers, poison, tommy guns, plane crashes, falls off a cliff, whips, bugs, snakes, hidden passages, booby traps, evil cults, assassins, scimitars, blood-drinking rituals, mine cart chases, unstable bridges over deep chasms, alligators, and cackling villains. This is a high-class B-movie — somewhere just below the cookie-cutter dime Westerns from the 1800s we’ve read. But since pop culture is so elevated right now, it and the rest of this Jones series are “movie classics” from the 1980s.
Temple of Doom is credited with catalyzing the institution of the PG-13 rating. Why? A man’s heart gets ripped out of his chest. People remember that. They forget that the first half of the movie is deliberately, frenetically comical. Then it shifts drastically. Jones and his cohorts find the Thuggee cult, and here the movie goes on and on for twenty minutes on the ritual practices of this cult. You won’t find what they do in many anthropology books, nor will you find a potion of blood that temporarily hypnotizes its victims, the hypnotic trance being broken only by jabbing the victim with a torch. The Thuggees even use a voodoo doll, which they apparently picked up on a leisure trip to the Caribbean. As we said, B-movie.
Even what little content this movie has is idiotic. Jones does free the slaves and conquer evil in the end, but it is only to return the sacred stone back to an Indian village that worships the goddess Shiva. The people get to keep their idols, at least the good ones. From slavery to slavery. Meanwhile, the reowned American professor of archaeology gets to bare his chiseled chest and wins the buxom blonde. These are the kinds of fantasies everyone appreciates in a post-Christian age.
Entertainment: 7
Intelligence: 0
Morality: 0
