I took my beloved bride to see the latest Indiana Jones movie recently. I've been reading and listening to reviews that have been mostly negative. I stopped listening to reviews and projections several days ago and decided that I should see it for myself.
The best thing I can say about the experience is that we saw the trailer for The Creator. It appears to be a sci-fi flick. My beloved bride is (mostly) not a fan of sci-fi movies. She saw the trailer and put it on our shared iPhone calendar. The premise looks pretty good to both of us.
The Indiana Jones franchise has been pretty uneven thus far. Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade are masterpieces of American cinema. They are individually nearly perfectly executed films. Commentary from The Big Bang Theory notwithstanding.
I've never been a big fan of The Temple of Doom. It isn't a bad movie. It just doesn't attract me in the same way that the other two movies do. It may be that we drop into an adventure without much framing and that there isn't a great motivation for Indy to get involved. Also eating monkey brains (and other things) just isn’t in my wheelhouse.
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was a bit of a hot mess. The villain would have twirled her mustache every four seconds if she'd had a mustache. The big stunt on the nuclear bomb test range strained the limits of the suspension of disbelief. Many of the other stunts were equal tests of credulity. There are other elements that are a bit of a mess, but it was largely a decent outing.
Call it (2) installments that get an A+ and (2) that are B- movies. Now we have (3) movies in one category; B-.
Spoilers lie ahead. If you like the Indiana Jones franchise and haven't seen the movie, I encourage you to go see the movie. It is not bad. It is just flawed.
Last chance.
Here we go.
The Dial of Destiny actually starts out pretty strong. The opening scenes involve a WWII vintage Indy. They use computers to de-age Harrison Ford and use night scenes to minimize the viewer's ability to see where the CGI was done.
Indy and a new sidekick, Professor Shaw, are trying to salvage historical artifacts from the Nazi treasure trove during the closing weeks of WWII. Shaw gets caught. Indy comes to the rescue. There is an extended fight on the top of a train that requires a lot of ducking to avoid tunnels and other overhead obstacles.
There is a machine gun that ends up pointed down the line of the train that shoots up a bunch of Nazis. The odds of this happening? Quite small. But credulity is only stretched, not broken.
Our intrepid duo escaped by jumping from the train into a river at the bottom of a ravine. The height is enough to kill most people, but it's Indiana Jones!
The movie slides inexorably downhill from there.
We jump forward to 1969 where Indy is a broken man. He lives alone as a grumpy old history professor. We see that he and Marion are legally separating, but have no reasons given for the separation.
This is where many critics have a point. Hollywood in general, and Disney specifically, seems to think that we want to see the heroes of our youth return as broken men who are then "fixed" by some plucky young woman. See also "Luke Skywalker and Rey Palpatine-Skywalker" for another recent example.
We want to see our heroes being heroes. Indy was not only physically dynamic, he was mentally engaged as an archeologist and used both skill sets to move toward a justifiable objective.
Nope. We get a broken Indy.
It's also his last day at a college where he has been teaching for ten years. What happened to his prestigious position at the university? We aren't told. He retires. They throw a party and give him a chintzy clock. He gives the clock away.
Up pops Professor Shaw's plucky daughter, Helena. Her dad is dead. She's just graduated from college with a degree in...surprise...archeology with aspirations to pursue a PhD. So she's nowhere near being at the same level of knowledge and experience in the field as Indy. But sure, why not. Let's slap these two together to dig around for historical artifacts.
Here's a second place where other critics have a point. Helena is largely a purposeless character. Is she supposed to be a savior? A schemer? A thief? A voice for morals in action? A femme fatale? A pure heart? A beauty worthy of her presumed namesake? The character ends up trying to be everything and ends up being compromised as a result.
Quite frankly the character of Helena is emblematic of the rest of the movie. She goes on an adventure but doesn't really change as a result. There isn't any proof that the experience has shifted her character. Honestly, the same goes for Indy. The hero went on a journey, but not a hero's journey.
So Helena is digging for the Dial of Destiny (Archimedes' Dial - aka the Antikythera). The long story made short, she knew Indy had half of the Dial and was scheming to get him to show it to her. So she could steal it.
A quick pause to note that the humming noise is Henry Jones Sr. spinning in his grave knowing that his son learned nothing in their adventure together. All Indy had to do was to play stupid about the existence of his part of the Dial. Pat Helena on the head and wish her well in her search. Nope. He pulls it out of hiding and shows it to her. So she can steal it. It would have been safer with the Marx brothers.
Our villain is a German scientist from WWII who has been given shelter by the US in exchange for his knowledge of rocketry. He gets the US to the moon and in exchange, he gets a small detail of agents to help him pursue stuff. In this case, [he wants to pursue] Helena Shaw. For…reasons, I guess.
