Steven Spielberg has gone on record to say that his least favorite Indiana Jones movie is the second one, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The 1984 prequel sees Indiana Jones travel to India, where he’s tasked with retrieving an ancient stone from an evil priest, only to find himself drawn into a disturbing underground cult. The Indiana Jones movie that received the most mixed reviews was the belated fourth entry, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but Spielberg prefers the CG monkeys and interdimensional beings found in that movie over the cultist rituals and demonic spirits seen in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Cooked up by Indiana Jones creator George Lucas and the screenwriting team of Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, Temple of Doom is much darker in tone than its predecessor. Like Lethal Weapon 2, Back to the Future Part II, and Lucas’s own The Empire Strikes Back, the second Indiana Jones movie helped to set the trend of sequels going bleaker as a way of shaking up the formula and surprising fans. But Spielberg felt that it went too dark and looks back on Temple of Doom as his least favorite Indiana Jones adventure.
Spielberg Felt That Temple Of Doom Was Too Dark
When he named Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as his least preferred Indy adventure, Steven Spielberg said (via The Playlist) that it was “too dark, too subterranean, and much too horrific” for an Indiana Jones movie. In between the first and second Indiana Jones movies, Spielberg had co-written and co-produced the classic haunted house movie Poltergeist, and he felt that Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom had more horror elements than his actual horror movie. He said that the occult themes and demon worship of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom “out-poltered Poltergeist.”
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is full of human sacrifices and cruelty against children and hearts getting ripped out of people’s chests. A couple of snake pits and ghostly sightings aside, Raiders of the Lost Ark had set the tone of the Indiana Jones franchise as a fun, pulpy action-adventure series. The third and fourth entries in the franchise – Last Crusade and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, respectively – returned to this lively, lighthearted tone, making Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom the dark horse of the series.
Spielberg Didn't Put Any Of His Own Personality Into Temple Of Doom
Another reason why Spielberg was dissatisfied with the Indiana Jones prequel is that he felt he wasn’t able to put his own personal stamp on the material. He said, “There’s not an ounce of my own personal feeling in Temple of Doom.” Spielberg makes genre spectacles and historical epics, but there’s always something personal in them. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial explores the loneliness of a child of divorce; Schindler’s List explores the generational trauma of the Holocaust. But Spielberg couldn’t find a way to imbue the macabre antics of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom with elements of his own personality.