There are a couple of prolonged chaotic scenes with awful white-noisy music and sound effects in the first 20 minutes, making the fast-paced action quite irritating at times.
It gets a lot more interesting as the plot thickens about half an hour in.
It gets a bit gruesome for a moment as a pregnant snake is cut open and its babies slither out, while talking about human sacrifice, before serving up decapitated monkey heads for desert. Some people will understand the sick metaphors at work here. Shades of Marina Abramović. Nasty death & fire obsessed cult rituals led by horned men take place about an hour into the movie. There’s really not much archaeology in this one.
Overall though, the movie is not bad, the ending is decent, it didn’t just fade off like so many movies do after starting out well.
Harrison Ford does well as Indiana Jones, the star of the movie; as does his sidekick, an adopted Chinese boy called Short Round, played very well by Ke Huy Quan who almost stole the show!
Kate Capshaw also does alright as the lead female in this movie – her performance was pretty good and her level of appeal was just satisfactory for the role, which may have been the plan so as not to detract from the near slapstick adventure genre, although there’s probably a higher chance that the director Steven Spielberg thoroughly adored her since he eventually married her in 1991.