Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (June 30th, 2023)
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jye4ever
Broke and happy
Here is a-dev being informed that Khev prefers DOD over TLC…
DOD is just such a perfect abbreviation. Dead On Delivery.
I hope not, but even the muster of enthusiasm here from so many, this movie still ends up a 4, maybe, if lucky, a 3 at miracles best. Expectation IS everything.
I hope not, but even the muster of enthusiasm here from so many, this movie still ends up a 4, maybe, if lucky, a 3 at miracles best. Expectation IS everything.
jye4ever
Broke and happy
Shhh don’t say anything to a-dev he still thinks DOD stands for “Draughts of Dublin”
Look how happy he is leave him be…
Look how happy he is leave him be…
That actually makes total sense.
batfan08
Super Freak
So, I saw the movie for the second time today and I must say that I absolutely loved it. I loved it the first time and I loved it even more this time. James Mangold is spinning so many plates concurrently in this movie and, in my opinion, he deftly manages to keep them all spinning without dropping a single one. It’s a movie about mortality, it’s a movie about aging, it’s a movie about letting go of the past, learning from our mistakes, and being able to move forward in the present, but it’s also, perhaps most importantly, an Indiana Jones movie.
I want to really dive into it because I’m so damn excited by it that I could talk about it for hours, but I’ll start outside the actual plot of the movie and talk about the characters. Harrison Ford is absolutely the heart of the movie and he delivers an incredible performance here as a man who well and truly feels he’s reached the end of his road. It’s so weird watching the first half hour of the film because it really puts you in Indy’s shoes later on (I’ll get to that in a moment). The digital de-aging was incredible and honestly? I think we’re encroaching on a period where the uncanny valley ceases to exist. It’s unfortunate because I’m so utterly in awe of the capabilities and the potential applications of this kind of technology, despite having serious ethical and moral objections to the use of AI. Simply put, if we could trust that studios would wield the power of AI responsibly and fairly, I think the potential to marry technology and art is incredible.
The one drawback I noticed was that Indy had old man voice and it made me kind of sad that this would be the last time we see this kind of tech used to de-age him. I feel like, if they could do what they did for his voice the same as they did for his face (the AI mined the Lucasfilm and Paramount archive for photos and footage of Ford and melded his past image with his current performance, so, I wonder if they couldn’t do the same by feeding it his voice from 40 years ago and masking his current voice with young Indy), but even still, it was magical watching it in action and I was struck thinking “I could watch a whole movie like this.”
I feel like that’s kind of the point of the entire sequence and it feeds into the overarching narrative that Indy longs for those days, too. The paradigm has shifted and he’s relegated to the academia side of being an archaeologist more than the adventurous. The co-eds no longer swoon at their good looking professor; now, they just yawn, and the movie treats death with a gravity that I’ve never seen in an Indiana Jones movie. Indy’s near death experiences are always met with some caveat or some MacGyver-esque out. He can be grievously injured with the Holy Grail just within reach or about to be atomized by a Nuke only to be saved by a Frigidaire, but when he comes face to face with the colleagues Klaber murdered in cold blood, Indy recoils in abject horror. When Antonio Banderas’ Renaldo finds his executed crew members, he almost can’t even process it, and, likewise, when he’s murdered by Voller, Indy couldn’t give two ***** about outsmarting the bad guys because he was too busy grieving his friend. All that and the reveal of Mutt’s death in Vietnam are played with a heartbreaking earnestness from Ford that made me more than a little misty eyed at times. Even the “happy” ending feels loaded in the sense that we’re watching two people in the twilight of their lives making their peace with all the pain they’ve experienced and learning to live with it instead of running away.
The villains this time around are also deliciously evil and, honestly? I’d put them right up there with the likes of René Belloq, Toht, and Mola Ram as franchise bests and possibly above the former two, even, because their villainy is all too real. Belloq and Toht felt like old school, classic Hollywood movie Nazis in the vein of Casablanca’s Major Strausser where they didn’t divulge the politics of their belief enough to make you aware, it was just sort of implied under the banner of “Nazis are bad and our American heroes are going to stop them.”
Voller and Klaber, though, are true believers. They’d have to be or there’d be no movie because, at this point, the war is long since over. Like Indy, Voller, too, is longing for the glory of the past. You pick up on little nuances in each performance that really give away exactly who each of these guys are. Voller sizes up the black hotel waiter like a snake ready to attack a mouse when he asks “where he’s originally from” and every word is deliberate and dripping with disdain as pointedly says “you didn’t win, Hitler lost.” Likewise, you can see the glimmer in Klaber’s eyes as he fatally shoots the black CIA handler and, with his deep southern drawl and dogeared “how to speak German” book, you get the impression that this is a guy who’s attended more than one cross-burning in his day and dreamt of finally getting to put on a Nazi Uniform and play the part.
