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Steven Spielberg Once Disowned ‘The Temple of Doom.’ It’s Better Than He Thinks.

I suspect that when Spielberg apologized for the film, it was because the movie represented something that he wasn’t quite comfortable with. Not yet, at least.

Meanwhile, the banquet at Pankot Palace is presented as a barrage of cheap, gross-out gags, where locals’ eyes widen deliriously at the savory delights of giant beetles which are slurped like oysters, eyeball soup, and chilled monkey brains. The Club Obi Wan set piece may be (along with Raiders ’ opening chased-by-a-giant-boulder boobytrapfest) the most thrillingly exuberant sequence Spielberg has ever directed: A first-rate villain is introduced (Roy Chiao’s dagger-sideburned Lao Che); McGuffins are trotted out (the priceless remains of Nurhachi) only to be be quickly forgotten; Indy is slipped a Mickey; gems, gold, and poison antidotes are swapped via a lazy susan; machine-gun fire is ducked thanks to a giant, rolling gong; and cackling henchmen are impaled with flaming skewers. In his 1984 review of Temple of Doom, critic Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars, writing: “This movie is one of the most relentlessly nonstop action pictures ever made, with a virtuoso series of climactic sequences that must last an hour and never stop for a second.

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