INDIANA JONES & THE TEMPLE OF DOOM [1984] review
June 4, 2008 · Print This Article
Having established a format in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK that we’d later see again in INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE, one realizes just how large a departure from the Indy formula INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM is. This is not to say that the movie isn’t good and a successful action film, but I can just imagine who jarring it must have been to fans who saw it in 1984. I have no memory of seeing it in a theater then, so I can’t say. While in the first and third Indy films, Indy is sought out specifically by other parties to retrieve an object, which forms the structure of the film, this time Indy literally stumbles into his retrieval assignment.
While I commented in my RAIDERS review that nothing really implausible happened in that movie, right away in TEMPLE OF DOOM does the implausible happen. Landing a life boat on a snowy mountain top after falling countless feet from a crashing airplane? Not believable. Fun to watch, but the touch or reality of RAIDERS was lost.
Yet the movie is very memorable. I have no idea when I saw it last, maybe over 10 or more years ago, but I totally remembered the very memorable dinner scene where an assortment of bugs and eyeballs are brought out for sampling.
TEMPLE OF DOOM is almost literally non-stop, and in that way it’s a totally satisfying action movie. The rope bridge climax is particularly visceral and tense.
And as always, John Williams iconic score punctuates it all helping to continue and maintain the essence of Indy, though the script structure deviates from the norm.
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[...] and adventure skills to their utmost, a return to form of sorts from the somewhat diversion TEMPLE OF DOOM [...]