Well, looks like finally this thread can be turned into a proper conversation about the movie?
Spoilers will follow, so be warned.
If you want to hear a positive, this film is easily one of the best ones Lucasfilm has produced under Disney. It's not completely inept in the sense many of these late sequels stripped of their creative voices and authenticity usually are. That's not saying much, but at least there's a story somewhere in there and an attempt to bring some sort of new closure to the character. Unfortunately it can't quite get away from the curse that will unavoidably follow these type of movies from here to eternity for as long as they keep getting made. It just feels like a forgery, a less inventive, less accomplished imitation of something without any of the original spark, touch or cohesion. Kind of soulless and joyless.
I'll try to get into more detail.
The most obvious challenge this thing was gonna face is following up four films directed by Steven Spielberg. James Mangold is not a bad filmmaker, you could even say he's the best pick we've seen to handle the Lucasfilm legacy so far, he's just nowhere near as creative or creatively free to pull off the kind of visual ideas or story mechanics Spielberg crafted to define the Indiana Jones series. Right off the bat, Dial of Destiny is muddy, unfocused, lacking distinct direction, inspired shots or fun staging choices of any sort. Every single sequence drags, and badly. The pacing is quite terrible, and particularly for an Indiana Jones film. You can already sense it within the prologue when the film keeps cutting back and forth between an expository conversation among secondary characters and Indy walking from one train car to another without anything new or exciting happening in each one. You never find yourself smiling at the audacity of the character using a broken pole to take down a motorized Nazi as if they were in a Medieval joust, or finding a group of mannequins in a soon-to-be devastated nuclear test site mirroring the family unit he's been avoiding all his life. Every scene is mundane, serviceable and as a consequence kind of forgettable.
The structure of these movies has been laid out four times already, and it's quite clear: a fast-paced action sequence mostly designed around clever visual beats preludes an expository early segment, following which we don't bother much with long dialogue again as we're launched into a series of unique set pieces that eventually take us to some big pyrotechnic finale with fantastical elements. Dial of Destiny respects all this, but it follows it awkwardly. This is the first time in the series a flashback is introduced mid-story, and to add absolutely nothing we hadn't already learned through previous dialogue. It's odd choices like this, or the journeyman feel of the many overlong action pieces that drags the whole thing down. An entire ticker-tape parade was recreated in Glasgow to finally amount to nothing, as the characters do nothing of consequence with the fact that they're in the middle of such thing. An endless chase through the streets of Tangier could be summed up with they turned here, then went there, eventually made a left and then it ended. Indiana Jones is supposed to be the opposite of this, with tightly cut sequences literally filled with narrative surprises and refreshing visual gags to the last frame. But that's the thing with this movie, even though it never really feels poorly made, it just always ends up being frustratingly insipid.
Although perhaps the one thing some people will react more negatively to is the tone. As uneven as the film is structurally, what I personally struggled the most with was the tone.
Indiana Jones films are supposed to be lighthearted adventure stories, and any downer beats have been carefully inserted in the past in ways that didn't mess with the overall feel of the movie. Spielberg is a master when it comes to walking these kind of tightropes, so we witnessed the potential death of Marion, Indy's descent into hell, or a moment of remembrance for those who passed in quick vignettes that never distracted from the main story or took over the tonal quality of the film. Dial of Destiny does not follow up on this. Indiana is stuck in a perpetual state of mental defeat and he literally needs to be punched in the face at the very end of the movie to snap out of it, without really having gone through any character transformation along the ride. Secondary characters are murdered in cold blood out of nowhere by the antagonists, in a way that makes you feel like you're watching Munich instead of an Indiana Jones film every now and then. In what was likely conceived as the "aha!" concept that motivates the entire character journey for Indy, Mutt is unceremoniously killed off screen and his death turned into an old trauma that ultimately broke Indy and Marion's marriage. In what world does this feel right within the context of these movies? The film just carries a weirdly somber vibe throughout its full length, and I for one cannot understand what made the filmmakers think this felt right for an Indiana Jones adventure at any point. If the goal was to make an older Indy look back at his life and reconsider things, there's plenty of questionable choices he made in the previous movies without having to resort to story ideas that belong in completely different genres, bringing down the mood to such an extent that you virtually blow the entire film.
Yet here we are.
After all that, it may sound off if I say I didn't hate the movie. But I didn't. It was competent enough that it didn't feel like some Jurassic World or Rise of Skywalker. I appreciate the effort to try to add something to the character, even if in the end the whole thing ended up being just a redundant take on the exact same story Kingdom of the Crystal Skull tackled imperfectly, but ultimately better. I suppose it's somewhat interesting to finally have seen Indy in World War II—despite the fact that, as Frank Marshall once said, that was avoided because it turns the segment into a war movie. There was something fun about seeing Indy woken up by partying youths, and his last lecture getting interrupted by a report on the Moon landing. And that last scene between him and Marion was a rather touching beat that took good advantage of the characters' history and brought their story to a close in a more elegant way than the Spielberg wedding ever did.
But that's about it. For me, it clearly sits at the very bottom of the series, and I'm not sure it really needed to exist. Hopefully others will enjoy it more. I'm sure some will.