I know mileage may vary, but I quite enjoyed Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Helena. She’s an excellent foil to Ford’s Indy and she and Teddy add some much needed levity and charisma that kind of balances out Ford’s more glum, reflective Indy. She grew on me a lot over the course of the movie and, by the end, I felt a genuine attachment to her character.
Seeing returning characters like Sallah and Marion felt earned and not at all like Disney dipping into the nostalgia well for a cheap way to get audience members to go “look! It’s that guy!” Sallah’s cab and his grandchildren and the exposition about his coming to America following Raiders gives you the impression that this guy’s lived a full life and is a fully realized character outside his relationship to Indy and the callback the movie ended on, in my opinion, was absolutely beautiful. It was the antithesis of something like Keaton’s forced “you wanna get nuts? Let’s get nuts” in The Flash as it served the story and felt authentic to Indy and Marion’s relationship then and now.
As far as the plot goes, I loved every minute of it. I loved the beginning, I loved the middle, and I loved the end. It works as a movie, but also, on a meta level, as a last farewell to one of cinema’s most iconic fictional characters. I see a lot of people really preoccupied with the mechanics of time travel in the movie, but I don’t really feel like it needs to be because, frankly, it’s not about science and it never has been, in my opinion. To my mind, it’s a tricky MacGuffin to pull off, but it works because the Indiana Jones movies already have a built in MacGuffin for each of the MacGuffins: God.
It’s fascinating to me that a Jewish filmmaker has done more to introduce Christianity and the Abrahamic religions to pop culture and moviegoers than Kirk Cameron and his PureFlix could ever dream of. He does it by rejecting the rigidity of dogma and focusing on the more, sensational, fun elements, but I firmly believe that the Indiana Jones movies are modern day parables. Every movie has a specific structure that follows through: a man of science and reason, stubborn and set in his ways, is faced with irrefutable knowledge of the supernatural. He can’t explain it; the most he can do is acknowledge that it happened. The wicked are punished and the just are spared and that’s why I feel like the third act of this film works.
Time travel and “the butterfly effect” and all the scientific analyses of paradoxes need not apply when you reconcile the science of time travel with the inexplicable nature of the divine and predestination. We’ve seen Nazis’ faces melt and their heads exploded by The Ark of The Covenant, a man’s still-beating heart ripped from his body by Mola Ram, and mortal wounds healed by the Cup of Christ, so, to my mind, the idea that Indy and this plane were always supposed to end up at the Siege of Syracuse isn’t much more harder of a sell for me. I feel like the nature of the “temporal anomaly” is consistent with the internal logic of the franchise, too. The Indiana Jones series is steeped in pulp stories and science/myth and I look at things like pilots disappearing into the Bermuda Triangle or even comics that I’ve read like “The War That Time Forgot” where pilots wind up displaced in time and that feels like it could happen in Indy’s world. Simply put, Indy’s not, as Helena put it “mucking up time” when he was always meant to come back. The Dial’s a false deck. It never wielded the power to travel through time in the traditional sense, it was just a compass directing Indy to one time he was always meant to go back to. It’s right there in the name: The Dial of Destiny.
So, that’s my TED Talk. The “TL; DR” version is “it’s a really great movie with wonderful performances, a fun story, and a fitting conclusion to one of my all-time favorite franchises.”
I want to really dive into it because I’m so damn excited by it that I could talk about it for hours, but I’ll start outside the actual plot of the movie and talk about the characters. Harrison Ford is absolutely the heart of the movie and he delivers an incredible performance here as a man who well and truly feels he’s reached the end of his road. It’s so weird watching the first half hour of the film because it really puts you in Indy’s shoes later on (I’ll get to that in a moment). The digital de-aging was incredible and honestly? I think we’re encroaching on a period where the uncanny valley ceases to exist. It’s unfortunate because I’m so utterly in awe of the capabilities and the potential applications of this kind of technology, despite having serious ethical and moral objections to the use of AI. Simply put, if we could trust that studios would wield the power of AI responsibly and fairly, I think the potential to marry technology and art is incredible.
The one drawback I noticed was that Indy had old man voice and it made me kind of sad that this would be the last time we see this kind of tech used to de-age him. I feel like, if they could do what they did for his voice the same as they did for his face (the AI mined the Lucasfilm and Paramount archive for photos and footage of Ford and melded his past image with his current performance, so, I wonder if they couldn’t do the same by feeding it his voice from 40 years ago and masking his current voice with young Indy), but even still, it was magical watching it in action and I was struck thinking “I could watch a whole movie like this.”
