‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’ Did Not Age Well By Today’s Standards
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which stars iconic actor Harrison Ford, marked a milestone in the Indiana Jones series. It was one of the movies of 1984 that prompted the creation of the PG-13 rating and it made a lot of money at the box office. Still, the movie doesn’t look so good 38 years later and some people, including director Steven Spielberg, think Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom has a lot to answer for.
What’s the problem with ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’?
Screen Rant came up with a list of how the Indiana Jones series as a whole looks problematic today, singling out Temple of Doom for its racial depictions.
The author writes, “This is most clearly seen in Temple of Doom, where Indiana Jones interacts with a fairly clear cut stereotype of an evil Indian person, leaning heavily into stereotypes of the Thuggee Cult.”
A similar article by Vice lists similar complaints, again pointing to Temple of Doom for particularly egregious depictions.
That article says that “nearly every Indian character in the movie is a caricature, from the sadistic ‘Thuggee’ slavers, to the magical shamans, to the gluttonous merchants and dignitaries feasting on eyeball soup and monkey brains at dinner. (The only Indian characters who finally come to Jones’ aid are soldiers of the British Indian Army.)”
Some of the sharpest criticism of the movie came from Spielberg himself.
In an oral history on Medium, he said, “I wasn’t happy with Temple of Doom at all. It was too dark, too subterranean, and much too horrific. I thought it out-poltered Poltergeist. There’s not an ounce of my personal feeling in Temple of Doom.“
Where does ‘Temple of Doom’ fit in the series?
The Indiana Jones series was born out of Spielberg’s desire to make a James Bond movie. However, his friend, fellow filmmaker and classic movie buff George Lucas, said he had a better idea: an adventure yarn about an archeologist who gets into trouble around the world. The first movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, was a phenomenon, making $225 million after its release in 1981, according to The Numbers.
Then came Temple of Doom in 1984, a prequel that found Indy in India entangled in a Thuggee cult seeking valuable stones and stealing children from a village. It did a little less well than Raiders of the Lost Ark, pulling in $179 million that summer.
The film inspired a lot of less-than-flattering headlines, with many parents complaining about graphic sequences like the one where a cult leader pulls a beating heart from a man’s chest. That, among other things, led to the creation of the PG-13 rating, which dominates the tentpole movie landscape today.
The 1989 sequel Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade didn’t get that kind of negative attention when that adventure paired Harrison Ford with the recently departed Sean Connery playing Indy’s father. That represented a rebound at the box office, with the movie making $197 million.
Another Indiana Jones film was not released in theaters until 19 years later when Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull premiered in 2008. It made $317 million, although fans largely consider it a disappointment.
Indiana Jones will return
Despite the fact that Crystal Skull got a chilly reception, with fans deriding the infamous “Nuke the fridge” scene or the CGI aliens that felt out of place in the Indiana Jones franchise, the character will get one more go-round on the big screen, although Spielberg will be absent from the director’s chair this time.
The fifth movie will be helmed by James Mangold, who was praised for bringing the story of Wolverine to a strong close with the movie Logan in 2017. Not only was the movie a hit, but it got an Oscar nomination for its screenplay, something no superhero movie had achieved.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is due out in July 2023 and Ford will return to play the leading character.
