Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. - If Adventure had a name, it would change it.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - Gross Encounters of the Third Kind.


I guess even Steven Spielberg can drop a bomb now and then, in fact, I know he can.

As much as it hurts me to be critical of a movie series I like, like a Star Wars or a Star Trek, it hurts me equally to criticize an Indiana Jones movie. Because Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade were such good movies. What the hell happened to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which I will from this point on refer to as TOD for short?

TOD starts out well enough, with the typical "Indy gets into and out of a tight spot and escapes from the bad guys in a plane/train situation". Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) and Nightclub singer, Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) must recover a diamond and an antidote for some poison that Indy has been slipped, all while be shot at with machine guns and attacked by various thugs and dancing girls and large gongs. They get away and are rescued by "Short Round" (Ke Huy Quan).

The opening danger/escape all works as well as it did in Raiders, however it's slightly after the escape that TOD goes terrible wrong. Because unlike in Raiders and Last Crusade where the danger/escape scene is simply a warm-up for the real story, in TOD, the story never really gets going and the characters just wander aimlessly looking for trouble. Such as when the escape plane Indy and gang choose just happens to belong to the bad guy they were escaping from. This leads to one of the most implausible and unlikely escapes in movie history, which involves a crashing plane, an inflatable raft, a snowy peak and a river. I won't bore you with the details, the movie can do that for you, suffice to say, it's about as ridiculous and unsurvivable a sequence as you are likely to see.

However our heroes do survive somehow and set out aimlessly wandering about some continent, I suppose it could be Asia. All along the way Willie Scott screams at spiders and snakes and runs around like some sort of beta-version Jar-Jar Binks. They eventually meet up with some villagers who have had their magic rocks stolen, along with all their children, by a cult of Thuggees lead by spooky Mola Ram (Amrish Puri). Indy agrees to look for the magic rocks and sets out with his gang. They eventually stumble upon a palace and are invited in for some gross-out food. In fact, grossing out the audience is a recurring theme in TOD, lots of gross-outs. Lots of bugs and goat's eyes and monkey brains and extreme heartburn.

Indy is captured by the Thuggees and taken to the Temple of Doom, where Mola Ram performs some impromptu mystical heart surgery and breaks some child labor laws. Indy is eventually rescued by Jar-Jar and Anakin, I mean by Willie Scott and Short Round. Indy frees the villagers kids, snatches the magic rocks, there is a big mining car chase/roller-coaster, then another unlikely escape. Then it just goes on about 30 more minutes and ends. There is no big finish, no melting heads, just "here are your stupid rocks, now take better care of them this time."

TOD, by the way is a PREQUEL to Raiders of the Lost Ark, not a sequel, which was disappointing. But one thing I've learned is that "prequel" and "disappointment" kind of go hand-in-hand.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom seems rushed and hurried, without much of a plot and very little character development. Much of the film is just images meant to be gross/scary and Willie Scott screaming. Maybe Spielberg wanted to cash in on Raiders while he had his momentum going. Actually, since George Lucas is credited as the writer on TOD, I suppose he gets the blame for the lack of story. It's clear that he just didn't have his heart in it.

STAR TREK: INSURRECTION - This time, the crew of the Starship Enterprise is revolting!

Star Trek (9): Insurrection - Nip/Tuck

They say there's a curse on odd numbered Star Trek motion pictures, so to break this curse, they stopped numbering the films after Star Trek 6, but the curse didn't lift.

Star Trek: Insurrection, the ninth in the series and the 3rd to feature the Next Generation crew certainly lives up to the curse of the odd numbers. Not that Insurrection is bad to the degree that Star Trek 5 is bad, God no, nothing in the series matches that stinker. It's bad in the sense that Insurrection is basically a run-of-the-mill hour-long episode plot dragged out to fill about two hours.

The crew of the Starship Enterprise is back and they seem restless and bored with their duties of greeting alien diplomats and sitting around the universe waiting for an even numbered film so that the Borg or the Romulans will attack. Just when it seems that things can’t get anymore boring, the crew is ordered to the planet of the Ba’ku a race of eternally young and white humanoids who are being threatened by the Son’a. The Son'a are a race of ugly, bad guys, who are addicted to botox and elective surgery and are lead by equally ugly and apostrophized Ru’afo (F. Murray Abraham).

Things really get bogged down as the Enterprise crew, lead by Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) arrive and have to sing Gilbert & Sullivan tunes in order to stop a malfunctioning Lt. Commander Data (Brent Spiner) from revealing the Federation's "duck-blind" outpost, from which they watch the boring day to day blandness of the Ba'ku village.

Eventually the crew discover that the planet is being bombarded by a specific form of radiation that causes the Ba'ku to remain young, healthy and white. They also discover that the Son'a, with the inexplicable assistance of Federation Vice Admiral Dougherty (Anthony Zerbe), are planning on stealing the radiation to feed their own quest for eternal youth. Of course the catch is that the Ba'ku will all be killed by the radiation collector in the process.

Apparently the Star Trek filmmakers were suffering under the delusions that we, the Star Trek audience, want them to funny-up the franchise along the way. It's all good and touching when blind Geordi LaForge (LeVar Burton) temporarily regains his sight. But then the extreme silliness ensues as the crew begins to experience the effects of the de-aging radiation. Picard begins to chase after one of the local girls, Anij (Donna Murphy), Worf (Michael Dorn) experiences the heartbreak of Klingon acne, Crusher and Troi (Gates McFadden & Marina Sirtis) notice that their "boobs are firming up", and Riker (Jonathan Frakes) gets all hot and bothered and even starts to believe that he's a director. The crew finally discovers Ru'afo's plot, they begin the much hyped "insurrection" by revolting against Vice Admiral Dougherty's orders and trying to save the Ba'ku from the Son'a.

There's plenty of gross-out Son'a plastic surgery and Ba'ku pretentious pseudo-new-age feel-goodisms to fill out the gaps between the non-action. I won't spoil the big surprise about the Son'a and Ba'ku connection, since no one probably cares anyhow. But it did occur to me that since there only seem to be a few hundred Ba'ku and Son'a, that the Son'a could have just moved to the other side of the planet and gotten their radiation the old fashioned way, instead of being so greedy and icky.

To be fair, this isn't the worst Star Trek movie. That dubious honor will probably always belong to Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier. However Star Trek: Insurrection is about as interesting as you might imagine life in the quaint Ba’ku village might be, and it will make you long for much better Star Trek movies like First Contact and The Wrath of Khan. Plus the sight of Commander Riker in the bath tub, getting shaved by Troi will hurt you, not as much as Uhura's naked fan-dance from ST5, but there is pain involved, and it’s all pretty revolting.