10 Movies That Could Have Been Truly Awesome (With A Single Change)
2. Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom
It was the summer of 1984. The blockbuster ruled Hollywood and, by proxy, the popular consciousness. The studios had long forgotten how to take risks, now answering to their corporate parents' bottom line. Movies were no longer artistic statements, or even mere entertainments, but product. In the thick of a season dominated by said product, was the long-awaited sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Three years before, director Steven Spielberg, producer George Lucas and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan had reintroduced moviegoers to the spirit of high adventure that had characterised the matinee movie serials and pulp novels of the thirties. Raiders was old Hollywood reborn, a post-Graduate renaissance of action-adventure films like The African Queen, with everyman Harrison Ford in the Bogart role. The picture was a resounding success on nearly every level. Ford's raw charisma, Spielberg's fast-paced style, John Williams's score and even Ben Burtt's sound effects set the film apart to this day.
The main players all came back for Temple of Doom, save for Kasdan, who was focusing on directing at the time and had reservations about the sequel's darker direction. American Graffiti screenwriters Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz returned to the Lucas fold, and wrote a screenplay with all the adventure of Raiders, but with none of the backstory or character development. Inexplicably set a year before Raiders, the film gave us an Indiana Jones with no history, and therefore no real character trajectory.
Sure, Indy gets over his fortune and glory fixation by the end of the film, but that character pales in comparison to the man who fooled around with his mentor's daughter, left her, and came back to get her almost killed by Nazis. It's also missing Kasdan's sense of dread. Raiders has several scenes of characters reflecting about what they're getting themselves into, a post-seventies, New Hollywood version of Curt Siodmak's Wolf Man speech. Temple of Doom has nothing of the sort and nothing with which to replace it, save for more action.
Temple of Doom gets a lot of things right, and has become a cult favorite of the series. It pushes its PG rating to the limit, showing things that probably wouldn't make it into a PG-13 movie today. Like Raiders, it has great moments, but ultimately, it's all sound effects and fury.