Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Well...

We loved it! 

[Possible spoilers follow, although no plot reveals.]

A first impressions, no-spoiler review follows... 

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It's equal parts nostalgia - the mix of adventure, humor and character moments that you expect from an Indy film - and looking forward, with a thematic undertow of the experiences of aging thread throughout. I thought it worked really well, although I can imagine audiences expecting a big supernatural climx might be disappointed. It's not so much supernatural as science-fictiony, but we'll come to that. 

Unlike - say - Picard S3, where the character is virtually unrecognisable compared to how he's been portrayed in the past, this is the same Indy, reassuringly so in a 20-minute teaser set in 1944 and the last months of WWII. 

The film doesn't exactly examine the ravages of age, or of the life of an adventurer well lived, but there are moments of heartfelt emotion that arise from some of Indy's regrets, and Harrison Ford is... well, he's perfect. Indy is still a hero, a reluctant one at this age, but he just can't help himself, and the initial world-weariness Ford gives to Indy lends a real emotion to proceedings. 

The action set pieces looked a little digital to my eyes in places, but I can accept all that if the performances are there, and we get an utterly superb Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Helena, Toby Jones as her Dad and a couple of other cameos that will tug at your heart strings. Plus there's Ethann Isidore's Teddy, a non-annoying youth sidekick who is charming and actually has an effect on the plot.

If I have a nit, it's that Mads Mikkelsen's Nazi villain Jürgen Voller is played perhaps a little too coldly straight. Mikkelsen is an actor I love, so I was slightly confounded by that, but when you compare him to Paul Freeman's Belloq or Julian Glover's Donovan, it feels like there was room to go a little larger. 

The climax is nuts. It's a thematic showdown between Indy's raison-d-être and real life, real life being those we care for and the decisions we made that fuel memories of both regret and pride. I feel there's a cheat of sorts here, because there are things we don't see and are invited to fill in for ourselves via a literal blackout, but it felt like the sort of dramatic about-face that a script needs to pull sometimes to give you the kind of epilogue this film wants to give its title character. It does succeed in doing that, and it absolutely pressed all my buttons the right way, because I was mess in that final reel. 

Sometimes, nostalgia if handled with care and as a narrative tool working in tandem with other dramatic elements, can be really effective, as it is here. If this indeed Indy's last hurrah, it's a fine one to go out on. 

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I'm sure I'll see it again and may add further thoughts then. 

I think me and the bairn liked it more than you, Sehlat, even though I agree with every single crit you cover in this seriously great and considered review. 

Imma come back tomorrow and write more coz I'm in a rush today, but I'll just say that I was in a forgiving mood and the movie hit me in all the right ways, despite that climax. (That's a longer convo!) 

I think my enjoyment of this instalment is so tied up with many personal reasons that the Indy movies have for me, and that final scene just floored me. I kinda knew it was coming, even though I'd successfully avoided all spoilers. 

It's far from being a perfect ending, but the fact that I'm still thinking about it five days after I saw it mean something. I think I'm gonna go see it again before it vanishes from theatres. That's something I rarely if ever do anymore...! 

That final scene left me with the appropriate glow, even if the rest was a bit more problematic for me.  All the same, it was far from the train wreck of the last one, or the darkly racist nightmare of "Temple of Doom," so for ending the franchise well enough, I give it props.

I dunno...

Only you can know! 

I worried that it would be terrible, but I found a lot to love. It's not perfect and there's things I wish had been done slightly differently, but I enjoyed it a helluva lot more than I do a lot of other big tentpole movies these days. For me, Harrison Ford's performance was worth the price of entry alone.

But, as always, YMMV... 

It should be noted that I'm someone who tends to say out loud, "There is only one good Indiana Jones film, and that's Raiders."

