INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM: Two Hours of Kate Capshaw Shrieking Like a Harpy

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) – Directed by Steven Spielberg – Starring Harrison Ford, Kate Capshaw, Jonathan Ke Quan, Amrish Puri, Roshan Seth, Philip Stone, and Dan Ackroyd.

What do you do with a movie like TEMPLE OF DOOM?

On the one hand, it’s not a very good movie; it’s dark and depressing, full of unmemorable characters that feel like they’re pulled from old adventure stories that would be better off being remembered for their style and passion instead of their use of racial stereotypes.

On the other hand, it’s an Indiana Jones movie, and we’ve only got four of them.

While TEMPLE OF DOOM isn’t a very good movie, it’s not a numbingly bad movie, either. There’s certainly a lot of stuff going on, and only the overly long and drawn out set piece in the middle of the film depicting human sacrifice really constitutes as boring. Like its predecessor RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, TEMPLE is still a roller coaster, it’s just a roller coaster in an amusement park I don’t want to visit.

There are so many little things wrong with TEMPLE that it’s like somehow everyone involved had a brain cramp during the entire production that led to incredibly questionable decisions. At the core of the movie is still Harrison Ford playing Indy, but it’s not a particularly involved or passionate Indiana Jones this time around. Still, Ford is a pro and Indy is a great character and he finds ways to make his part mostly enjoyable. If only the same could be said for the rest of the film.

Most of the problems of the film seem to stem from, or revolve around the Shrieking Harpy. Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) is a singer at a Shanghai nightclub that gets dragged into Indy’s adventure after she inserts herself into the wrong place at the wrong time. She then spends the rest of the movie either b*tching and moaning or shrieking in fear. There’s no narrative arc to her character, at all, which is what ultimately damns her in my eyes. Willie is at her worst during her first night at camp in the jungle. As Indy and Short Round play poker by the campfire, Willie is “AAAAIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!”ing all over camp as she runs into various animals. She’s a horrendous character and Spielberg and Lucas treat her incredibly poorly. Willie is just this money-grubbing, shallow, shrieking, awful woman.

Where’s Karen Allen? Where’s Marion Ravenswood’s moxie? Her resourcefulness? Who thought replacing a tough, capable, but vulnerable woman with a scream queen was a good idea?

And worse, what’s happened to Indy? With Marion, his wrongs were things of the past that he spent the film trying to atone for, either overtly or as a by-product of who he was as a man at that stage in his life, but with Willie’s, Indy’s dickishness is happening NOW, right in front of us. He’s gone from being this awkwardly romantic figure to a guy just trying to get laid by a hot woman in an Indian palace. He doesn’t remotely like Willie, and yet she’s hot so he’s going to take a run at spending the night in her bed as opposed to his own. Worse, given the way Short Round acts about Indy’s real reasons for wanting to see Willie that night, the inference is that he’s done this sort of thing plenty of times before.

There’s a bit of a James Bond vibe running through TEMPLE that doesn’t work and is curious for its inclusion. Spielberg has always said he wanted to direct a James Bond movie, and that RAIDERS was his chance to do that kind of grand, globetrotting adventure. TEMPLE has two scenes with a Bond feel to it and neither of them work. The second is the seduction scene above, while the first is the opening scene of the movie. Where RAIDERS gave us the phenomenal temple/rolling ball sequence with Indy in his signature geat, TEMPLE sees Indy dressed in a white-jacket tux at a Shanghai nightclub dealing with Chinese gangsters. Indy gets poisoned and the antidote is in a vial that keeps being knocked around the floor. It’s lame.

Another problem with TEMPLE is that there’s no joy. RAIDERS had a passionate Indiana Jones trying to find a treasure before his main, Nazi-hired rival found it. In TEMPLE, Indy is guilted into trying to recover a stone precious to a small village that’s missing its children.

Missing kids, slave labor, human sacrifice … not exactly a whirlwind of super-fun good times. The stock bit of conventional wisdom that’s sprung up around TEMPLE OF DOOM is that it’s too dark, but I think the problem isn’t that the film is too dark, but rather that the filmmakers didn’t have enough faith in the dark story to see it all the way through. If you want to do a grim movie, do it, but don’t do a grim movie and then try to pretend it’s not by having a the shrieking buffoon-slash-love interest and some unbelievably ridiculous stunt sequences.

