--- title: "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" year: 1984 kind: "film" canonical: "https://film.one/film/indiana-jones-and-the-temple-of-doom" fi1m_score: 65 critics_score: 57 critics_reviews: 12 published: "2026-09-19T12:47:15.077270+00:00" updated: "2026-09-19T12:47:42.738224+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) Directed by Steven Spielberg · 1h 58m · MPA PG · Adventure, Action **Fi1m score: 65** · Critics 57 from 12 reviews *In a sentence:* Two men build a magnificent fairground ride and hire a woman to scream on it > The raft, the mine cart and the bridge are as well built as anything Spielberg has made, and the film around them has a heroine who only screams and a view of India that should have embarrassed everyone at the time. ## Synopsis Shanghai, 1935. Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) arrives at a nightclub to trade an emperor’s ashes for a diamond with the gangster Lao Che (Roy Chiao), and is poisoned for his trouble. Chasing the antidote across the dance floor, he picks up the club’s singer, Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw), and escapes through a window to a car driven by his young sidekick Short Round (Ke Huy Quan). Their flight out of China loses its pilots over the Himalayas; a raft, a mountainside and a river later they reach a starving Indian village whose sacred stone and children have been taken. The villagers send them by elephant to Pankot Palace, where the prime minister Chattar Lal (Roshan Seth) and a visiting British officer, Captain Blumburtt (Philip Stone), insist that nothing is wrong. ## Review Three years after [*Raiders of the Lost Ark*](https://film.one/film/raiders-of-the-lost-ark), Steven Spielberg and George Lucas send Indiana Jones back a year, to 1935, and somewhere a good deal darker. Lucas supplies the story, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz the screenplay, and the plan is plainly to outdo the first film: more stunts, more speed, fewer pauses for breath. For long stretches it works. The trouble is what has been put into the pauses. Spielberg has rarely staged action this cleanly. The Shanghai opening is a musical number that turns into a poisoning that turns into a shoot-out that turns into a car chase, and Michael Kahn cuts it so that every object that matters, the diamond, the antidote, the ice bucket, the gong, is exactly where we need to see it when we need to see it. The escape from a pilotless aeroplane in an inflatable raft is the sort of nonsense that only works if nobody on screen blinks, and nobody does. The mine-cart chase near the end is a fairground ride built by people who knew exactly where the drops should go. We watched it grinning, which is not our usual expression. Douglas Slocombe lights the palace in torchlit oranges and deep reds and the temple beneath it with hard shafts of light through smoke, so that figures move as silhouettes and the fire glows from below. Elliot Scott’s sets, the nightclub with its enormous staircase, the dining hall, the temple with its pit and its chains, are built solidly enough for people to be thrown across them, and people are thrown across them constantly. Anthony Powell puts Kate Capshaw in a gold sequinned gown that is ruined by degrees over two hours, which is as close as the script gets to giving her a story. John Williams writes bigger and louder than he did for *Raiders*, and more than once the music is announcing excitement the picture has already delivered. Willie Scott is the film’s largest mistake. Capshaw is asked to scream, complain and fall over, and she does all three with commitment, but the script gives her nothing else to do, and by the halfway mark each scream costs the film a little more of our goodwill. The romance with Ford is written as bickering, and it is bickering between a man with a job and a woman who is in his way. Ke Huy Quan’s Short Round does far better. He is quick and funny, he treats Ford as an equal, and their card games and squabbles are the warmest thing in the film. Then there is India. The village is a place of starving, weeping people waiting for a white man to arrive, and the banquet at Pankot Palace serves live snakes, beetles and chilled monkey brains so that Willie can retch and we can laugh at what foreigners eat. We did not laugh. The film is unkind to a real country, which is bad enough; worse, the jokes are lazy, and laziness is the