Helena steals the Dial just as the bad guy’s crew breaks into the college. She eludes the bad guy’s crew. Indy is captured. A chase is on. Eventually, Indy escapes which extends the chase even further.
This brings up yet another problem with the movie. It is a bit bloated. All of the set pieces are overdone and go on for too long.
On a related note, most of the chase was shot in a green screen environment. There are extended scenes of Indy racing along a New York City parade in an attempt to elude his pursuers. If the scenes had been shot in NYC, then we would have seen the photos. It is impossible to block off that much of the city without someone snapping some photos.
The whole thing was whipped up on a computer and, frankly, it looks like it.
Helena gets away. Indy gets away. He runs into Sallah who tells him about the only black market event for antiquities on the planet which must be where Helena is going. The bad guy comes to the same conclusion based on tracking Helena’s airline ticket purchase. Coincidences abound!
While it is good to see Sallah, it is immediately apparent that any real action is physically beyond John Rhys-Davies ability. The movie is supposed to be a loving send-off for Indy so they have to get the gang back together somehow. The result of having Sallah show up reduced to being little more than a taxi driver and momentary plot driver is just a little sad.
But movie magic isn’t enough to overcome aging actors. The same is true of Harrison Ford. He doesn’t do a ton of physical acting in the movie, but even those limited bits break believability because an actor who is north of 80 years old just isn’t going to be convincing at it.
Off everyone goes to North Africa (Algiers? Tangier? Morocco? Meh.) Helena is there trying to sell off an incomplete dial. Indy shows up to stop it. The bad guy and company show up at some point.
A modest edit. I neglected to mention Helena's one-off shot at capitalism. Having stolen something and then trying to sell it, she equates her actions with capitalism. It grates like a bell a 1/4 step out of tune or nails on a chalkboard. Erg.
In an homage to Raiders, Indy gets in a fight where he pulls out his whip. Everyone else in the room pulls out a gun. Indy ducks a hail of gunfire and we are off on another green screen chase spectacle. It looks fake. It goes on twice as long as needed.
Part of the reason why it goes on for so long is that they decided to introduce a gangster that is lovesick for Helena. He joins in the chase as well because he wants Helena for some odd reason. It’s just a pointless arc that serves no real purpose beyond illustrating Helena’s lack of character and penchant for using people for her own petty purposes.
As with Harrison Ford’s age breaking any credulity in his stunts, this chase illustrates Hollywood’s current penchant for believing that anyone can do anything. The actress that plays Helena Shaw, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, simply is unable to convincingly express the physicality that her stunts imply. Later in the movie, she will hang out of a bomb bay door by those slender arms with a full-grown man grasping at her legs.
The only belief involved here is disbelief.
Off they all go to the Aegean to find the rest of the Dial or directions to wherever it is. They get there and find a graphikos made of wood and wax that has spent a couple of millennia submerged in salt water. It comes out of the water in pretty good shape considering what saltwater typically does to wood.
The bad guy somehow shows up just in time to capture the team and the graphikos. He persuades Helena to translate the text with a bit of bribery and shooting a background character or two. While translating the text, Helena slips Indy an explosive which allows them to escape while stranding the bad guy in the middle of the sea.
The bad guy…let me pause for a moment to appreciate the performance of Mads Mikkelsen as the German scientist Voller. Mads is a great actor. He does a good job with what he is given which isn’t nearly as much as the bad guys in either Raiders or Crusade. At least he wasn’t handed a near cartoonish role such as from Temple of Doom or Crystal Skull. Mad props to Mads for a good performance.
The bad guy somehow divines that our team is headed to Sicily. Seriously, this guy is a mathematician and physicist. The historical nuances of Archimedes are likely not going to be something he would have close at hand. They could have saved a good twenty minutes by just allowing everyone to go from Tangier to Sicily.
Once there, our team wanders in some caverns until they find Archimedes' tomb. This is where Indy practices the limited amount of archeology that the writers gave him. He uses his knowledge of Archimedes to figure out the trap/lock on the tomb. They find Archimedes with the other half of the Dial (and a previously unmentioned center pin).
The corpse also happens to have a very modern watch on its wrist. There’s a bit of time travel coming up. But the director makes sure to rub the watch in the viewer’s face to make sure everyone gets it. “Hey guys, look! Time travel! Tiiiimmme Travelllll!! Watch the watch!”. Treating your audience as being smart enough to get it without being led by the nose is apparently out of style in Hollywood.
The bad guys show up and reassemble the Dial. Off they go to find an airplane. The clock predicts rifts in time. The current rift that is about to appear theoretically links 1969 with 1939. Voller (psst, the bad guy) wants to go back in time and “fix” all the mistakes that Hitler and the Third Reich made so the Nazis can win WWII.