I feel like that’s kind of the point of the entire sequence and it feeds into the overarching narrative that Indy longs for those days, too. The paradigm has shifted and he’s relegated to the academia side of being an archaeologist more than the adventurous. The co-eds no longer swoon at their good looking professor; now, they just yawn, and the movie treats death with a gravity that I’ve never seen in an Indiana Jones movie. Indy’s near death experiences are always met with some caveat or some MacGyver-esque out. He can be grievously injured with the Holy Grail just within reach or about to be atomized by a Nuke only to be saved by a Frigidaire, but when he comes face to face with the colleagues Klaber murdered in cold blood, Indy recoils in abject horror. When Antonio Banderas’ Renaldo finds his executed crew members, he almost can’t even process it, and, likewise, when he’s murdered by Voller, Indy couldn’t give two ***** about outsmarting the bad guys because he was too busy grieving his friend. All that and the reveal of Mutt’s death in Vietnam are played with a heartbreaking earnestness from Ford that made me more than a little misty eyed at times. Even the “happy” ending feels loaded in the sense that we’re watching two people in the twilight of their lives making their peace with all the pain they’ve experienced and learning to live with it instead of running away.
The villains this time around are also deliciously evil and, honestly? I’d put them right up there with the likes of René Belloq, Toht, and Mola Ram as franchise bests and possibly above the former two, even, because their villainy is all too real. Belloq and Toht felt like old school, classic Hollywood movie Nazis in the vein of Casablanca’s Major Strausser where they didn’t divulge the politics of their belief enough to make you aware, it was just sort of implied under the banner of “Nazis are bad and our American heroes are going to stop them.”
Voller and Klaber, though, are true believers. They’d have to be or there’d be no movie because, at this point, the war is long since over. Like Indy, Voller, too, is longing for the glory of the past. You pick up on little nuances in each performance that really give away exactly who each of these guys are. Voller sizes up the black hotel waiter like a snake ready to attack a mouse when he asks “where he’s originally from” and every word is deliberate and dripping with disdain as pointedly says “you didn’t win, Hitler lost.” Likewise, you can see the glimmer in Klaber’s eyes as he fatally shoots the black CIA handler and, with his deep southern drawl and dogeared “how to speak German” book, you get the impression that this is a guy who’s attended more than one cross-burning in his day and dreamt of finally getting to put on a Nazi Uniform and play the part.
I know mileage may vary, but I quite enjoyed Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Helena. She’s an excellent foil to Ford’s Indy and she and Teddy add some much needed levity and charisma that kind of balances out Ford’s more glum, reflective Indy. She grew on me a lot over the course of the movie and, by the end, I felt a genuine attachment to her character.
Seeing returning characters like Sallah and Marion felt earned and not at all like Disney dipping into the nostalgia well for a cheap way to get audience members to go “look! It’s that guy!” Sallah’s cab and his grandchildren and the exposition about his coming to America following Raiders gives you the impression that this guy’s lived a full life and is a fully realized character outside his relationship to Indy and the callback the movie ended on, in my opinion, was absolutely beautiful. It was the antithesis of something like Keaton’s forced “you wanna get nuts? Let’s get nuts” in The Flash as it served the story and felt authentic to Indy and Marion’s relationship then and now.
As far as the plot goes, I loved every minute of it. I loved the beginning, I loved the middle, and I loved the end. It works as a movie, but also, on a meta level, as a last farewell to one of cinema’s most iconic fictional characters. I see a lot of people really preoccupied with the mechanics of time travel in the movie, but I don’t really feel like it needs to be because, frankly, it’s not about science and it never has been, in my opinion. To my mind, it’s a tricky MacGuffin to pull off, but it works because the Indiana Jones movies already have a built in MacGuffin for each of the MacGuffins: God.
It’s fascinating to me that a Jewish filmmaker has done more to introduce Christianity and the Abrahamic religions to pop culture and moviegoers than Kirk Cameron and his PureFlix could ever dream of. He does it by rejecting the rigidity of dogma and focusing on the more, sensational, fun elements, but I firmly believe that the Indiana Jones movies are modern day parables. Every movie has a specific structure that follows through: a man of science and reason, stubborn and set in his ways, is faced with irrefutable knowledge of the supernatural. He can’t explain it; the most he can do is acknowledge that it happened. The wicked are punished and the just are spared and that’s why I feel like the third act of this film works.