one thing the rest of the film refuses to allow itself. Amrish Puri’s Mola Ram, all eyes and teeth, is a proper villain because Puri makes him one, and Roshan Seth’s Chattar Lal, the palace’s smooth prime minister, is the best-written adult in it. Both are playing figures from a 1930s serial, and the film knows this and does not much care. Under the palace, the second half turns into something the certificate did not prepare anyone for. There is a ceremony we will not describe. It frightened us, and we were not children, and Spielberg stages it with complete conviction, drums and torches and Puri chanting over a stone altar. It is the one stretch where the darkness feels chosen rather than stumbled into. Parents who took the PG at its word had a right to feel misled. *Raiders* had a plot you could explain in a sentence and set pieces that grew out of it. *Temple of Doom* has set pieces, and a plot that exists to join them. Even the series seemed to notice: [*Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade*](https://film.one/film/indiana-jones-and-the-last-crusade) (1989) went back to Nazis and daylight. Watch it for the machinery, which has not aged a day, and brace for everything around it, which has aged badly. Released in Britain on 15 June 1984, it runs 118 minutes and still carries a PG. Do not take that as a promise about what your children will see. *Fi1m score 65, published 19 September 2026.* ### Reviews we read (12) - **RogerEbert.com**, Roger Ebert (90/100, inferred): The film is a relentlessly nonstop action picture and technical triumph that works as exhilarating, manic escapism in the tradition of an impregnable fortress adventure. It delivers a virtuoso mine-car chase and other set pieces that make it an equal to Raiders rather than a retread. [Read](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/indiana-jones-and-the-temple-of-doom-1984) - **Empire**, Ian Nathan (70/100, inferred): The critic praises the film's shift to a darker, claustrophobic tone with vivid stunts, humor, and lurid details that make it one of Spielberg's most underrated works. It notes the backlash over its intensity but highlights how the action and wit hold up as dazzling cinema. [Read](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/indiana-jones-temple-doom-review/) - **Evening Standard**, William Mata (3.5/5): The critic calls it the darkest and most opinion-splitting entry, with strong muscular action and daring sequences from Ford, but notes it is let down by the shrieking female sidekick and poorly aged child character. [Read](https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/film/indiana-jones-films-ranked-harrison-ford-b1091051.html) - **The New Yorker**, Pauline Kael (70/100, inferred): Spielberg fuses thrills and laughter in a tall tale of happy disbelief, starting at full charge in the opening sequence and sustaining it without letdown through preposterous stunts and physical comedy. The John Williams score is the only real bother, as it oversells excitement. [Read](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1984/06/11/a-breeze-a-bawd-a-bounty) - **The New York Times**, Vincent Canby (70/100, inferred): Spielberg’s exuberantly tasteless and entertaining pre-sequel opens with its best, funniest sequence in a Shanghai nightclub before settling into a mix of thrills, barroom brawls, and darker adventures in Asia. The PG rating has caused a ruckus, but the film entertains despite its excesses. [Read](https://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/23/movies/moviesspecial/indiana-jones-and-the-temple-of-doom.html) - **Slant Magazine**, Eric Henderson (65/100, inferred): The film embodies the dark, racist, sexist, and jingoistic elements of old serials that inspired it, serving as a kind of exorcism for Spielberg. Its darker tone and horrifying imagery ultimately overwhelm the director in a thrilling but nightmarish finale filled with intense action set pieces. [Read](https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/indiana-jones-and-the-temple-of-doom/) - **The Guardian** (50/100, inferred): The critic finds plenty to admire in the action sequences and Spielberg's technical prowess but notes the film remains ungainly with leaden romance, gross-out comedy and cultural insensitivity. [Read](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/article/2024/may/23/indiana-jones-temple-of-doom-anniversary) - **Time