Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

After escaping from a Chinese gangster in Shanghai, archaeologist Dr Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) makes a crash-landing into India. There he finds a remote village whose sacred stone has been taken and their children kidnapped en masse. With kid sidekick Short Round (Ke Huey Quan) and lounge singer Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) in tow, Indy investigates a nearby palace and the diabolical 'temple of doom' beneath it.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was the second Indiana Jones film, released four years after Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1984. It has generally been regarded as the weakest of the original three films. with many viewers disliking the misplaced combination of slapstick comedy and horror, the introduction of a child sidekick, and the gratingly irritating romantic lead Willie Scott. Generally speaking the mass opinions are correct: quality-wise Temple of Doom sits a solid distance down the heap from either Raiders or The Last Crusade, and debates over whether Temple of Doom is better or worse than late series entry Kingdom of the Crystal Skull probably don't really have a viable conclusion to them. This is one hell of a creative misjudgement. That said, this is not a complete disaster of a film but more of a curate's egg. There is a lot of good material in Temple of Doom, generally buried into the back half where most of the audience has already written the movie off.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

Some times you can't go back again. I think pretty solid proof of that sentiment is Steven Spielberg's 2008 sequel Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It is a film made with the best of intentions, and certainly by a lot of talented people. It continued the Indiana Jones movie franchise that had - a relatively unpopular TV spin-off aside - seemingly wrapped up with The Last Crusade in 1989. Suddenly, 19 years later, there was a new instalment with a 66 year-old Harrison Ford returning as the titular archaeologist. The same creative team by-and-large reunited to make the film, yet the results seems to fall far short of The Last Crusade. While box office takings were huge, the audience response was fairly ambivalent. Crystal Skull rapidly became one of those Hollywood blockbusters - like Prometheus and Batman v Superman - that it was uncool to defend.

Certainly I cannot defend it. I can defend parts of it, but individual sequences and characters are not capable of saving an entire film. What is particularly striking to me about Crystal Skull is that it is broadly pretty great for its first half, and then weirdly derails as soon as it hits the jungle. After that it becomes a real head-scratcher: why those story choices? Why that kind of visual effect? Why those kinds of attempts at comedy? In the end it seems to leave the Indiana Jones series with two kinds of film: the slick, non-stop adventure of Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, and the messy 'curate's egg' attempts of The Temple of Doom and The Crystal Skull.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

So last week my father died. It was a fairly long time coming, and Dad prepared us all incredibly well - much more than I would have anticipated a week earlier. Despite that it was, and still is, a terrible shock. When something dreadful happens my viewing habits tend to retreat towards comfortable territory: films I have seen many times before, ones where I can talk over the action to discuss particular shots, or lines of dialogue. Last week one of the films I homed in on very rapidly was Steven Spielberg's 1989 sequel Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It was only while watching the film that I realised I had unconsciously gravitated to a film about the relationship between a son and his father.

This third film in the Indiana Jones series sees the titular archaeologist (Harrison Ford) sent on an episodic chase across Europe and the Middle East to rescue his father Dr Henry Jones (Sean Connery) and to prevent the Nazis from obtaining the Holy Grail - the specific cup that caught the blood of Christ upon the cross. I am going to be immediately upfront and say that this is my favourite of the four Indiana Jones films. I do not think it is necessarily the best - that remains 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark - but The Last Crusade continues to have a strong effect on me. It is a film to which I can return over and over again and never tire of watching it.

In praise of Short Round, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

There's not a lot of love for Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Most of the complaining tends to circle around romantic co-star Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw), who is admittedly a colossal creative misfire of Jar-Jar Binksian proportions. Capshaw mutters, struts, shrieks and cries her way through a role that is entirely passive and responsive, victim-like and shrill. This isn't Capshaw's fault in the slightest: indeed she does a pitch-perfect performance of what she's required to do - it's that requirement that sucks so much. The fact that her character replaces the iconic Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) from Raiders of the Lost Ark only makes it worse.

Then there's the vaguely racist (sorry, did I type "vaguely"? I meant "entirely") depiction of Indians as either superstitious peasants or blood-thirsty child-beating cultists, and the utterly gratuitous and silly dinner banquet of various inedible delicacies. All up, it's very easy to understand why Temple of Doom has always been the under appreciated middle child of the three 1980s Indiana Jones films. The problem is that, while disliking the film is perfectly valid, it does ignore some absolutely knock-out elements that still make this an incredibly enjoyable movie to watch.