Spielberg: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom part 2

Chapter 1 (1:00:00-1:10:00) This gripping little reel involves Indy and his family stumbling upon an obscene, terrifying blood-cult ceremony. I myself have never stumbled across an obscene, terrifying blood-cult ceremony so I don’t honestly know if the one depicted here is accurate or not, but I’m going to go ahead and say that for members of blood cults I’m guessing that this sequence is probably pretty cheesy. I mean, lava? Who has lava at their blood-cult ceremony? That’s just stupid.

For the rest of us though, it’s pretty freakin’ dark. The design of the temple, the human skins fluttering in the breeze, the high priest wearing an animal skull on his head, the swaying, groveling celebrants, the sacrificial victim getting his heart ripped out and surviving, it’s all perfectly stupid and utterly intoxicating. Spielberg is a master at taking an assignment and running with it — “Oh, it’s a weird, scary blood-cult ceremony? Well then, let’s make it the weirdest, scariest ever.”

One flaw: we meet our head villain, cult priest Mola Ram, an hour into the movie, and they don’t even tell us he’s the head villain, we just kind of have to figure it out after a while. Plus he’s wearing a weird costume and is hellishly lit — it’s a great entrance, but would have been more effective an hour earlier — you know, like at the point where the head villain of Raiders showed up. Is there some reason Mola Ram couldn’t be one of the guests at the Maharajah’s dinner table? Or for that matter, why couldn’t he be the Prime Minister? The PM is, we eventually learn, one of the cultists, why not make him the head priest?

(I do have one problem with the cult ceremony. The victim has his still-beating heart removed from his body, which is really cool. But then, when Willie is the victim, Mola Ram doesn’t bother ripping out her heart, which is good for Willie, but pulls the villain’s punch. Better, I think, to forgo the cool effect of the first victim’s heart being ripped out than to make it look like the villain is “just kidding” later on in the act. But then, I get the feeling that the architecture of the sacrifice ritual is based on Mola Ram holding the still-beating heart as it bursts into flames. I get the feeling this image came into Spielberg’s head before anything else and he structured the whole ceremony around it.)

Funny thing is, as implausible as the plot of Temple is, Mola Ram is a great villain and his plan, in its weird, twisted way, makes sense. He’s got a solid motive, a decent plan and a logical endgame. This puts him ahead of 80% of Bond villains and even ahead of Belloq, who had huge balls on him to think he could wrest control of the Ark of the Covenant while in the employ of Adolf Hitler, but had no plan for what he was going to do once the Ark was opened.

(That is, Belloq thinks the Ark is a transmitter to God, and that by opening the Ark before handing it over to Hitler will give him the power that Hitler craves. But he doesn’t know what “transmitter to God” actually means, a bit of shortsightedness that turns out to be disastrous. “Hmm, my head is exploding — maybe I should put the lid back on this thing and think this plan through a little more.”)

After the ceremony, the temple immediately empties and Indy goes after the Sankara Stones. Two things: hey, wait, wasn’t this temple just filled with hundreds of zombie celebrants? How did they get out so fast? And doesn’t anybody stay to, you know, clean up? Not a single altar-boy or acolyte to be seen. And, I notice that Indy treats the Temple of Doom with ten times the respect he shows to either the Well of Souls or the Peruvian temple in Raiders — he tiptoes carefully through the rafters, cautious not to upset anything. Well, come to think of it, this isn’t an ancient temple, it’s practically brand new — what’s the point of wrecking it?

In any case, Indy nabs the stones, but as he is heading out of the temple, he discovers the mine, being operated by the kidnapped village children and the movie, in case it wasn’t dark enough yet, takes an even darker turn.