There’s two stunt sequences here that stretch my willingness to believe. The first is when Indy, Short Round, and Willie jump out of a plane IN A RAFT. God. Stop. Then the raft goes over a waterfall and lands fine AGAIN. If the whole film operated on this idiotic level, fine, but it doesn’t. Spielberg uses this scene to counter all of the dark stuff by giving us a bit of the ridiculous. The second sequence is the mine cart chase. There’s a couple of unbelievable bits (the cart jumping over a big break in the tracks and landing perfectly so they can keep going) but at least it’s a really fun, engaging scene.

Unfortunately, there’s no signature villain here, as TEMPLE trades in the slick charm of Belloq for mad priests in ceremonial paint and headdress. Spielberg doesn’t bother to create any of the villains as individuals – they just fit stereotypical roles of dangerous savages trying to kill the hero.

Way too much of the movie takes place inside, too. It seems like we’re always in a nightclub or plane or palace or tunnel or cave or mine … everything feels cramped and poorly lit. The humor almost always fails, too. Were people still laughing in 1984 at foreign cultures eating weird food?

If there’s one shining star in TEMPLE OF DOOM, it’s Short Round (Jonathan Ke Quan, who’s screen-credited as Ke Huy Quan). Far from the annoying kid sidekick he could very well have been, Short Round is smart, resourceful, and most importantly, morally on point. He’s turned Indy into his surrogate dad (Indy rescued him from the streets), and there’s plenty of bits where he’s just trying to mimic Indy, but mostly he’s protecting Indy or kidding with Indy or arguing with Indy about cheating at cards. Quan does a fantastic job making Short Round work, and it’s a shame that Spielberg thought it was a good idea to have Willie around to take screen time away from him.

TEMPLE OF DOOM is one of those films that’s probably better than its reputation, but only because that reputation is so low; Spielberg and Lucas have followed up the brilliant, seminal RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK with a giant misstep. If TEMPLE had focused on the Indy/Short Round relationship – perhaps playing off Indy’s rough relationship with his own dad – and made Willie’s arc about integrating into that relationship, it would have gone a long to balancing all of the dreariness.

THE INDIANA JONES REVIEW COLLECTION:

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK: Asps. Very Dangerous. You Go First.
TEMPLE OF DOOM: Two Hours of Kate Capshaw Shrieking Like a Harpy
THE LAST CRUSADE: You Lost Today, Kid. But That Doesn’t Mean You Have to Like It.
THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL: How Much of Human Life is Lost in Waiting?

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK: Asps. Very Dangerous. You Go First.

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) – Directed by Steven Spielberg – Starring Harrison Ford, John Rhys-Davis, Paul Freeman, Karen Allen, Ronald Lacey, and Denholm Elliot.

I never wanted to be Indiana Jones.

Don’t get me wrong – I always loved the character as a kid, and RAIDERS has always been a favorite of mine, but I never had those fantasies of the hat and the bullwhip and finding all that lost treasure. I wanted to be Captain America or Hawkeye or Green Lantern, but Indiana Jones? Never. I’ve often wondered why I never wanted to be Indy. I reckon part of it was an affinity for sci-fi films over adventure stories, but I think it mostly comes down to this:

I don’t want to go to the places Indy goes looking for artifacts. I had (and still have) little interest in going treasure hunting in Nepal, South America, Egypt … I’m a forest and ice and outer space guy, not a jungles and desert one. Hacking through overgrowth, running from spear-chucking natives, figuring out booby traps inside deserted jungle temples … you got this one, Indy. I’ll be standing over here in the rocket ship.

None of that changes my appreciation for RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, one of those rare films that is perfect, in almost every sense. Because of what the film has come to mean over the last 30 years, and because of who Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Harrison Ford all became, it’s hard to remember that RAIDERS was basically George and Steven’s version of Tarantino and Rodriguez’s Grindhouse project – quick and rough film making that was meant as an ode to pictures of an era gone by. It seems almost impossible to think that guys as professional and studio as Spielberg, as calculating and economically-driven as Lucas, and as unwilling to stop tinkering with past films as they both are could pull together to make such a lean, rough, efficiently brilliant film.

