The film I chose for this week’s essay is “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”. The film begins in China where Indiana Jones barely escapes from a Chinese crime boss. In this opening scene, Indy and Short Round end up jumping on a plane to escape with Willie Scott, the nightclub singer. Indy, Short, and Willie decide to go on an excursion to help retrieve a village’s sacred stone and find out why this palace which has been dormant for years is now at the height of its reign. The film follows the natural conventional polt, where Indy fights of an evil cult and retrieves the stone before the antagonists can take over the world. 

The plot for Temple of Doom was very similar to Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indy is recruited on a difficult excursion to recover a historical artifact. The plot and character development are very conventional, especially when compared to Speilberg’s first film. There is a protagonist, instead of Nazi’s its a religious cult who is trying to conquer the world. Indy has a sidekick and beautiful heroine who is less helpful than the gal from Raiders. ( Either way, the second film has a feeling of striking while the iron is hot with the audience, and generate a box office success without much plot, thought, or innovation in the storyline.“Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (Vincent Canby, New York Times) Critics state the film was a prequel to the Raiders, and it was the beginning of Indy’s character development. 

One of the biggest differences between Raiders and Temple of Doom is the role of the heroine throughout the film. Marion Ravenwood was the daughter of Indy’s mentor and a great friend. The audience meets Marion running her bar beating a 250 lb man in a drinking contest, she plays key roles in the recovery of the Ark and many of “missions”. She is positioned as a true heroine in the film. Willie Scott seems to be framed as the damsel in distress needed Indy to come to her rescue and save the day. (Christian Science Monitor, Sterritt) It’s an interesting contrast from the first film but also a huge difference from how the heroine is positioned to the audience in today’s films. Lara Croft in Tomb Raider, Wonderwoman, and Captin Marvel. Hollywood seemed to take a huge turn in recent years when it came to how they presented female characters to the audience.

Another interesting perspective that seems to be very unpopular among the critics who reviewed the Temple of Doom is how caucasian culture is portrayed versus Indian and even Chinese culture. The first scene of the film has Indy in Shanghai negotiating with a Chinese crime boss. The director sheds the characters in a light where the Chinese actors are shifty and untrustworthy because they are trying to scam and kill Indy.

Fast forward to the banquet scene where the Prime Minister, Indiana Jones, and the British Officer are sitting at the table having a discussion about the recent return of the palace. The Prime Minister says “The British always like to keep an eye on its empire.” Another example of how the movie is portraying the non-white characters as either shifty, untrustworthy or complete barbarians. Take for example the multiple scenes of human sacrifice and how closely tied the fictitious religion is to Hinduism. The message is unsettled and highly focused on core white Christian values.(Christian Science Monitor, Sterritt) How great and heroic the white male is and how barbaric any other character from a different culture is.

The last theme which seemed to pop up in many critical reviews is darkness. In the Temple of Doom the dark them took an entirely new perspective. It does not take a hardcore fan to realize that something is drastically different in film 2 then 1 and 3. The most interesting part is it was not the intention of the Speilberg and Lucas the make the film this way but rather the circumstance they found themselves in. Yes, there may have been an intention to make things a bit darker, you can see evidence of that in the 2nd Star Wars film. But for Temple of Doom, George Lucas was going through personal hardship, a divorce. Spielberg: “George said that it was going to be a very dark film. The way Empire Strikes Back was the dark second act of the Star Wars trilogy. So Gorge came up with this idea…about the Kali cult, with black magic and things that I personally find very spooky.” Lucas: “The story ended up being a lot darker than we intended it to be. Part of it is that I was going through a divorce at the time and I wasn’t in a good mood; and part of it was that we wanted to do something a little bit more edgy.”Spielberg: “I was not going through a divorce; I had just come off a huge success with E.T. and I was in a good mood.”(Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: An Oral History, Medium.com, Bullock) Interestingly enough, Speilberg was intent on having the film be a little dark but Lucas pushed things a little over the edge due to his poor mood from the divorce. Naturally, things went a little towards the extreme with the banquet and human sacrifice scenes.

All in all, the prequel turned out to be a controversial but successful film for Lucas and Speilberg.