INDIANA JONES & THE TEMPLE OF DOOM – steven spielberg – 1.9 / 10

Leaving aside Kate Capshaw’s howlingly anti-feminist portrayal of Willie Scott (as getting into that would enrage me much more than I feel like being enraged right now), the film has myriad problems from start to finish. First of all, what happens to Lao Che, the person who tried to kill Indiana in Shanghai at the start of the film? We never here from him again. Doesn’t he still want Jones dead? There’s no resolution there.

Then Jones, Willie and Short Round (another ridiculously offensive element of the film I’m not going to get into at the moment) end up in India. And when they meet a tribe of villagers, Jones asks for a guide to Delhi. But since he was asleep on the plane that took them into India, how does he know how close they are to Delhi? Maybe Delhi’s a thousand miles away. And why does the chief of the village speak English? Where did he learn it? (That last question is particularly interesting as the behind the scenes featurettes reveal that the actor that portrayed the village chef didn’t really speak English and was feed his lines off camera by Spielberg.)

Then there’s the nonsense with the blood that turns Indy into a crazed Thuggee warrior and the voodoo doll the Maharajah uses to inflict pain on Indiana. Leaving aside the fact that Hinduism (the Maharajah’s supposed religion) has nothing to do with voodoo, what point does all this mystical nonsense serve? The whole thing’s just really racist and completely tone deaf.

And why is this a (unacknowledged) prequel? The events in this film take place a year earlier than those of Raiders of the Lost Ark but for really no purpose. The Last Crusade takes place in 1938 because it has a major piece of the story set in the Republic of Hatay which only existed from 1937 to 1938. But the events of this film could have taken place any time during the 1930s. It’s just a weird, unexplained thing that this film comes before the first one.