I would imagine that most people who write also consume and digest stories the way I do – while there’s an appreciation for the story, characters, and craft, there’s also that part of the brain that makes comments all its own over in its own corner: “Bad line,” “Where’s the establishing shot?,” “Go faster!,” “Lame fight,” and so on. It’s not a good or bad voice necessarily – it’s just a voice. I bet most people, like me, can just segment that voice off from the rest of their head so you can appreciate a story on its own merits.

With RAIDERS, that “I Woulda Done It Differently” voice is almost non-existent because this is a wonderful movie. The script is sharp, the acting makes the characters believable, the directing is top-notch, and the ride is exhilirating. In fact, there’s only one moment in the entire film that made the voice protest and that’s the incredibly small instance when rival archaeologist Rene Belloq opens the Ark of the Covenant and he dresses in some kind of period, ancient Jewish or Egyptian outfit that makes him look like a bigger loser than Hank Azara in Night at the Museum 2.

And that’s it. Almost everything else feels so right that watching RAIDERS this time around makes me realize just how important this film is to my own development as a writer – it’s not that I recognize it as good, but that I recognize it as right. It feels right because it was one of the stories that made me want to write. RAIDERS isn’t just a movie or a story, but some kind of formulative blueprint that instructed me on what movies can do, should do, and how to make it happen. It’s the same way I feel when I read a Walt Simonson comic or a Tolkien novel or the Thornton W. Burgess books.

Indiana Jones in RAIDERS is the perfect Spielberg hero and Harrison Ford is the perfect actor to play him – kinda nerdy but also kinda dramatically athletic.* There’s a respect for knowledge and a dogged ability to get the physical feat performed, but it would be wrong to say Indy is a great athlete. Harrison Ford looks a lot more athletic than he actually is in practice. He runs like he self-taught himself how to move his legs faster just for this part, but there are few actors who look better doing athletic-looking things while standing still; if you need someone to crack a whip, fire a gun, throw a punch, or take a punch, there’s few people better.

(*One of the many reasons why Shia LeBeouf is so horrible in Indy 4 is that he’s not this type, but we’ll get to that in time.)

The greatness of the character of Indiana Jones comes in his well-rounded humanity and how the different parts of him interact with one another. He’s this bold adventurer who’s also terrified of snakes, a hit with the ladies from a distance but a disaster up close, and nerdy and reserved in the classroom but comfortable and adventurous in the field. He can disarm you with a smile but he’s not funny, he treats massive poisonous spiders like they’re lint that needs to be casually brushed off your shoulder but freak out at the tiniest snake, and while he’s not given to violence he neither runs from it nor hesitates to initiate it.

Certainly there are actors besides Harrison Ford who could play the part (Tom Selleck was originally offered the role but couldn’t do it thanks to his commitments to Magnum, P.I.), but Ford makes Indy his own to the point where it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role. Other actors can do the action, the humor, can provide the vulnerability and intensity, but no one else has Ford’s particular mix of charisma and exasperation, no one else has his smile, and no one else can pull off wearing a leather jacket in the middle of the day in the Peruvian jungle.

The film carefully protects Indy and his treasure hunting (also known as stealing, sacrilege, and the arrogance of imperialism, depending on one’s point of view) by making everyone else in his line of work a dirtbag. He’s originally helped by two local guides, but they both betray him. His main rival, French archaeologist René Belloq (Paul Freeman) blatantly steals Indy’s finds and works for the Nazis.

Where it allows Indy to be human is both acknowledging (albeit slightly) that his brand of archaeology is a grey area at best, and in his relationship with Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), which did not end well and has yet to heal.

