Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

The last quarter of an hour is the only passage where some nostalgia works, and if I were the narrator, I would be much more uncompromising in my completion of Dr. Jones's life's journey. I would have found it much more emotional and logical (connoisseurs know). The rest is inconsistent to say the least. The opening with the train when there's palpable CGI rushing at you from all sides, is not enjoyable, it makes you remember with sadness the train opening of The Last Crusade, where Spielberg didn't need computers (understandably) and it worked much better. The tediously long chase in Tangier again, given the long takes, looks as if the local streets are empty of cars and people and as long as airport runways, I didn't believe it for a second. And that's how it is with everything. It's just such a see-and-forget feel-good movie most of the time, about on the level of the overwrought fourth film. Otherwise, the much-criticized Phoebe Waller-Bridge was fine, she has such a mischievous charisma and is a great counterpoint to the curmudgeonly Harrison Ford, and actually entertained me the most out of the whole film. (09/01/2023)

I've had that famous John Williams tune playing in my head for about two hours now, and not because I enjoyed the fifth Indy so much, but rather because I'm in the mood to watch the first three episodes. I'll never watch the fifth one again, I'm almost certain of that. It’s not a completely bad movie, which could be said of the fourth, but it's just not “it”. The new Indy is carried by Harrison Ford and he's really trying his best, but he's just left on his own and he’s obstructed by everything else. The Fifth Indiana Jones film is visually bland and in some moments regularly repulsive, but mostly it has a boring story full of boring characters, and especially the bad guys are a bunch of uninteresting bums who are impossible to be scared of – Mads Mikkelsen is looking like he's about to start crying the whole time. Moreover, the treasure hunt itself leading up to the very weird (and slightly uglier) finale consists mostly of routine chases, because someone figured they couldn't have an 80-year-old Ford running around the set doing action shenanigans. James Mangold directs it all with no attempt at invention, and the result is at best a passable piece of craftsmanship somewhere on the level of National Treasure: Book of Secrets and a tiny bit above Uncharted, which is definitely not praise for this franchise. It lacks the style, the inventiveness and the evident joy that accompanied the first three films and, to some extent, the fourth. A product without soul. (06/28/2023)

When I think back over the last three months of movies I've seen in the cinema, Indiana Jones comes out as the weakest. Objectively, it might have been worth 3 stars, but I struggled for the first time in a long time and the film failed to engage or captivate me at all. If I look at my watch at least five times in the cinema during a film, I can't give it more than 2 stars. Indiana Jones is not my favorite franchise even though I grew up on it, but I wasn't too pleased with Mangold. The acting is not bad, though Mads Mikkelsen is terribly bland when he's supposed to play the bad guy. Harrison Ford is likeable but didn't entertain me, and I liked Boyd Holbrook but he didn't have much to play here. I didn't enjoy the action scenes, they were digital and lacked pizzazz (the car chase was good though), and when it came to the adventure rides it was one of the highlights (the eel scene was probably the best), but there were only two such scenes in total. The humour was completely absent and I found the plot also quite uninteresting and not very engaging. At home I would probably have turned it off, for me it was an exhausting movie. 4/10. (07/08/2023)

Not great, not terrible. At the start, when we flashback to World War II and a Wehrmacht officer shines a flashlight in the face of a clearly digital Indy, who squints his eyes everywhere but where he's supposed to, it's a bit scary, but thankfully after a few minutes the train (literally) does slowly move forward and we get a few jokes, solid action and imaginative locations. The dogged effort to honor the unique retro-adventure concept of the saga is evident at every turn, but not always entirely necessary or appropriate. Hats off to Ford, who pulls off some incredible stunts for an octogenarian. On the other hand, I believe this film will probably flop in theaters even if Indy stands on its head. Because it's too uninteresting for the young generation, with an uninteresting, generic pulled out of thin air, and the older viewers would rather watch The Last Crusade, which doesn't need try to go back to its roots, because it’s right there. (07/15/2023)

The actors and John Williams’ musical motif are pleasing and Harrison Ford’s de-aging is great. The surprise in the climax is more acceptable than the nonsense with the aliens in the last instalment. But the ubiquitous digital, when even a tuk-tuk cruising the narrow Moroccan alleys is not real, is something that I DO NOT WANT in an Indiana Jones movie. Because I still love the films of the original trilogy for their inventive and honest filmmaking. This routine in which filmmakers don’t have to be creative in their craft because the CGI post-production does everything for them is the complete opposite of Spielberg’s original approach. And the potential of every scene suffers because of that. (08/14/2023)