Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: Prequel or Sequel?

Indy Returns

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom came out in 1984, one year after Return of the Jedi. I was nine. I can’t tell you how excited I was for this movie, I even had the storybook version, which yes, despite the nature of the tale, did exist.

The movie itself is sweaty, bombastic, grim, heartening, harrowing. It glows with terrifying light, it’s full of fire and reds and oranges, as pulsing with energy as a flaming, bloody heart. Where Raiders of the Lost Ark was about the thrill of adventure, Temple of Doom is about the dangers lurking in the world. It’s language is of horror and the occult: mesmerism, blood sacrifice, poison. It’s deaths are grisly and circumstances terrifying: children in danger and even our titular hero turned, briefly, to the dark side. That’s why it inspired the creation of the PG-13 rating.

It’s also crazy fun: Short Round (now Oscar-winner Ke Huy Quan) is just the very best, and keeps the proceedings on the right side of family entertainment. The mine-car sequence is one of the best ever in the series. The Busby Berkley number that opens the film, declaring Anything Goes in Mandarian, feels like a mission statement of creative freedom. It’s darkness is thrilling, it makes the stakes seem intense and exciting, the emotions all high and relief of escape palpable. And it’s a movie where, unlike Raiders, Indy does feel very much like a hero, or at least, a savior. (It’s up to the viewer if they think that is the will of the Gods or just good fortune.)

Over the years, another thing has interested me about Temple of Doom, which is where it lies in the timeline of the series. Technically, takes place a year before Raiders of the Lost Ark. This was before we used words like prequel with frequency, (and many many years before Lucasfilm’s main narrative tool was telling us what came before). Even eagle-eyed viewers might have missed that fact, it wasn’t a part of the film’s marketing.

So, is it a prequel? What makes something a prequel anyhow? Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom plays more like a sequel to me, in form and function.

Prequels, to my eyes, exist to provide insight into stories that are familiar to the viewer, to be in conversation with the original text. The Star Wars prequels are the perfect example: they work best with their foreshadowing intact, as they surprise us with Darth Vader’s origins. Want to know what the Clone Wars were? The prequels are here to fill in those blanks. Want to know how Han and Chewy met? Here’s Solo, a prequel, to show you. In the Obi-Wan Kenobi series prequel series Obi-Wan and Darth Vader met once again after Mustafar, which changes the meaning of Darth Vader’s dialogue in A New Hope; and that he’d met Leia before, which alters our understanding of her actions too.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom doesn’t teach us anything about Raiders of the Lost Ark. Like a James Bond movie, there are new villains, a new companion, and a new love interest. There’s not a hint of professorship to be found, we don’t hear at all about Marshall College. We don’t get filled in about his history with Marion Ravenwood. We don’t find out, for example, where he got the whip. (That’s all saved for one hilarious sequence in the next movie.)

This is, very plainly, another adventure with our favorite whip-cracking archeologist. He flirts, he gets out of danger, he saves children, he defeats an evil cult. It stands entirely on its own. If you only saw one Indiana Jones movie and it was this one, you wouldn’t be confused. Raiders of the Lost Ark and Temple of Doom speak the same language and exist in the same world, but they are entirely separate stories in the series. One doesn’t build on the other and one doesn’t explain the other. Temple of Doom knows you want more Indiana Jones and gives you a whole lot more. It’s a sequel to one of the greatest movies ever made, not its prequel.

My impression is that Lucas set this story before Raiders so that he didn’t have to deal with existing story elements. It’s a reminder that the pressure that so many storytellers feel to tie things together can wind up as obligations instead of opportunities. A contemporary writer tasked with writing a prequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark would never have come up with Temple of Doom, they would feel too bound Raiders, making it all ‘make sense.’ Instead, Temple of Doom is its very own thing, and in so being, expands the palette of the series.

To this day, Temple of Doom is one of my favorite rewatches, I can’t turn it on without watching the whole thing. Sure, it’s got some hard-to-ignore insensitivities, but that’s how time works, you can’t go back and make the filmmakers think the way we do now. You can appreciate what was, acknowledge where it falls short, and celebrate how far we’ve come. I don’t believe in banishing the failings of the past to oblivion, they’re a part of our journey.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was a part of my childhood journey and I have a deep love for how excited and curious I was about it back then. I’ve tried to retain that excitement and wonder and curiosity even now, decades later. That feeling one of the great pleasures of my life, and it started, in many ways, with Return of the Jedi and Temple of Doom.

Two more to come before Thursday!