In terms of archaeology, Belloq accuses Indy of being not very different from himself, arguing that Indy is not the good guy he likes to pretend to be, and it would not take much for Indy to be pushed into becoming Belloq. The Frenchman is proven partially correct later on when Indy threatens to blow up the Ark of the Covenant to prevent Belloq and the Nazis from opening up the ancient chest; Belloq dares Indy to blow up the Ark, telling him he knows he won’t do it because Indy wants to see what happens. “Yes, blow it up! Blow it back to God,” Belloq challenges his rival. “All your life has been spent in search of archaeological relics. Inside the Ark are treasures beyond your wildest aspirations. You want to see it open as well as I. Indiana, we are simply passing through history. This,” he points to the Ark, “this is history. Do as you will.”

Indy caves and allows the Nazis to capture him.

The details of his relationship with Marion are kept largely in the dark, but we know that a decade ago Indy and Marion had a relationship, and it ended badly enough that not only did Indy alienate Marion but her father – and his mentor – as well. Abner Ravenwood’s name is mentioned in a Nazi telegram concerning the Ark, so after Indiana agrees to help the U.S. government stop the Nazis from acquiring the Ark, he goes to Nepal to retrieve a particular medallion that will tell him where the Ark is hidden. He doesn’t find Abner, but he finds Marion. She’s non-too-pleased to see him, and they have the best emotional moment of the film together.

“Indiana Jones,” she says when he enters and Karen Allen makes you feel all of her hurt and all of that time lost in those two words. She protests she was just a kid; he counters she knew exactly what she was doing.

“I can only say I’m sorry so many times,” Indy tells her at one point.

“Then say it again!” she snaps angrily.

One of the most impressive aspects of the film is the way Spielberg manages his action sequences. The opening raid of the Peruvian temple is recognized as a cinematic masterpiece, with Spielberg deftly building the tension of the scene as Indy moves through the jungle and then through the temple’s booby traps. When he reaches the idol and replaces the golden object with a bag of sand, he smiles at his own cleverness. You think the sequence is over, and then the stone that holds the idol sinks into the base and a giant ball slowly rolls down towards them, itself picking up steam as the rest of the sequence progresses. Indy runs to freedom and bursts into the clear and again you think the scene is over, only to find Belloq and some indigenous tribesman waiting to take the idol from him. Indy escapes to the lake, the natives chasing after him, and escapes in a seaplane. For a third time you think the sequence is done, only to have Indy freak out when a giant snake starts slithering up between his legs.

“That’s just my pet snake, Reggie!” the pilot smiles.

“I hate snakes, Jock! I hate them!”

“Aw, come on,” Jock chides. “Show a little backbone, will ya?”

The sequence sets the tone for the rest of the film; Indy is resourceful but far from perfect, brave but by no means a man without fear. That the rest of the film doesn’t slag after such an engaging, exciting sequence is a credit to everyone involved. Excellent work in small roles from John Rhys-Davies and Denholm Elliot provide comedic relief and an elder statesman, respectively, and Paul Freeman almost manages to steal the show as Belloq. He’s the perfect foil for Indy and makes every scene he’s in better.

I treasured RAIDERS as a kid because it was exciting and funny and awesome; I treasure it now because it remains all three. Marion tells him at one point after he’s been beaten up and bruised that he’s not the man he was ten years ago. “It’s not the years, honey,” he drolls. “It’s the mileage.”

After nearly thirty years and tons of mileage in numerous VCRs and DVD players, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK endures as a cinematic treasure.

THE INDIANA JONES REVIEW COLLECTION:

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK: Asps. Very Dangerous. You Go First.
TEMPLE OF DOOM: Two Hours of Kate Capshaw Shrieking Like a Harpy
THE LAST CRUSADE: You Lost Today, Kid. But That Doesn’t Mean You Have to Like It.
THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL: How Much of Human Life is Lost in Waiting?

AVATAR: James Cameron’s Racial F*ck You to George Lucas & Michael Bay

Avatar (2009) – Directed by James Cameron – Starring Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, Joel David Moore, and Giovanni Ribisi.

Or: James Cameron Hates America, Watto, Skids, Mudflap, and George W. Bush.

