Indiana Jones 4
July 2, 2023
By NZB3
As a very late Generation X, and for other reasons, I was excluded from being a part of the culture of my cohort. A bit like not being in on the joke except it’s no joke, it’s generational identity. When it comes to films, I was too late to be part of things like Ghost Busters or Star Wars or Blues Brothers and had to go it alone later. But the residue was always there in the air- others around me in my cohort had ‘been there’ and knew something I didn’t. When it came to Indiana Jones it would have been the same except Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) came along.
This time I did get to be included, especially because this book (image, left) appeared in the ‘Lucky Book Club’ and I picked it. Poured over it. Caught up to speed. That was probably the entire point of the book- to get the kids excited, inducted, and along to the theatres. I didn’t go for the hat and jacket so much but I did take up my grandad’s old cattle whip and learn to use it. I did succeed very well in whipping it around a tree branch and swinging from it from A to B; Proof of concept.
This is why the 3rd and 4th attempts to follow up the original Indiana Jones trilogy were such a let-down. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull jumpped the shark early on¹ but especially when Indie’s son instantly aquired monkey vine-swinging powers. Finding myself in Warkworth last Thursday and not wanting to battle rush hour traffic to get back to a cold camp I looked for something else to do and discovered only then that it was opening night for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023.) Due to low expectations I hadn’t kept track of the release date so I took my spontanious decision to the theatre at Matakana.
Dial of Destiny
In brief, this film is basically the trailer you can see for fre +extra time.
It was never clear at all why Indi burned the world down behind him and Grant Theft Auto’ed his way through the killing of his friends and co-workers. Didn’t know the stakes of the MacGuffin until it was too late and those stakes were so low he needn’t have bothered. All he did was lead the bad guys to the treasure which they simply used to suicide themselves with extra steps!
CGI deaging is a bad idea unless it’s that Tom Cruise deep fake team. The 1940s Jones is Uncanny Valley due to, I assume, lack of effort/spending.
Nazi exploitation never gets old, apparently. I’m over it though. Always the 1D bad guy you can do anything to because it’s always OK to punch/shoot/blow-up/face-melt etc. a Nazi.
Archeology makes professors go OCD and neglect their families. This premise keeps being hammered home in this film as well as the Crystal Skull one. It’s uncomfortable, it doesn’t work. Why do they keep re-employing this trope? Certainly not to resolve and heal it. More, so they can introduce the feeling to exploit the audience and that’s the end to it. Likewise, getting us to quickly like Captain Antonio Banderas so he can then be brutally shot.
Lots of grand theft auto and grand theft plane from peoples who didn’t deserve that. When Superman or the Avengers trash a city it’s accidental or in the name of protecting the world. Indi et al are just trashing Tunisia and New York but for what? Phoebe Waller-Bridge wants to McGuffin for the cash. Indi’s just chasing after it because….²
When the Nazis get the McGuffin, the Dial of Destiny, it’s only by following Indi’s team and stealing it so he really helped them rather than prevent them. But he wasn’t exactly trying to prevent them from doing anything to make all this ‘adventure’ worthwhile since nobody knew what the bad guys were up to or that the Dial worked; Indie was skeptical throughout.
Roman Bones last 2000 years under sea water and machine parts too, then fit perfectly together to assembel the Dial of Destiny. Apparently the Dial is some sort of navigation device to locate temporal rifts and to approach them at a calculated angle of attack in order to determine where in history you wish to emerge. This was never ever explained by the movie.
The real life Antikythera object is attributed to Archimedes but dummed down in the title as ‘dial’ for easier public consumption. After all, the audience is already being expected to swallow the idea that Archimedes could develop an algorithm for finding time rifts in the sky that he had no aircraft in third century BC to examine or access. And, that this device (with 2000+ range) was considered so potent in the Ancient world (who never used it) that they split it apart and hid it. None of this is even attempted to be explained by the movie.
Indie finds out about The Evil Scheme only as the Bad Nazis take him as their prisoner into the time rift. They wish to visit the 1930s to mentor Adolf Hitler through the war; Oh no! But all the adventure and fighting and killing and property destruction to this point can’t have been for this on Indi’s part because he only just found out! He wasn’t doing this to stop Hitler. No love from Waller-Bridge’s character. So what’s he doing any of this for and why don’t the slaughter of his university colleagues and old diving mate Captain Antonio Banderas slow him down?
When Indie helpfully explained Continental Drift he got punched by the bad guys. Archimedes’ device led them to the rift but miscalculation would take them to the wrong time. Instead of listening to Jones they hit him hard in the face because they feel mocked I guess. The effect is that he certainly does now start laughing at and mocking them as they slowly start to realise he is correct and try to abort. Yet another illogical character transaction.
Speaking of which, a kid can 1 on 1 the strongest bad goon, hijack an aircraft, then go for ice cream with the regular kids. Why would a street-smart going-it-alone side-kick partner who kills people and flys planes just flip into being one of the ‘kids’ and allow himself to be taken for ice cream at the end of the movie? No.
Anyway, of all the random time periods the miscalculated time travel journey of the Nazi’s in their bomber plane would end up instead of the 1940s…..it’s Archimedes’ workshop in 300BC! This makes no sense at all. They were flying blind but end up crashing right into the history extravaganza of a sea invasion in the ancient world complete with a chit-chat with Archimedes himself. Great for plot arc and climax but absolutely nonsensial, illogical, and un-earned.
These ancient Greeks had sea to air ballistics that WW2 era bombers could not evade. Why would they have that ability to skewer a moving aircraft so successfully? A responce to a threat the ancients never faced as well as a pointless decision to direct effort that way “Because it’s a dragon!” Most of the flying action is at exciting cinematic low altitude but when Indie and Wombat-Bridge need to share a 1-man parachute to a gentle touchdown in Archemedies’ yard they are conveniently high in the sky so it can work.
Wombat is a stupid nickname for Waller-Bridge’s character and we cringe every time Harry says the name again and again.
So, bad movie. What else?
Nazi Goon got on a bike to chase Indie through New York before Indie mounted a horse to even start running away. Bad editing.
Good guys can take a bullet bad guys just get shot and die. Fairly standard movie physics but still disappointing.
Small talk during deadly chase most incongruous. When you’re destroying poor people’s produce and homes and vechicles take it seriously please. It’s a tense situation and you’re acting as if you’re out playing mini golf.
Pretty sure antagonist died in his first scene or got chopped in half. And yet Scary Nazi Mathematician survives unharmed to molest black hotel staff so we know he’s bad. Yikes..
It’s scripts and newspaper articles like this that make Artificial Intelligence text generators look good. It’s not that they are good it’s that the standard is so low in the human world already. Dial wasn’t as bad as Crusade but judging by how few showed up at Matakana and hearsay it deserves to bomb for being so poor. What I did like was Harry’s performance which showed a bit of the old Indi drive and competence to keep navigating his way through adventures in a relaxed and competent way. But that’s down to acting. There’s some good blood in the system but due to terrible plumbing it’s hemmoraging all over the place. We thought director James Mangold knew what he was doing thanks to Logan (2017) but either he doesn’t or else the producers wont let James be James. Instead, Generation X’s cultural capital has been broken down for parts and sold for scrap money.
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1 Directly after the nuclear explosion. Movie all down hill after that
2 Because he promised to destroy it and never did? Say so!
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