Time travel and “the butterfly effect” and all the scientific analyses of paradoxes need not apply when you reconcile the science of time travel with the inexplicable nature of the divine and predestination. We’ve seen Nazis’ faces melt and their heads exploded by The Ark of The Covenant, a man’s still-beating heart ripped from his body by Mola Ram, and mortal wounds healed by the Cup of Christ, so, to my mind, the idea that Indy and this plane were always supposed to end up at the Siege of Syracuse isn’t much more harder of a sell for me. I feel like the nature of the “temporal anomaly” is consistent with the internal logic of the franchise, too. The Indiana Jones series is steeped in pulp stories and science/myth and I look at things like pilots disappearing into the Bermuda Triangle or even comics that I’ve read like “The War That Time Forgot” where pilots wind up displaced in time and that feels like it could happen in Indy’s world. Simply put, Indy’s not, as Helena put it “mucking up time” when he was always meant to come back. The Dial’s a false deck. It never wielded the power to travel through time in the traditional sense, it was just a compass directing Indy to one time he was always meant to go back to. It’s right there in the name: The Dial of Destiny.
So, that’s my TED Talk. The “TL; DR” version is “it’s a really great movie with wonderful performances, a fun story, and a fitting conclusion to one of my all-time favorite franchises.”
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Spoiler:
That would be my summary as well after one viewing though I'd lean toward replacing "really great" with "really enjoyable." As for prologue Indy using old Ford's voice to me it seemed to go in and out. IIRC they were able to digitally de-age Mark Hamill's voice for the Mando Season 2 finale and I believe they did that again here with fluctuating success.So, that’s my TED Talk. The “TL; DR” version is “it’s a really great movie with wonderful performances, a fun story, and a fitting conclusion to one of my all-time favorite franchises.”
Batfan's post is too long to quote but it's a fantastic post and nailed all of what I loved about the film.
It felt full circle to me when Indy is where he is in the third act, he can't believe he is where he is. Ford played it beautifully.
It felt full circle to me when Indy is where he is in the third act, he can't believe he is where he is. Ford played it beautifully.
batfan08
Super Freak
There were definitely some lines that flowed smoother than others. Part of it could very well just be how gruff Ford’s voice has gotten as he’s aged that, even with the digital alterations, the cadences and intonations are just too pronounced to hide.
Watching that 1944 opening I became 100% convinced that we will see a CGI-ed 1940s Indy movie - whether it's done like this with HF (mostly) playing the part and his face de-aged, or done as another actor with HF's face added. And listening to the Val Kilmer and Andy Warhol Netflix docs (that feature perfect recreations of tehir voices) makes you realize even after HF has died he could be still playing Indy.
My guess is this CGI-ed movie may be done as a "tribute" to HF if he dies in the next decade, or while alive he will give his blessing to this: mostly because he will be the "forever Indy" even if he's no longer able to physically do so, and after he has died.
The 1944 sequence wasn't perfect - I actually thought the Mads de-ageing stood out as looking pretty wonky in places, whereas HF's mostly looked quite close spot-on, even to a point where they were able to mimic iconic Indy smirks, etc which was amazing. The tech we see in DoD was also produced 2 years ago and its improving with each try.
Just to clarify, Val's son Jack provided the narration for his doc. That documentary is incredible.
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Really amazing post. I’m not as excited about it as you are but you are enabling me (in a good way) to go and see it again. On this, someone I went with just assumed the whole movie was going to be like the opening. I will say that along with the voice the way he moved seemed like an older man as well so I’m wondering if they used Ford on set rather than get someone else like they did with Hamill/Luke.
Agree completely I thought she was terrific. Always liked her and I liked that she wasn’t a one dimensional one note character just along for the ride. She had her own life.
I feel I will like this film more on a second viewing. I really liked that Mangold didn’t feel the need to ape Spielberg’s style. I mean he did a bit, enough to give you an Indy film, but didn’t over do it.
My nine year old is my gauge. He is a true Indy believer and loved every second of it. He was in Indy heaven.
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abake
Rex Tremendae Majestatis
Sounds like a very divisive movie...
I had no intention of watching this at the theatre, but I might. It does sound intriguing at the very least.
I had no intention of watching this at the theatre, but I might. It does sound intriguing at the very least.
Wow, didn't know that - I assumed it was digitally done. That's eerie but cool he sounds so much like him.
But yeah that Val doc had me in tears. I'd also recommend the Garry Shandling doc.
It's certainly better than I ever expected and HF is better in this than some of his more recent outings. It's weird - almost like it greater than the sum of its parts or something.
It's certainly no classic (and won't grow into one) and is riddled with all kinds of problems minor and major, but it was definitely an upside surprise for me.
I'm seeing it again in a couple of days.
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At the 7pm show in our area's largest theater. Show starts in 15 minutes. Not even a quarter full.
First time in a theater in a few years. Weird feeling of dread instead of excitement.
First time in a theater in a few years. Weird feeling of dread instead of excitement.
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