With the internet already prepared to pour some Haterade on next year’s “Ready Player One,” it’s worth remembering that Steven Spielberg is not unfamiliar with delivering below expectations. There was the misfire “1941” and some would say even last year’s “The BFG” missed the mark, but for the filmmaker, there’s another movie that sticks in his craw.
Director Susan Lacy, who helmed the upcoming HBO documentary “Spielberg,” reveals that “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” is the director’s least favorite film in that franchise.
It’s not exactly a shock. The movie is tedious at best, casually kinda racist, and certainly the least interesting of those films (yes, and includes “Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull“) and tonally off base. While Spielberg’s dismissal of ‘Doom’ might be new to some, he’s spoken about his dislike of the movie before.
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“I wasn’t happy with the second film at all. It was too dark, too subterranean, and much too horrific. I thought it out-poltered ‘Poltergeist.’ There’s not an ounce of my own personal feeling in ‘Temple of Doom,’ ” he told the Sun-Sentinel back in 1989, just five years after it was released. Maybe it’s not such a surprise that the next film, “Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade,” would be firmly in Spielberg’s wheelhouse with a father/son story.
At any rate, it’s an interesting nugget from what’s sure to be a fascinating documentary when it airs on October 7th. [New York Daily News]