Indiana Jones used to be afraid of one thing: snakes. The archeologist could outrun boulders, crawl through tunnels and hop on moving planes, but put him next to one of those slithering creatures and he turns into a school girl with a bug on her desk. Harrison Ford was the definition of fearless in Steven Speilberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, but his character has grown scared of a number of things in recent years, like risk, vivacity and originality. The sequels haven’t exactly broken new ground, delivering the same combination of laughs and thrills audiences have come to expect from this franchise. And Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny offers more of the same.
As always, the action sequences–which include the inevitable running through jungles and flying across deserts–are solid. But the title Dial of Destiny, might as well refer to the series itself turning back the clock: a digital de-aging technique allows the filmmakers to bring back the original Indy for the first part of the film.
The blast from the past in the movie’s opening sequence sees a de-aged hero trying to save his pal (Toby Jones) from a hoard of Nazis. He hops on a train to take on the soldiers, and for a second, you could swear you were watching a 35-year-old Ford. His wrinkles are gone, his shoulders are long and his punches are strong. Unfortunately, the sense of magic is lost when you trade-in practical effects for CGI. When nothing on screen is real, there isn’t much for audiences to latch onto.
Luckily most of the film is about old man Indy, now on the verge of retirement after decades of teaching college students. When his goddaughter (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) shows up to class, she drags him along for one last run at the Antikyretha, which is part of a time travel contraption built by a Greek philosopher. This of course gets the attention of Juergen Voller (Mads Mikkelson), a former Nazi who wants to use the device to change history and help Germany win the war. It’s…
Read the full article here
