By the time it gets to its triumphant ending, with Indy surrounded by the hundreds of children he’s rescued for the grateful villagers, its white saviour complex knows no bounds.Īnd so, one must discuss the menu at Pankot Palace. Released in 1984, a few months before Band Aid’s ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ – which ludicrously claimed that nothing ever grows in Africa, where “no rain nor rivers flow” – Temple Of Doom’s portrayal of an India populated by desperate, starving villagers is of a similar ilk. You can picture Spielberg and Lucas on set, grinning at all the madness. You can’t fake – or engineer – chemistry like that. Watch Temple Of Doom again, and his recent red-carpet reunions with Ford seem all the more poignant. We lost decades of that guy, prior to his Everything Everywhere All At Once comeback. It’s a crying shame that Ke left the profession behind soon after, due to the dearth of decent roles for Asian actors. Temple Of Doom, as it would be renamed, just wants to give you a good time at the old picture house, and its exuberance is summed up by one small human: the 12-year-old Ke Huy Quan, whose Short Round is absolute joy on legs, lightning in a bottle, an immediate pick-me-up, just about as much fun as a person can be. The dinghy incident is about as incredulous as it gets, letting you know – if it wasn’t clear enough already – that this film is not in the business of subtlety. Raiders restrained itself there’d be no such restraint here. There was certainly nothing that outlandish in Raiders, in part because the sequence was written for Raiders but abandoned. Having kicked off with a Busby Berkeley-inspired bit of song and dance just because, the film sticks Indy, Short Round and Willie in a plane with no fuel, no pilots, and no parachutes, and so they jump out, clinging to a dinghy which plummets down onto a mountain, off a cliff and into the rocky rapids. Spielberg was in tune with Lucas’ edgier ambitions, but wanted to balance it out with comedy, hence an opening hour which goes from the ridiculous to the sublimely ridiculous. They emerged with a jolly working title: ‘Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Death’. Having come up with the bones of the story – black magic, voodoo, child slavery, hearts being ripped out of chests – he hunkered down with Spielberg and writers Williard Huyck and Gloria Katz to see it through. Lucas cooked this up in 1982 whilst in the midst of a divorce and, as he has said, “wasn’t in a good mood.” Darkness beckoned. And for all its faults – which, for all the film’s greatness, are admittedly plentiful – it is, pound for pound, the most consistently entertaining of the series, existing purely to thrill you, frighten you, delight you, no more, no less. Each Indy outing is tonally different from the last this one actually becomes a whole other film halfway through, switching unapologetically from knockabout farce to traumatic nightmare. Temple Of Doom is pulpier, funnier, sillier, scarier than Raiders. With Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas had made a genuinely classic film, got heaps of acclaim, and now here they were with a follow-up for which they, well, went mad. It’s outrageous really, an insane thing to do, and to see. As far as I’m aware, we hadn’t seen such a thing on screen before. Eight minutes into Temple Of Doom, Indiana Jones kills someone by hurling a flaming kebab into his chest.
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