Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)
I had zero interest in paying to see this godawful looking insult but I clicked play the instant it was free to watch on somebody else's Disney+. It's difficult to access whether this is worse or better than
'Kingdom of the Crystal Skull' because I hated it for different reasons and I've kind of made peace with that misfire over the years. The
'Dial of Destiny' script is a mess, written by committee. The most moronic moment is when Helena says Archimedes' ship sank
"filled with the skeletons of over a hundred Centurions". Either implying the little Roman galley somehow sank with over ten thousand men on board, or the dim writers obviously think "Centurion" is a synonym for "Legionary", when they were actually the commander of 100 Legionaries (cent = 100).
Phoebe Waller-Bridge is quite fun as new sidekick that all these movies have but I never got the sense of why she is like she is, or how she relates to Indy. If only the script had placed her younger self at the centre of the prologue we could've seen some evidence for why she wants to be the same as Indy and why she wants to be different. This franchise already effortlessly did that kind of thing in the third film's prologue with young Indy and the older adventurer trying to steal the cross of Coronado.
So much time (screen and production) and money clearly went into the 20-minute long intro, you wonder if the whole film was just a scam so Disney could get a digital clone of young Harrison in the bank, ready to exploit in future corporate products, with the full input and cooperation of the elderly star before he passes on. That youth FX is amazing, not perfect, but as close to perfect as de-aging has got so far, visually anyway. Unfortunately Harrison doesn't do enough to moderate his ageing voice, or movements to completely nail it. It might've helped the illusion that the whole sequence around him looked hideously phoney. The brief use of the Raiders theme over a ghastly digi-double shot of fake-Indy running across a train roof only served to underline the non-excitement of the sequence.
The use of the famous transition shot where Indy gets on a plane that's superimposed over a map with a red line is perhaps emblematic of why Director
James Mangold got this film so wrong. It features a slick updated 3D CGI version of the idea. Those map shots were originally designed to look completely dated, who other than an idiot would seek to modernise, something that's supposed to look old fashioned. You're not referencing something from a 1981 film, you're referencing something from decades before that.
John Rhys-Davies (and the writers) double down on the iffy stereotyped portrayal of Sallah they did in the 3rd film, so he's not just wearing a fez, he's in the full ethnic clobber and driving a New York cab, instead of working at a museum, or lecturing in archaeology, as befits the important character introduced in Raiders.
The finale is bonkers and ill-advised but I did at least find myself becoming engaged with the story because it was doing something different with the franchise. So I couldn't so easily say
"this is just like another thing I've seen before but incalculably worse" e.g. 1983's
'Octopussy's had a thrilling tuk-tuk chase done for real, so DoD's ersatz green screen version of the same could not look more lame. By the end of the film it had all got very convoluted so excuse me if I've got this wrong but... if Archimedes could not have factored continental drift into his calculations, then how could he have designed a device that brought people back to the exact time he intended? I guess the script hopes the viewer's attention span is less than the couple of minutes that separates these two pieces of temporal exposition.
