2 of 6
Temple of Doom captures Indy at both his most and least heroic. Set in 1935, the film begins in a Shanghai nightclub, where Indy is about to close a deal with a local ganglord, exchanging the ashes of the Manchu emperor Nurhaci for a valuable diamond. When the deal goes sour, Indy grabs the nightclub's singer, Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw), and sticks a fork in her side, threatening to harm her if her boss doesn't give in to his demands—not exactly the sort of behavior one expects from a good guy. But then a fight breaks out, mayhem ensues, one thing leads to another, and before they know it, Indy and Willie and a kid named Short Round (Ke Huy Quan) find themselves stuck on a pilotless plane somewhere over India.
Indy and the others jump from the plane in an inflatable life raft and, improbably, survive, their raft eventually settling near a village that has been wasting away ever since its children were abducted by a local cult of Thuggees, followers of the Hindu god Kali. A village elder tells Indy that the cult also took the village's Sankara Stone, an object without which the village cannot prosper—and he adds that the Hindu god Shiva brought Indy there to retrieve the stone and save the village.
Indy doesn't buy the supernatural stuff, and he tells Short Round not to worry because what the elder told them was nothing more than "a ghost story." But he is interested in the Sankara Stone—which, if genuine, would mean "fortune and glory" for him when he took it to America. So he goes to nearby Pankot Palace, with Willie and Short Round at his side, and there he witnesses horrifying displays of human sacrifice and child slavery at the hand of the Thuggees and their leader, Mola Ram (Amrish Puri). By the end of the film, Indy has had a change of heart, liberated the children, defeated the bad guys, and returned the Stone to its village, which now prospers. A final exchange between Indy and the village elder establishes that Indy now "understands" the Stone's power.
Raiders takes place one year later. A couple of federal agents tell Indy that the Nazis are on the verge of discovering the Ark of the Covenant in an ancient, ruined Egyptian city, and they want him to claim it for the United States before the Germans get it. Despite his experiences the previous year—which, of course, had not been written or filmed yet—Indy is a skeptic once again, scoffing when his colleague Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott) cautions him not to take the job too lightly. "I don't believe in magic, a lot of superstitious hocus-pocus," says Indy. "I'm going after a find of incredible historical significance, you're talking about the bogeyman."
By the end of the film, however, Indy has become a believer all over again. With the help of a former girlfriend, Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), Indy does indeed find the Ark, but all three of them are captured by the Nazis, who bind Indy and Marion to a pole and allow them to watch from a distance as René Belloq (Paul Freeman), a mercenary French archaeologist, opens the Ark and peers inside—which, as anyone who has read their Bible could have told them, is a definite no-no. [5] Spirits emerge, bodies melt, and in a matter of minutes everyone is dead except for the two lovers—both of whom are alive, it is suggested, because Indy remembered at the last minute that they should shut their eyes and avoid making eye contact with the divine. [6] The film ends with the American government locking the Ark away in a warehouse, as Indy grumbles that those "bureaucratic fools … don't know what they've got there."
share this page
RSS Feed
