This chase has to be seen to be believed. Some of the film's great set pieces now take place: Human victims are lowered into a subterranean volcano in a steel cage, weird rituals are celebrated, and there is a chase scene involving the mine's miniature railway. Indiana and his friends look on in astonishment, and then Indiana attempts to steal back the jewel. As dozens of little kids work on chain gangs, the evil maharajah keeps them in slavery by using the sinister powers of the missing jewel and its two mates. The set design, art direction, special effects, and sound effects inside this underground Hades are among the most impressive achievements in the whole history of Raiders and Bond-style thrillers. (Make some popcorn.) Then the movie's second half opens with a breathtaking series of adventures involving the mines beneath the palace - mines that have been turned into a vision of hell. After Indiana and Willie retire for the night, there's the movie's only slow sequence, in which such matters as love are discussed. The dinner scene, by the way, also is lifted from James Bond, where it's an obligatory part of every adventure: James is always promised a sure death, but treated first to an elegant dinner with his host, who boasts of his power and takes inordinate pride in being a sophisticated host. Then there's a dinner in the palace of a sinister local lord. Their getaway leads them into a series of adventures: A flight over the Himalayas, a breathtaking escape from a crashing plane, and a meeting with a village leader who begs Indiana to find and return the village's precious magic jewel - a stone which disappeared along with all of the village's children. He escapes in the nick of time, taking along a beautiful nightclub floozy ( Kate Capshaw), and accompanied by his trusty young sidekick, Short Round (Jonathan Ke Quan). As "Temple of Doom" opens, Indiana is in a nightclub somewhere in Shanghai. Hopefully, there will be great walls of flame and water, engulfing the bad guys as the heroes race to freedom, inches ahead of certain death.īut enough of intellectual film criticism. The very last shots at the end of the sequence are obligatory: The fortress must be destroyed. This task always involves great difficulty, horrendous surprises, unspeakable dangers, and a virtuoso chase sequence. The role of the hero in a movie like this is to enter the fortress, steal the prize, and get away in one piece. Our first glimpse of an Impregnable Fortress is always the same: An ominous long shot, with Wagnerian music, as identically uniformed functionaries hurry about their appointed tasks. They are ruled over by megalomaniac zealots who dream of conquest, and they're fueled by slave labor. They involve unbelievably bizarre hideaways, usually buried under the earth, beneath the sea, on the moon, or inside a volcano. You see them all the time in James Bond pictures. You know the kind of fortress I'm talking about. "Temple of Doom" mostly takes place on one location, and belongs more to the great tradition of the Impregnable Fortress Impregnated. It was a series of cliff-hanging predicaments, strung out along the way as Indiana Jones traveled from San Francisco to Tibet, Egypt, and other romantic locales. "Raiders" was inspired by Saturday afternoon serials.
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