Where George Lucas gave us racist stereotypes dressed as cartoonish aliens (in PHANTOM MENACE) and Michael Bay gave us racist stereotypes dressed as robots (TRANSFORMERS 2), I spent the first hour of AVATAR worried that James Cameron was simply giving us racist stereotypes dressed up as really tall Smurfs. Cameron clearly traffics in the historical waters and cultural weight of American racism, but it’s far too easy to racially dismiss AVATAR as “Dances with CGI” and condemn Cameron for making another “White People Make Better Indians than Indians” movie. There’s more going on here.

While AVATAR qualifies as neither a great film nor an enlightening film, Cameron doesn’t go the Lucas/Bay route and CGI-up stereotypes so we can continue to laugh at such racist Hollywood favorites as the big-nosed, money-pinching Jew (as Lucas does with Watto) or the gold-tooth wearing, shucking and jiving inner city black kid (as Bay does with Skids and Mudflap). Instead, Cameron turns American Indians blue in order to both evaluate our contemporary ability to use technology to put on an avatar and change our visual identity, and to offer an environmental critique of contemporary American politics, capitalism, and the military.

Frankly, it’s sort of a stunning attempt from a brilliant visual director who tends to make rather dumb movies.

James Cameron makes big movies and often emotional movies but he doesn’t make very smart movies; there’s not a lot of moral ambiguity in the Cameron-verse, where there are usually clearly drawn good guys and clearly drawn bad guys shooting at each other to create awesome looking explosions. Nothing illustrates this more than the switch of the Schwarzenegger T-800 being a bad guy in one movie and a good guy in the next simply by reprogramming it; Cameron cares far less about the journey as he does the destination.

Even in AVATAR, Jake Sully has basically one scene where he’s conflicted about what he’s doing. First, he’s a spy whose firmly on the side of the company, then he’s conflicted about who he is, then he lies to his Colonel so he can keep being blue, and then he wants to be blue all the time.

And then Cameron spends two hours blowing cartoon shit up cooler than anyone else can blow cartoon shit up.

AVATAR is, pretty plainly, a cowboys and indians movie where the cowboy “goes native” and ends up fighting against the system that produced him, and the film does fall into the racialist trap of having Jake often make a better Na’vi than the Na’vi themselves make: he’s not only chosen by the Na’vi’s god as being special but he manages to tame the big red flying dinosaur thing that only five other Na’vi have ever done in the entire history of their people.

So, yeah, there’s that, and Cameron doesn’t get a pass for falling into that trap.

That said, Cameron doesn’t simply repackage the Hollywood Indian as blue aliens just so we can continue to traffic in the same old racial stereotypes; that is, unlike Lucas and Bay, Cameron doesn’t offer the stereotype as a source of derision or for our amusement, but so he can critique contemporary American culture as one that has lost its way.

Or maybe one that never really had the right way to begin with.

What sets AVATAR apart, too, is the totality of its condemnation. At the heart of AVATAR resides a rejection not only of a military, capitalist, genocidal approach to dealing with another culture, but of racial paternalism. When the Na’vi accept Jake’s avatar into their culture, we learn that he gets an inside pass that Sigourney Weaver and the scientists haven’t received, either, and they’re clearly the good humans in contrast to the evil company/military variety.

The Na’vi, in short, have not only rejected the “Sky People’s” military but their scientists who think of the Na’vi and Pandora simply as biological parts to study, and treat them, in their own way, as stupid savages that need to be taught the human way in human schools in order for the Na’vi to get out of the corporation’s way. When Jake becomes hybridized as a human soul in a Na’vi body, he’s really hybridized as being a military creation living inside a scientific creation, and it’s this hybridization that leads to the Na’vi accepting them into their midst.

The Na’vi god, then, seems to see that change is coming and that the Na’vi must learn to navigate this change in order for them to survive. It’s not that they must lose their culture, or have their culture assimilated into an American way of life, but that they can learn from Jake in order to defend themselves. They need to be open to an outsider’s way in order to defeat the outsiders, so while Jake is sent into Pandora to spy on the Na’vi, the Na’vi god seems to want the Na’vi people to bring Jake in so they can use him, too.

