INTRO
Oof. James Mangold saw the Refrigerator Nuke scene from The Crystal Skull, said, “hold my milk,” and gave us the opening to Dial of Destiny. Absolutely no spoilers, but this movie starts out with an “it’s IMPOSSIBLE that he is alive” and it just keeps on coming. [Cue Michael Scott]. Dial of Destiny is rough—HA. Understatement. It’s insanely depressing, insanely generic, and absolutely unnecessary. I suppose it’s cool to see an Indiana Jones movie visually done well, but the entire time I kept thinking, “Nobody asked for any bit of this.”
VISUALLY PRETTY
I am a sucker for muted color grading. The Russo Brother’s “cool grey” tone is something I RELISH when color grading. And this one had lots of visually creative elements to really sell the time period to you. I enjoyed the slight vignette and the muted colors. However, that’s really the only positive thing I can say about this film: the coloring is very nice.
SUPER BLEAK
However, the coloring only helps generate the deeply bleak sensation that you get from watching this film, which never goes away. That is only because the movie is profoundly depressing and it literally never stops. There are few instances where I would say a protagonist is punished way too much to the point where it feels uncomfortable or just outright sad; this would be one of those instances. I don’t know what Poor Indy did to deserve all the things in this movie, but apparently, he pissed off James Mangold mighty fiercely.
BAD SCRIPT
It’s hard to fathom that this movie is two and a half hours long considering, literally, not much happens. It might be due to the fact that the script is just bombastically copy and paste from pretty much every other adventure archaeology movie [even Veggietales’ Minnesota Cuke had more surprise with its malt shop flooding with melted ice cream [this is truly an “if you know you know” moment, and if you know, well, a thousand golden stars for YOU!]. Interestingly, there is this new craze of radically changing our childhood heroes into these old, dark, and depressed versions of their classic version that we know, who all—for some reason—need to have their personal poop hit the fan for them to have a “final triumph,” instead of having our beloved heroes go out on top. Why the need to bring them down so insanely low, they could wave to my self-esteem… and that’s SUPER low, let me tell ya!
ACTORS
I mean, to a degree the actors did just fine; but that’s about all I can say about it. Everyone did their part, collected their Disney paycheck, and went home… except for Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who decided to play into the cliche of insanely annoying stick-in-the-mud, “I know better than you because I’m younger than you” entitled attitude that you would expect out of a character like that of Helena. I saw no reason in having really any of the choices this movie had from a screenwriting perspective. There is no reason to have Waller-Bridge’s character be unbelievably annoying throughout nearly the entire film up until the third act. I understand the need for growth, but couldn’t we have come up with something more original or less dumb? It’s clear why she was created and what her purpose is/was, but I am glad they had tests and reshoots.
Oh, and they should’ve looked harder for a better actor for the role of Teddy. It’s always akward criticizing child actors, but if facts are facts, you can’t be mad. He was bad. He was VERY bad.
CLOSING REMARKS
The ending was strong, but divisive. I liked that they went with the ending that they did and not the one that was leaked a year-ish ago. However, The movie just… abruptly ends. They go from the third act to the final scene SO FAST. It truly is a wonder how and why this movie is SO long; (there’s very little substance). In the end, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny… just isn;t good. It is entertaining to a degree, because it IS so different that it pulls you in visually, but the journey is rough. Too many times I yelled, “YOU’D. BE. DEAD.” But alas, it’s WAY better than The Crystal Skull; it’s just SUCH a depressing movie.
I give Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny a 6.5.