The doom of Indiana Jones was everything

It's very problematic. It's full of so much casual racism and sexism that it is genuinely painful to watch parts of it right now, has a lot of distasteful colonial bullshit, and everyone seems to agree that it's needlessly bloody for a kids movie. 

But Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom has always been my favourite Indy film, and while the trailer for the new one looks better than anybody expected, it always will be.

When it came out in 1984, I was nine years old and all about the Doom. Indiana Jones was my whole world and while I had been just a bit too young for Raiders of the Lost Ark when it first rolled through theatres, I was at the perfect age for the sequel.

I saw it first at the cinema in the Octagon that they later wiped out to put up the Hoyts multiplex. I was visiting relatives in Dunedin and convinced my family to drop me off to see it twice in one week because it was just the most amazing thing I'd ever seen in my young life that did not involve spaceships - funny, thrilling and slick.

It was over the top and loud, and the punches always landed with the most satisfying crunch. It had Harrison Ford at his absolute prime - I would absolutely 100% go gay for Indy - and the violence that people were worried would corrupt young minds wasn't anything worse than the carnage I was reading in 2000ad every week.

Raiders of the Lost Ark was weirdly unavailable on video tape in my corner of the world, and I didn't see it until 1987, when it came on broadcast TV for the first time. It was brilliant, with the rising escalation in the final third of the film, but it didn't feel as confident as the second film, which had less to prove. 

The Last Crusade was loads of fun, but I lived out in the country when that came out and had to wait for home video on that too. Apart from Temple of Doom, the Crystal Skull was the only other Indy I ever saw at the cinema, and it really didn't do anything for me, until the bit at the end where Indy is silhouetted against a massive rupture in space-time. Sometimes an epic shot like that is all I need.

So it's always been Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for me. After those initial screenings I had to make do with the few Marvel comics with the character I could get my hands on (one, with art from an extremely unlikely David Mazzucchelli, particularly blew my mind). Like every other kid of the same age, I begged my parents to get me a whip, and were lucky if we could get our hands on a battered old hat that looked something like Indy's. 

All these years later, I still just a chill from that immortal theme music from John Williams, and recently realised that we gave both our kids names with the exact same syllable structure as Indiana Jones, and am way more proud of that than I should be.

And I know that when I go to see the Dial of Destiny, I might only find the barest traces of the love I had for those movies when I walked up the massive stairs at that Octagon theatre. But like any good archeologist will tell you, you can still get a lot of those kinds of ruins.