Honestly, AVATAR isn’t really suggesting that Jake makes a better Na’vi than any Na’vi does at all, but that he holds a uniquely qualified ability to become the specific military leader they need against this specific military threat. The Na’vi need to learn to teach him how to be one of them so he can become that military leader they need. Nearly all of the “Na’vi ways” that he’s taught end up having a specific military benefit: riding Pandoran horses and dinobirds, shooting with a bow and arrow, and connecting with the big, light-up tree all end up playing a vital role in the big battle. I’m not going to claim that the Na’vi god or high priestess intends for Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) to sex him to help turn him against the humans and keep him loyal to the Na’vi, but I’m not saying they’re all that surprised, either.

Importantly, too, while Jake may get to do a few things better than the Na’vi, and while he gets the credit for leading the troops into victory, it’s Neytiri who saves him at the end. She saves him twice, in fact – first saving his avatar from the Colonel and then saving his human form from oxygen starvation.

Ultimately, the stereotypical trap that AVATAR not only doesn’t fall into but outright rejects is the “vanishing Indian” myth. In the typical “white man makes a better Indian than the Indians do” story, whatever victory is accomplished by the white man’s cultural shift is soaked in sorrow because we know how it all ends – it’s a victory in battle but not in war.

Because AVATAR CGIs reality into fantasy it can offer a real victory. The environmentally conscious aliens can defeat the big industrial power, allowing Cameron’s repackaged racial fantasy to resonate with a hopefulness about a nation finding a better way to move forward through inclusion rather than genocide. It’s not so much about finding people who look like you, but finding a shared ideology. When Jake and the Colonel have their final throwdown and the Colonel asks Jake how it feels to betray his race, we can already see that the question is the wrong one.

Cameron’s message in AVATAR really isn’t about “going native” as much as it about a nation rejecting the ideals of Bush and the Neocons, who have highjacked an already imperfect American ideology with its preemptive “shock and awe” approach to dealing with those who are different from us, who seek to destroy what they fear but do not understand.

There’s something to be said, too, for the manner in which this identity transformation takes place. While the film does embarrass itself by taking the “you can tell I’m siding with the natives because I’m wearing war paint” route, the transformation of Jake from human to Na’vi is achieved through the transference of his consciousness into a lab-built Na’vi body, but he needs to learn about Na’vi culture before the avatar is anything but a false face. In this regard, Cameron is making a technological critique about the dangers of identity hopping – just because you can look the part doesn’t mean you can understand the part.

It’ll be interesting to see how AVATAR ages. The big CGI sequences (which make up the bulk of the film) are really a sight to behold but the story is a bit simple and predictable. Cameron the Writer offers too much hack and ham throughout the film, which will hurt AVATAR as the CGI that dazzles us today becomes commonplace tomorrow.

I’m not really a huge Cameron fan, either, though I usually enjoy his movies the first time around. Technical whiz that he is, I only think one Cameron movie qualifies as a true cinematic masterpiece (ALIENS), while only two others (ABYSS and TITANIC) ever draw me back in for repeated viewings. His Schwarzenegger Trilogy (TERMINATOR, T2, and TRUE LIES) has aged as well as old milk.

Heck, even his TV show was only visionary in being the first of many Jessica Alba projects to bore us to tears.

AVATAR just might be the rare Cameron movie that gets better as it gets older, however, and as discussion of the film starts digging beneath the surface to examine the themes and issues at play here, AVATAR might be seen as a film that’s more than just a landmark effects film. Dismissing AVATAR as an empty spectacle is as much a mistake as dismissing it simply because he turns Indians blue.

Cameron really is trying to give us a story here, and he’s trying to offer social commentary, and he’s trying to have a real environmental consciousness, and he’s trying – whether it’s the conflict between industry and environment, or the conflict between two different cultures – to suggest that we can still move forward as we hold onto who we are.

I give him credit for that. James Cameron isn’t so much an old dog learning new tricks as he is an old dog learning new philosophy. You can knock him for not having all the answers, yet, or for relying on a few too many Hollywood tropes better left behind, but unlike the bulk of his characters, Cameron seems to finally have figured out that the journey is every bit as important as the destination. It’s gonna be interesting to see where the AVATAR story goes from here.