How would you feel about someone who deliberately set about devaluating the thrill? Any kind of thrill— of giving or receiving, of new faces or places, of art or science or discovery. The thrill of love or sex, of food or games or good conversation. A film like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom sets out to destroy, wantonly and stupidly, the thrill of moviegoing by the vulgar, simple-minded device of giving us nothing but thrills. The basic unit of the film is not an episode or scene or sequence of this sort or that, but sheerly the thrill—the spill, chill, kill, or near-kill, the scare or horror or even disgust. Unremitting, unrelenting, unmodulated thrills; shock upon shock, laced with cheap laughs. And all this not to be taken even movie-seriously, only movie-serially, in the manner of that silliest of defunct cinematic genres, the one-or two-reel serial.
George Lucas, who wrote the story; Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who concocted the script; and Steven Spielberg, who directed—these four were obviously determined to make the filmic equivalent of a nonstop roller-coaster ride (there is, in fact, a roller-coaster chase in mining cars), but one with no restful ups, only restlessly rocketing downs, ever lower in both senses of the word. What would a game of chess be like in which every move threatened checkmate? What would lovemaking be like if every second yielded orgasm? What about a long joke made up entirely of punchlines? Unspeakable horror, a kind even Mistah Kurtz had no inkling of. It’s the sort of thing that makes you yearn for the respite of a fingernail belaboring a blackboard. And, of course, it is the kind of film several reviewers, led by Pauline Kael, have swooned over.
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