Indiana Jones & Dial of Destiny (SPOILERS) — Review Thread

I actually can't disagree with you there. People -- including myself who doesn't like the prequels still on a recent rewatch -- do seem to have a more forgiving tone for those movies now because they actually tried to stand on their own legs and not just regurgitate the original trilogy unlike the Disney movies. The prequels and Crystal Skull -- which I also recently rewatched -- are not good movies but they are memorable for their whacky absurdity (fridge scene, monkey swinging scene, Jar Jar, basically every moment in Attack of the Clones) so I guess that's better than being safe and boring. Does that actually make Crystal Skull better than Dial of Destiny because it was more adventurous? I don't think so, but I think you're right that the sentiment towards it might change or in the least it'll be ranked higher than Dial of Destiny. The Kennedy regime is not winning over anybody with these play it safe films, and I for one would not be sad to see someone else take the reins over at Lucasfilm.

And would I be up for a Mutt/Short Round movie? Fuck yes I would. Fuck yes I would.

Rewatching all the Indy movies before this one, while Temple of Doom has its shortcomings (thanks to the team that would soon us bring us Howard the Duck) one thing for sure is that Short Round fucking rocks. Indy is kind of a dope in Temple of Doom, and Short Round is there to bail him out every step of the way. Remember that scene where Short Round punches the shit out of that little prince while Indy is decking a guy? Short Round is the best sidekick of the bunch. That's right, better than Sean Connery. I fucking said it.

I vote Kathleen Kennedy out and Doomsday in if he promises the first order of business is a Short Round show.

Let's get a series bible going to have on Doomsday 's desk by Monday.

The only reason that shitty teenage biker gang will be in the Short Round show is if he gets to kill them all.

They're not good enough for Howard the Duck. That's how terrible they were.

This is the innovative thinking that made us back you for Lucasfilm president.

The math teacher likes the movie with math.

The two teachers liked it.

I can't say I was particularly interested in a Spielberg-less Indiana Jones movie made in 2023. The appeal of the series can largely be boiled down to two factors. The first is the character himself is a pretty awesome power fantasy, but one that's largely lost when the character is in his eighties, and in the magic of Spielberg's talents for set-pieces and visual storytelling, which is obviously lacking when the man isn't there. That's no disrespect to James Mangold, who is also a very good director, but he isn't Spielberg. More than just those cinematic abilities though, one of the few things that might have made a fifth Indiana Jones interesting is simply the question of if the elderly Spielberg could still make a bare-knuckled badass action movie. Good or bad, the auteurist perspective would have at least given me a lot to think about. Instead, we have our first Indy film from a new director, and the first (and likely only, given the box-office) Indiana Jones movie from Disney. How did it turn out?

Fine I guess. This is a tricky film to review given I mostly had fun with it and probably like it more than most people, but I also think it's kind of mediocre and falls well short of the original trilogy. It's not even that there's really anything glaringly wrong with Dial of Destiny so much that I can only get so excited about the things that work. The action scenes, for example, are reasonably entertaining (I especially like the car chase in Tangier) but they're never that exciting or inventive. They get the job done well enough but it's a shame that a franchise that used to be the name in action-adventure filmmaking is now only on-par. The new cast members do a good job, especially Phoebe Waller-Bridge who is utterly charming and confident on-screen, but the screenplay takes short cuts with her character that aren't justified by the material, starting one way before inexplicably changing when the story needs her to. The film does a more thoughtful job of introducing an aging Indy than Crystal Skull ever did and is probably the film that treats him most as a character and not a concept, but then doesn't really know how to satisfy that arc. The end scene is not the worst idea in theory but it isn't earned in context. The film takes a big wacky risk in its climax that I personally liked a lot, but then just kind of fizzles out.

Hence, my dilemma. In the context of Indiana Jones, this is a modest disappointment. As an afternoon outing to the movie theater, however, I did enjoy myself well enough.

B-

You don’t own it in 4K. Part of your collection alongside Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Yea id say it was fine. Wanted a better finale for the bad guys, just crashing the plane is kinda... Anticlimactic. But otherwise I was pretty into it.

That $130 million actually seems low.