Chapter 2 (1:10:00-1:17:00) Indy might be a fortune hunter, but he can’t just turn his back on a mine full of enslaved children, but before he can do much for them he and his family are nabbed by the bad guys. Indy is tied up, Short Round is whipped, Willie is spirited away somewhere (odd that Spielberg lingers on showing us children being whipped, but shies from showing what might have happened to Willie). Indy is poisoned for the second time in the movie, forced to drink the blood of the whatever. And for some reason the boy Maharajah is on hand with a voodoo doll. What? A voodoo doll? Either Spielberg is just throwing in any creepy thing he can think of at this point, or else the young Maharajah was educated in, um, Haiti? I can imagine a Kali-worshiper watching this scene and finally throwing up his hands and saying “Okay, forget it, I was with this movie up to this point, but voodoo? That’s just insulting.”

In any case, the scene is almost unwatchably brutal and intense, which is great because it is, wouldn’t you know it, another expository scene, where the head villain explains his plot to the protagonist, and we don’t even notice because it’s just so unspeakably ghastly. And yet the movie still hasn’t gotten as dark as it’s going to. Because the next thing you know, there is, yes, another blood-cult ceremony, this time with Willie as the sacrifice and Indy as the priest.

Chapter 3 (1:17:00-1:27:30) Hey, wait a minute! These Kali-worshipers just had a ceremony, like, ten minutes ago! And now they’re having another one! How many of these ceremonies do they have in a day? How are the worshipers supposed to get anything done? What is the rest of their day like? I have this image in my head of a bunch of Kali worshipers getting back to their office jobs after changing out of their Kali-worshiping duds, and they’re filing papers and entering data and playing Minesweeper, and then suddenly one of their co-workers comes along and says “Hey guys! They’re doing a second sacrifice today! Everybody back to the Temple!” and everybody kind of looking at each other like “Hey, you know, Kali is great and all, but I have a life, dude.“

Speaking of which, if Mola Ram has a congregation of zombies that are able to drop whatever they’re doing at a moment’s notice to come attend a sacrifice, why doesn’t he use them to help dig for diamonds? Surely they’d be more efficient than child slaves.

Anyway, so Indy is now bad and Willie is now his sacrificial victim. And I suppose there may be a metaphor at work here — if Willie represents the cynical, greedy side of Indy, and Indy himself has now been boiled down to a “true believer,” then there could be a comment in here about the bad side of pure faith.

But something tells me that it’s really just “plot.” I suspect this because, fact is, the rest of the movie from here on out is pretty much just plot. This is a good thing. Movies need plot, and few directors understand plot better than Spielberg, and, as any screenwriter will tell you, plot is hard. In fact, I’m going to go ahead and say that Temple of Doom is probably the most tightly plotted movie in Spielberg’s filmography, which is the reason I find it so compulsively watchable.

Oh, and the action/suspense elements of all this are just masterfully presented. The roasting cage bobbing up and down with Willie inside, Indy backhanding Short Round, the fight on the altar, it’s all just incredible.

Anyway, Short Round cures Indy (that is, the son cures the father, a plot turn I attribute to George Lucas, since he made six movies revolving around the idea), driving us into —

ACT IV (1:27:30-1:54) Here we have another textbook ur-Dreamworks “race to the finish line” final act, a breathless sequence of stupefying, expertly-mounted set pieces, each topping the last.

Chapter 1 (1:27:30-1:35) We begin with the massive slugfest in the mine, as Indy and his family free the enslaved children and beat the crap out of their captors. The chapter climaxes with Indy’s fight with the Enormous Thuggee atop the Rock-Smashing Machine.

Chapter 2 (1:35-1:43) We go straight from the stupefying slugfest into the stupefying mine-car chase, a sequence so mind-bogglingly complex I cannot even begin to imagine how it was planned, much less shot. The chapter ends with a literal cliffhanger, as Indy and his family are left, yes, hanging from a literal cliff as torrents of water blast out of the mine entrance.

(Of course if I slow down long enough to ponder the design of this ridiculous mine, which apparently is inside an active volcano, the whole thing seems kind of silly.)

