The movie sequel Steven Spielberg called “horrific”
While Steven Spielberg is associated with some of the biggest movies known to humankind, some of his most significant come in the Indiana Jones franchise, starring Harrison Ford as the titular globetrotting archaeologist adventurer, and the first film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, arrived in 1981.
Raiders, based on a story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman, remains one of the greatest action-adventure movies of all time, seeing Jones take on Nazi forces in 1936 as they search to find to lost-lost Ark of the Covenant, which is said to gift invincibility to any Army. The Lost Ark is a classic of contemporary cinema, and it continued Spielberg’s commercially successful career after the likes of Jaws and E.T.
However, Spielberg was less than impressed with his own effort in the Indiana Jones sequel movie Temple of Doom from 1984. The success of Raiders of the Lost Ark had built up great anticipation for Ford and Spielberg’s follow-up adventure, but it just didn’t land in the same way as the original.
The director once admitted, “I wasn’t happy with the second film at all. It was too dark, too subterranean, and much too horrific”.
He then quipped: “I thought it out-poltered Poltergeist!” Spielberg’s comments are interesting because Temple of Doom was a success from a commercial perspective, bringing in $333million from a $28m budget.
Still, Spielberg’s primarily correct in his assessment of his film, noting how dark it was because it was set underground in the forgotten historic temple and that the violence and gore were perhaps ramped up a bit too high. The result was that Spielberg felt that his own style was starkly missing from the film.
“There’s not an ounce of my own personal feeling in Temple of Doom,” he said. There’s also a sense in the director of not being able to please the swathes of Indiana Jones fans that his original movie garnered. In that sense, the Temple of Doom movie was always, well, doomed to fail to some degree or another.
Spielberg noted: “If you give people the same movie with different scenes, they say: ‘Why weren’t you more original?’ But if you give them the same character in another fantastic adventure, but with a different tone, you risk disappointing the other half of the audience who just wanted a carbon copy of the first film with a different girl and a different bad guy.”
Check out the trailer for Temple of Doom below.
