INDIANA JONES & THE DIAL OF DESTINY
Directed by James Mangold
4/5
The Indiana Jones films were always inflated tributes to something else. They were inspired by the action-adventure matinees that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas grew up on. So despite having an 80-year-old Harrison Ford playing a rumpled Dr Jones in 1969, that the fifth film pays close homage to the original action-adventure trilogy is to be expected. It does that right from the film's Nazithumping flashback prologue set in 1945 Germany, complete with a remarkable computer de-aged version of Ford.
The fifth Indiana Jones also pretty much forgets the terrible fourth, 2008's Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, in which Spielberg attempted to give the series a sci-fi edge with a close encounter of the Amazon kind. That film was so forgettable that when in this, a doleful Jones briefly explains what happened to his son, it takes a while to remember that in the previous film, Shia LaBeouf played Mutt, the offspring Jones didn't know he had with long-time love Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen). On the upside, at least this progeny of a beloved Ford character didn't turn out to be the next Darth Vader.
This story is from the July 8 - 14, 2023 edition of New Zealand Listener.
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This story is from the July 8 - 14, 2023 edition of New Zealand Listener.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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