Spielberg: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom part 1
Like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom has four acts, each lasting about 30 minutes. Each of the acts has three distinct chapters, giving us a twelve-chapter serial drama.
What’s different, structurally, is that Raiders has a restless spirit, jetting (well, prop-planing) about all over the globe, from Peru to the US to Nepal to Cairo to Secret Sub Base Island. Temple gets all the travel out of the way in the first 25 minutes and spends the rest of its time in more or less one place, and an hour of that in one location, underground in a cave. The result is a much differently-shaped narrative than Raiders, one that’s spirited and frantic for the first act, then claustrophobic and inward for the rest of the movie, and dark, dark, dark. It gives us twenty minutes of breathless forward movement, seventy minutes of horror and torture, then thirty minutes of blasting escape.
The movie is often criticized for its unpleasantness and weirdness, as well as its generally heavy attitude, but I find it as compulsively watchable as any of the best of Spielberg and a much meatier experience than either Raiders or Crusade.