As with the creepy, dead-eyed CGI Luke Skywalker so beloved by fans of Disney’s “The Mandalorian,” and that ugly, grave-robbing cameo by a resurrected Christopher Reeve as Superman in this summer’s “The Flash,” these unsettling, forever-young simulacrums of merely mortal movie stars might be the future of franchise entertainment.Ĭut to New York City in 1969, where we discover Dr. The actor’s gruff, present-day persona doesn’t match Ford’s dashing 1980s demeanor in the slightest, but get used to it. This backstory is presented during an endless prologue for which Ford’s face has been digitally de-aged so that it matches “Last Crusade”-era Indy - an eerie effect rendered even more unconvincing whenever he opens his mouth and emits the raspy growl of an 80-year-old man. We’re told that the Antikythera, aka Archimedes’ Dial, can locate fissures in the space-time continuum and was once the subject of a lengthy, train-bound tussle between our Indiana and Mads Mikkelsen’s Nazi professor during the waning days of WWII.
Jones and his associates are chasing after a time machine. There are four credited screenwriters, including journeyman director James Mangold, but the movie may as well have been scripted by an algorithm.
In the depressingly obvious absence of these two geniuses who created the character, “Dial of Destiny” is filmmaking by committee - anonymous hackwork without an iota of inspiration or originality. (The infamous scene of Indy surviving a nuclear explosion by hiding inside a lead-lined refrigerator may have infuriated the internet, but it’s exactly the kind of gonzo imagination the rest of the picture needed more of.) This new adventure might just be bad enough to inspire a collective “Crystal Skull” reappraisal, as even a misguided movie made by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas is still a movie made by titans of the industry. Though personally, I still feel like that film has a fairly strong first hour before it falls apart. Granted, 2008’s widely despised “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” didn’t exactly leave audiences clamoring for more. Basically, Disney was granted ownership of the character when the company purchased Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion back in 2013, and in keeping with the Mouse House’s mission to continue regurgitating our childhoods in perpetuity, one last hurrah starring a still-hale and hearty Harrison Ford was seen as a smart investment before the role inevitably gets recast for a whole new round of reboots with Chris Pratt or whoever. Facebook Email Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) in Lucasfilm's "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" (Courtesy Lucasfilm Ltd., TM)įor a handy overview of pretty much everything wrong with contemporary blockbuster filmmaking, look no further than “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” A joyless, enervated exercise in brand extension, this late-game exhumation of America’s favorite archeologist exists not because someone had a new idea or a story to tell but because it was an available asset in a studio portfolio.
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