In truth, when I rewatched all of them prior to this one, I enjoyed them all way more than any old guy in his mid-fifties has any right to.  Even Crystal Skull. I do think that Dial of Destiny is a hell of a lot better than that one, but if you're going to scale it, I find the whole Indy saga way more interesting and involving than most other big movie franchises. 

Ah, sorry you didn't enjoy it.

I think you're absolutely right about the action scenes. They had none of the flair and brilliant composition of the Spielberg film equivalents. I mean, the giant rolling ball and truck chase or Flying Wing fight from Raiders, the mine car chase in Doom, the boat and tank chases in Last Crusade. They're all so memorable. By comparison, the top of the train chase in the opening sequence of Dial was swamped in this kind of digital murk where it was sometimes hard to figure out what was going on - although this is a problem that plagues a lot of modern action sequences to my mind. Compare that sequence to the one in the opening teaser of Crusade with young Indy where he's hopping across train cars and falling into the cages of the zoo animals. You understand everything that's happening. I can barely remember the tuk-tuk chase in Dial's Tangier.

What lifted the film for me - and what I'm still recalling - is Ford's performance and his deeper characterisation of Indiana Jones. I really believed in this older Indy, regretful but still heroic, still trying to do the right thing, still fighting Nazis. I do need to see it again, to really place it, but it felt like a more honest outro for the character than the ending of Crystal Skull. 

For years, I'd say that there was really only one good Indiana Jones film, which for me is Raiders. Which is not to say I don't also really enjoy Last Crusade, which I think is the other genuinely decent one. (I just think the ending is kind of lame.)

But I rewatched all four just before Dial and realised how much I like the character, and watching Ford play him, no matter what. Even Crystal Skull. Even Doom, which I think is the one I like the least. So, just seeing him in action and giving him a happy ending of sorts gave me a good feeling as I left the movie theatre. 

I'll take that, given that most things I see I forget a nanosecond after viewing. I'm just not sure capitalist culture wants stories to be memorable anymore. They just want people to pay money for momentary hits. Everything is fragmentary. 

I had no problem with his portrayal; a more somber persona given his age. There were some scenes that had that weight of his age on him. For example, when Wombat and the kid are whooping it up after the boat scene only for Indy to remind them that his friend died. That was brilliant....but that was it. There was no follow up to that. None of the other characters seem to have been affected by that emotional opening of a rather closed off character. And then we're off to the next scene completely forgetting this principal character's vulnerability that was ripe for dramatic content. 

I don't expect Indiana Jones to be drama but there could have been more weighty material given his age and audience. I can't see anyone under 30 bothering with such a movie unless they've been indoctrinated by a parent, you know?

I liked the ending of Skull for them. They got married and the adventures continue. Despite all the flaws of Skull that's the one saving grace it had in getting both of them together. This movie robs that by creating a separation(that is only off screen) and by repeating a scene from Raiders when they get back together. Felt very cheap to me. We don't feel that emotional hit of their separation, of their son's death. 

Ok. I'll just be quiet now. 

Completely agree. He's a master of the subtextual (as evidenced by his extraordinary creative relationship with both John Williams and Michael Kahn) but his visual storytelling skills are supreme. I know Crystal Skull gets a lot of criticism for "too much CGI", and it does call attention to itself more than the analog ILM FX do in the earlier films, but you always comprehend exactly what's going on.  

I haven't managed to see it again, which I want to (and that hasn't happened in years), but my impression of her character was that she seemed a bit "out of time." That is, I liked her, but I did get the sense that she was written as more of a 1940s olde worlde adventuress than a child of the sixties.

My shopping list of wants for a final Indy movie didn't match up with Mangold's at all - I certainly would've wished for a much larger role for Karen Allen's Marion, who I still think is a huge reason why the first movie is held in such high esteem. I also still feel bemused by where the ending went, but coulda, shoulda, woulda. For me that's actually true of every Indy film since Raiders, so Dial is weirdly in synch with my perceptions of the other three sequels. I think I've come to appreciate the series on those terms.