Out**, JP (40/100, inferred): The critic notes the spectacular set pieces but criticizes the desperate filler, loss of credibility, and problematic portrayal of foreign characters as savages. The thrills feel more hollow than in Raiders. [Read](https://www.timeout.com/movies/indiana-jones-and-the-temple-of-doom) - **The Telegraph**, Patrick Gibbs (30/100, inferred): The nonstop action leaves no time for acting or a coherent plot in this sequel that fails to match expectations set by its predecessor. [Read](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/10526437/Indiana-Jones-and-the-Temple-of-Doom-review.html) - **Variety**, Todd McCarthy (30/100, inferred): The film comes as a letdown after Raiders despite packing even more thrills, resulting in an exhausting, numbing effect with more-is-less pacing and a taste of vulgarity and excess. The standout underground railway chase is a stunning set piece, but the overall sledgehammer approach and gruesome images are noted. [Read](https://variety.com/1984/film/reviews/indiana-jones-and-the-temple-of-doom-1200426218/) - **Den of Geek**, Simon Brew (65/100, inferred): The critic finds the film darker, more uncompromising and better than remembered on rewatch, praising its fluid opening action sequence and refusal to pull punches on brutality and set pieces like the heart extraction and mine cart chase. They note narrative muddles, logic issues, dated problematic elements in its depiction of India, and its harsh tone that led to the PG-13 rating, while calling it a stark antidote to cookie-cutter blockbusters. [Read](https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/revisiting-indiana-jones-and-the-temple-of-doom/) - **Collider**, Allison Keene (30/100, inferred): The critic finds the film an unnecessary and messy prequel that adds little to the series, with gratuitous racial issues and grating characters like the screaming Willie Scott. Action sequences and some slapstick provide entertainment value, but overall it is dismissed as a great B-movie at best. [Read](https://collider.com/indiana-jones-and-the-temple-of-doom-review/) ## Details - **Director:** Steven Spielberg - **Director:** Steven Spielberg - **Screenplay:** Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz - **Story:** George Lucas - **Cinematography:** Douglas Slocombe - **Editor:** Michael Kahn - **Music:** John Williams - **Production design:** Elliot Scott - **Costume design:** Anthony Powell - **Producer:** Robert Watts - **Cast:** Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones; Kate Capshaw as Willie Scott; Ke Huy Quan as Short Round; Amrish Puri as Mola Ram; Roshan Seth as Chattar Lal; Philip Stone as Phillip Blumburtt; Roy Chiao as Lao Che; David Yip as Wu Han - **Runtime:** 1h 58m - **Certificate (MPA):** PG - **Release (the US):** 23 May 1984 - **Genres:** Adventure, Action - **Budget:** $28 million - **Box office:** $333 million - **Trailer:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBdyLyijZhU ## Where to watch in the US - Disney+: streaming, uhd - Paramount+: streaming, hd - Amazon Prime Video: add-on, uhd - Hulu: add-on, hd - The Roku Channel: add-on, hd - Amazon Prime Video: rent $3.99, hd - Amazon Prime Video: buy $16.99, uhd *Checked 2026-09-19.* Also available in: AR, AT, AU, BE, BG, BR, CA, CH, CL, CO, CZ, DE, DK, EC, ES, FI, FR, GB, HK, HR, HU, ID, IE, IN, IS, IT, JP, KR, LT, MX, MY, NL, NO, NZ, PA, PE, PH, PL, PT, RO, RS, SE, SG, SI, SK, TH, TR, US, VN. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## Awards - Academy Awards 1985: Best Original Score (nominated); Best Visual Effects (won) ## If you liked this - *Raiders of the Lost Ark* (1981), Fi1m 93: The first one, with a plot that fits on a napkin and stunts that grow from it — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/raiders-of-the-lost-ark.md) - *Gunga Din* (1939): The Hollywood India this film is quoting, with its virtues and its blind spots intact - *The Man Who Would Be King* (1975): Two chancers, a lost kingdom and a rope bridge, with Huston letting the adults talk - *Romancing the Stone* (1984): Same year, same jungle nonsense, and a heroine who is allowed to be competent - *The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec* (2010): Besson’s Paris pulp, with a pterodactyl, a mummy and a woman running the show --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. 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