He has the Dial, but for some odd reason, he takes Indy along for the ride. There isn’t any good reason why they don’t shoot Indy and company in Archimedes’ tomb, but that would stop the movie, so off they go.
Helena and her sidekick follow along. Voller has a WWII vintage bomber ready to go. How did he know the rift would be in the air? I don’t know. Why would Archimedes build a device to locate rifts that could not be reached in his time? I don’t know. We have a movie to make here!
Helena manages to climb aboard the bomber as it takes off and wriggles through the wings and into the fuselage. The wings are typically where the fuel is stored, so I have no idea how the engines were working.
The bad guys put on Nazi uniforms. They go through the rift in the bomber. There’s a tussle. Indy gets shot in the shoulder. It doesn’t really matter, mostly.
It turns out that Archimedes had not accounted for continental drift. As a result, the bomber pops out on the other side of the rift over Syracuse in 212 BC. Various flavors of massive missile weapons launch harpoons at the bomber scoring fatal hits to the aircraft. Why is it flying that low? Stupid pilot.
Flying that low, no one should be able to bail out. Somehow, Indy, with a shoulder wound, wriggles into a parachute harness and holds onto Helena long enough for them to jump and parachute to the ground. She’s holding onto him, too. That doesn’t make it any better. The bomber crashes killing the bad guy and his crew. Note the obvious wrist with the aforementioned wristwatch hanging out of the wreckage.
They meet Archimedes. Indy says he has nothing left to live for in NYC. We get a bit of exposition. Mutt died in the Vietnam War. Marion was so distraught that she left Indy. All those unanswered questions from early on get brief, tell-me-don’t-show-me answers.
He lived his life as an archeologist studying history. Here is his chance to not just study it, but to live it. Helena knocks him out with one punch…again, not believable unless Helena was portrayed by Gina Carano…and Indy wakes up in his New York apartment with a bandaged shoulder.
Helena’s sidekick had flown a small plane through the rift. The plane was stolen. Fortunately, the owner (and legit pilot) was sleeping in the back so he could land, pick up Indy and Helena, and fly them all back through the rift to 1969. How convenient!
The movie ends with Marion in the kitchen putting away groceries. Why? She came back. Why?
Seriously, why did she come back? Nothing about her situation changed. Her son is still dead. Indy hasn’t changed, he just has some more miles on his body. But here she is. If she was always willing to come back, then she wouldn’t have gone so far as to get a separation decree from the courts. Which is totally a thing that women routinely did in the 1960s.
The movie began strong, and the ending is strong even if it is entirely unearned. In an homage to Raiders, Marion complains about the aches associated with growing old. Except for her forehead, which Indy kisses. And her elbow, which Indy kisses. You know the rest. And here I am weeping big man tears just recalling the scene that had me weeping big man tears in the theater.
A brief pause here to suggest that they could have stripped the extraneous Indy-whipping dross from the front end of the movie to show Marion as distraught over the loss of Mutt. Let them have an argument that implies a potential separation. Let us see Indy in a moment of failure so that his later redemption is somewhat earned.
And the movie ends. Adventures were had despite the tissue-thin reasoning that occurred from time to time. Characters moved around a bit, but they didn’t learn anything or exhibit any significant change. There were few quiet moments for the audience to process and reflect upon what they had just witnessed. The movie moved from one spectacle to the next in a rush that overwhelms rather than entertains the audience.
One of those critics I mentioned early on was a YouTube account called The Critical Drinker. If the above sounds negative, then don’t listen to his take on the movie. Woo. Now that’s negative!!
He’s got a bit of a thing towards Kathleen Kennedy. I’m not saying he’s wrong, just that he goes a bit overboard from time to time.
Good narratives involve conflict. The Critical Drinker embraces and highlights the conflict of the culture wars. Ms. Kennedy's stewardship of the Lucasfilms portion of Disney has been less than stellar. It isn't the end of Western civilization. He needs to have a sense of scale.
If you check out his channel, you will also find a number of videos that praise modern Hollywood movies that exhibit good writing. You will even find a few where he fixes characters and plots by stripping away the Hollywood-induced crap and then restores the hero’s journey to the plot
John W. Campbell might have been a bit of an arse on certain topics, but he knew how to tell a good story and he knew how to train/edit writers to tell good stories. Hollywood could use a second coming of Campbell along with a rediscovery of respect for their customers/audience.
In any case, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is crammed full of spectacles. If all you seek is an “Oh look at that action”, then this movie is for you! If you want to see heroes go on a journey where they experience failure and growth, then this movie is bound to disappoint.
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