I can see that perspective, but for me as a nine-year-old (and for my children at around the same age, not to mention all my classmates and other children I've known who saw the film), we saw it as a simple good versus evil fantasy. The extreme viciousness of the villains may be horrid, but it is easy for a child to understand. Indiana Jones in this film is a straightforward hero, almost out of a fairy tale, saving children from slavery in a world with more cruelty than Dickens. By contrast, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indy is a darker character; essentially a graverobber who twice abandons Marion in his obsessive pursuit of the Ark (a "shadowy reflection" of Belloq, as he points out). I think that is one of several reasons why Raiders of the Lost Ark remains the best Indiana Jones film by some distance.