New Indiana Jones movie! Amazing!

It seemed that we will never got another one after Last Crusade Kingdom of the Crystal Skull! 15 years already! I’ve always been a great fan of the character, and of course I had to go watch the new adventure.

What’s my opinion? Well… it’s fine. Is it GREAT? I don’t think so. But it’s a fun and enjoyable adventure movie, 100% worth watching. Does it raise to the level of the best instalments of the saga? No, but because those are the best of the best in their genre, and arguable some of the best movies of the last 50 years.

Raiders of the Lost Ark is an absolute masterclass in pace, cinematography and action pieces, and a movie that spawned countless clones with leather-jacketed adventurers in the jungle. Last Crusade is a perfect comedic adventure full of soul with a bulletproof script.

Dial of Destiny is pretty solid, and, in comparison with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (the universally considered weaker of the first four movies), it’s pretty consistent. It maintains a good level all the time. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is irregular in comparison. It has great heights, like the motorbike chase scene, and astonishingly ridiculous lows, like the infamous “vine swinging in the jungle” one.
I appreciate Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for trying to update the setting from the 30’s serials to the 50’s B-movies about aliens, with the background of the “red scare”. But it’s a big risk that ultimately doesn’t pay off as well as it should when looking at the series as a whole.

Compared to that, Dial of Destiny fits more traditionally in the “Indy feel”. There’s evil Nazis and a couple of McGuffin artefacts to chase around the world. Though it takes place in the end of the sixties, there’s no effort in updating the movie to include elements of a period-accurate Bond movie.

From here on, we move to SPOILER territories. If you want to keep up to here, the basics are “The movie is fun and worth watching in a movie theatre if you’re a fan of the character, but it’s not going to blow your mind“

Now, on to the spoilers-filled section, with a list of things I liked and things I didn’t like, always in my personal opinion!

Things I liked!

• Mads Mikkelsen is a fantastic villain! He’s definitively composing a character that’s a worthy opponent with a subtle menacing interpretation. While Nazis in Indiana Jones movies are always the comic-book villains, reserving the main villain character to someone motivated on pretty mundane things (like money in the case of Bellocq or eternal life in case of Donovan), here Jurgen Voller is a menacing villain that wants Germany to win World War II.
• The CGI process to make Harrison Ford look younger is incredible. Is it perfect? It is not, in particular because he may look like a younger person, but he still moves like himself. But I’d say that we are now approaching the other side of the uncanny valley.
• The movie is clearly influenced by Fate of Atlantis. The locations are surprisingly close to the ones on the game. The Ancient Greek clockwork elements. The episodic structure of “going to place A, do something, then going to place B”. Translating Dial of Destiny into an old LucasArts adventure game would be pretty straight forward. I really LOVE Fate of Atlantis, so this to me is a plus.
• Harrison Ford. Not only he is fit enough to perform as Indiana Jones at least 10 years younger than he actually is and be believable punching bad guys in the face. But he also delivers a great performance, especially when the script allows for it, at the beginning and at the end of the movie. I don’t know if Disney would recast the character, or recreate him digitally if technology allows it, but Indiana Jones IS Harrison Ford.
• The sound effects. The whole series has incredible sound effects. In particular, a very peculiar way of making punches sound.
• Antonio Banderas! Sorry, I just love the guy.

Things that I liked less!

• I think that the full theme, that Indy needs to stop living in the past and live in the present is not fully developed during most of the movie. It is very clearly stated both and the end and at the start, but the central section is too frantic and it’s not consistently present. They don’t allow Indy to look frail, fallible, or out of time for most of the movie, which should have landed better the ending.
• Too much CGI and too little stunts. Don’t get me wrong, the CGI is fantastic. But an Indiana Jones movie demands truly impressive stunt work, filmed in long, clear takes to totally appreciate it. The “short and furious” edition work doesn’t fit the style, in my opinion. This could be more my particular critique of recent movies, where the widespread usage of CGI and colour correction makes everything less believable, having a sort of “fake” quality.
  The final scene with the big battle in full CGI is probably the worst offender
• James Mangold is a great director, but he’s not Steven Spielberg. Spielberg is a true master of composition and cinematography, and in his four Indiana Jones movies everything looks bigger-than-life, full of iconic shots. Even regular stuff like the start of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, with hot-rods driving through the desert looks amazing. I can’t remember a particular frame or element that stuck iconic in Dial of Destiny, even if everything is totally correct. I think it lacks, for the lack of a better word, grandeur.

Nitpicks!

• Please, more comedy! There are a few things that are funny, in particular lines, but I would expect a bit more of it.
• I found funny that the movie looks like Fate of Atlantis (an adventure videogame) and then, in the last “Nazis vs Romans” part, it becomes an advanced Civilization game with an old culture facing an industrialised one!
• The last scene also misses the opportunity to show some Romans performing the Roman Salute (Ave!) and some Nazis responding with the Nazi one. If Spielberg was able to base part of Raiders of the Lost Ark in a monkey doing the Nazi salute, I think there should be a way of including it on the script. It feels like a wasted opportunity to me.
• Another disappointing element in the fact that we don’t get a proper fight scene with the huge henchman. It really felt like it would get a classic “Indiana Jones vs much stronger guy” fight scene, like the ones in Raiders of the Lost Ark or Temple of Doom. I would have settled with the same kind of fight with Helena. But didn’t happened.
• A very minor one, but I don’t understand why they shot Indy in the chest at the end of the movie. He survives, of course. We have all seen him older in the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. But it stretches the suspension of disbelief. A shot to the gut would have been equally effective.
• Antonio Banderas dies. Was it really required? I still hope that he can appear in a prequel.

What is your opinion? Did you like it?