Reputation from Nick Parker - JOHN WILLIAMS Fan Network

Nick Parker reacted to Romão in SPOILER TALK: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny July 4, 2023

This will be a fairly long and scattered post with my thoughts on the movie, so please bear with me.

I ended up enjoying this more than I expected, but I reckon it’s much more due to the ideas and concepts it presents than the execution itself, which I actually found to be considerably lacking.

First of all, I used to think you cannot possibly make an Indy movie without Harrison Ford. And while that remains to me as true as ever, I feel even more strongly now that you cannot make an Indiana Jones movie without Steven Spielberg. And even accounting for the shortcomings of KOTCS, the fact is that his directorial flair, his camera setups, his cinematic language are so integral to what made those first three films what they are, that when you remove him from the equation, you might have something that occasionally looks like the real thing, but it definitely does not move like the real thing.

And that’s one of the main problems I have with this movie. It is bloated. It has quite a bit of fat that absolutely needed to be trimmed off. Scenes drag a bit longer than they should. Things are shown and never implied. Some subplots either go nowhere or serve no narrative purpose whatsoever. And say what you will about those first three movies, they don’t have an ounce of fat in them. They are 2 hour movie trailers, and I mean that in the best possible way.

And one of the main reasons why those movies move so fast and feel so breezy without ever feeling rushed or that crucial scenes were left on the cutting room floor comes down to Spielberg’s visual storytelling, by which with just a few seconds of footage, important information is given to the audience. Or how he can accomplish in a single shot what lesser directors need 4 or 5 separate shots to accomplish, with the necessary accompanying cuts A few examples:

We had none of these camera setups in this movie. And it robs the movie of the energy, thrust and propulsive narrative that is so integral to the original trilogy.

And it’s a bit of a shame, really. I’m among the ones that thought that making another Indiana Jones movie was an awful idea. And yet, on a purely conceptual level, I do think Mangold’s approach, story ideas and concepts are actually pretty solid. They would’ve sold me on the project:

The Macguffin is fascinating and interesting, while still being different enough from previous Macguffins and is tied thematically to the inevitability of incorporating Indy’s aging into the story. They found a really ingenious way to have a Nazi villain in the 60’s, by making him a cryptonazi that was recruited through Operation Overcast and was instrumental in USA’s Space Program. The plan of the main villain and the way to achieve it was somewhat surprising and interesting. The opening sequence was really enticing on a conceptual level.

And yet, I feel like all these great ideas came up invariably short.

The quest for the Dial felt like a series of fetch quests, getting from point A to B through almost instantaneous puzzle solving, with the villains chasing the heroes and catching up with them at each destination. And although I do give the movie credit for trying something really bold and different for the movie’s climax, I do wonder if it wouldn't have been cooler if they actually went back to the days of WW2. And one thing that really bothered me is that the last lesson Indiana Jones ever gave was about the Battle of Syracuse and Archimedes’ involvement in it. I mean, how convenient can you get? In all previous movies, the subject of his classes was always unrelated to the story’s main quest.

Voller’s role in the Space Program and his recruitment through Operation Overcast was barely alluded to. It would’ve been more interesting if he was spearheading a whole secret Nazi revival within Nasa itself or something. As it stands, he just seemed like a really prestigious scientist that had two goons at his service and that was the full extent of his influence. The rest of the devotees that joined him in that doomed final flight felt they came out of nowhere.

His plan to try to assure Nazi victory by killing Hitler was a cool concept that really could’ve been further explored. And the revelation of this intent is done in such a matter-of-factly way that it really loses a lot of its potential impact. I wonder if they did indeed went back to 1939 and could have had some interesting moral dilemmas in whether to allow Voller to go through with his plan or not. Would murdering Hitler save more lives down the road or would it indeed bring the victory of Nazi Germany with the long term terrible consequences attached to it?

As for the opening sequence, it really won’t go in the de-aging process. It works mostly fine and it really was the only way to tackle this sort of sequence. The setting was great, the concept really cool, but it was simply overlong, overdone and a bit repetitive. And the whole thing with the Spear of Longinus being a fake and Voller suggesting his superiors to take the Antikythera instead felt a bit nonsensical. The sequence with the anti-air guns hitting the carriages as the train traveled through a large bend were admittedly exciting, but there’s no helping the feeling that Spielberg would’ve had a field day with this sort of material.

Another shortcoming I think the movie has is the humor. The verbal jokes rarely land, while the visual jokes, so integral to the Indiana Jones series, are few and far between.

But again, the main problem is the bloat, the fat. And not only it is found in the sequences themselves, but also on totally irrelevant plot threads and characters. The CIA tailing Indiana Jones, the subway chase, Indiana Jones crashing the Apollo Astronauts ticker tape parade, Helena’s Short Round-like sidekick…all of those could’ve been totally excised without the movie really being any worse for it. In fact, I think 90% of the New York scenes could’ve been cut altogether. Plus, stuff like Helena’s ex boyfriend chasing them in Algiers. It just unnecessarily pads the movie and drags the whole thing down.

I must give the movie some credit for indulging far less in fan service that I was expecting, although I disliked every single moment they went for it: Salah’s scenes, the totally pointless bug tunnel scene in Syracuse, Indy casually mentioning drinking the blood of Kali, Indy and Marion replaying their kissing scene on the boat from Raiders. All of those could’ve been cut without any harm done to the movie.

The musical quotes, although I understand their purpose and dramatic effectiveness, bother me to no end and I find them particularly deflating as I considered that on a conceptual level, JW absolutely knocked it out of the park in giving musical identity to the various characters, objects, factions and concepts in the movie. The new themes are all fantastic and really provide an enormous extra layer of character, weight and significance to the movie. The frantic and never ending editing process of the action sequences probably didn’t give him all the opportunities for greater musical coherence. I absolutely love the music for the Siege of Syracuse scenes.

I’m probably coming across much harsher on the movie than I intended, but it irks me that the movie had a really good premise (something I thought beforehand was really hard to achieve given the circumstances), only to squander all the potential of the story with a somewhat lackluster and uninspired execution. There’s something off about the tone, about the pace, about the blocking, about the humor. It doesn’t really feel like an Indiana Jones movie.

It mostly looks like one. John Williams ensures it sounds like one, for the most part. But it’s a sort of doppelganger. On the whole, it is a superior movie than Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. But as I read on the Mixnmojo forums, KOTCS was awful, but at least it was an awful Indiana Jones movie, whereas this one, while being, on the whole, a better movie, it is an above average movie wearing an Indy mask.