Chapter 3 (1:43-1:54) The cliffside scene bleeds into the bridge scene, and at this point I’d like to pause to break the fourth wall and tell a personal anecdote:

When I was at Dreamworks working on Antz, I had an idea for a scene that took place on a high, narrow bridge. As it happened, Spielberg was in the room during the pitch meeting and so I pitched the scene and added “you know, like the end of Temple of Doom,” at which point Spielberg closed his eyes like he had a headache and said, with no small amount of anguish, “I hated that scene.” And I could barely think of what I was supposed to say next about my own project, because all I wanted to say was “What? You hated that scene? But, but — you’re Steven Spielberg! And when you shot Temple of Doom you were at the peak of your powers! What power could have compelled you to shoot a scene you hated that much?” This moment bothered me for years, rolling around in my head — how, why, would Spielberg shoot a scene he hated? I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the “making of” DVD and the mystery was solved: Spielberg explains that while shooting Temple of Doom he found out, too late, that he has a fear of heights. This fear kept him from shooting the bridge scene the way he had planned (he literally could not make it more than a third of the way out onto the bridge without breaking out in a cold sweat) and he spent the entire shooting of the sequence in a state of physical discomfort. Needless to say, the bridge scene did not make into the script for Antz.

End of personal anecdote.

Anyway, I think the bridge sequence comes off well enough — the shot of Indy realizing the extremity of his dilemma is probably my favorite of the character, and the action of the climb back up to the cliffside is, again, expertly handled. Although of course I would love to know what Spielberg had intended for the scene to begin with. I imagine the cuts to the alligators below could have been more gracefully integrated — I never believe that anyone is ever actually eaten by an alligator, although it would serve the people right for all the disgusting things that get eaten in this movie — but otherwise I think it all works fine.

Once Indy gets Mola Ram in his sights, he snarls “Prepare to meet Kali — in Hell!” And I just can’t help but think “Jeez, what a lame threat.” Honestly, howis Mola Ram supposed to be scared by a guy who doesn’t even have a token understanding of his faith? Threatening Mola Ram with “prepare to meet Kali — in Hell!” is like threatening a rabbi with “Prepare to meet Jehovah — in Hades!” or threatening a Muslim with “Prepare to meet Mohammad — in Nirvana!” or threatening the Green Goblin with “Prepare to meet  Spiderman — in Gotham City!”  I want Mola Ram to look scared for a second and then pause and say “What? What the hell are you talking about? Why would Kali be in Hell? Who are you?” And then Indy would have to do some hasty backpedaling: “Well, you know what I mean, I mean, you know, whatever bad-place afterworld you guys have — I’m sorry, I haven’t studied Kali blood cults that much.” And then Mola Ram could say “Why not just say ‘Prepare to meet Kali?’ You had me up to that point, my heart was really racing, but then you had to add “in Hell” and all I could think was “Christ, what a douche.”

Indy’s complete ignorance of Mola Ram’s faith is confusing since, mere seconds later, he knows just the magic words that will make the magic rocks ignite into flames. “You betrayed Shiva!” he growls, then helpfully translates the phrase into, I’m guessing, Hindi. Because, apparently, Shiva, up to this point, was unaware that Mola Ram had acquired the Sankara Stones and was using them to amass a power base for himself on Earth. No, it took Indiana Jones pointing that out before Shiva, wherever Shiva hangs out, to look up and say “What’s that? Mola Ram betrayed me? Well, I’ll settle his hash, you just watch! Gimme my rocks back!”

(As with the Ark in Raiders, Indy, the non-believer, is spared the wrath of the god-of-the-moment and allowed to make off with the magic artifact. There is a message in there somewhere.)

The young Maharajah, now transformed into a good colonialist, leads Capt Blumburtt and his troops to the bridge to help save the day. And I can’t help but wonder if that’s necessarily a good thing. There is a troubling thread of colonialism running through all the Indiana Jones movies (and all of George Lucas’s movies too for that matter) but Spielberg breezes past the moment without comment, even though its perfectly obvious that, if not for people like Capt Blumburtt, there wouldn’t be people like Mola Ram in the first place.

(As Walter Sobchak might say, “Say what you want about the tenets of the Kali Ma, at least it’s an ethos.”)