Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

A pretty fantastic intro sequence introduces us to a CGI young Indy (Harrison Ford) doing his thing in 1944, Basil Shaw, a British archaeologist friend of Indy’s (house favourite Toby Jones), a Nazi scientist (Mads Mikkelsen), and the titular dial, or rather, one half of the dial. After an appropriate number of Nazis have been punched (poor Thomas Kretschmann), our hero waltzing from one bit of trouble to the next, we pop into the film’s main timeline in July/August 1969.

Indiana Jones is now a grumpy old man on the day of his retirement from a boring teaching job. Marion (Karen Allen) has left him in the course of grieving for their son (Shia LaBeouf is not appearing in this movie, thankfully, so his character can be more useful in death than he ever was in his fictional life) who died in Vietnam. The rest of his life really doesn’t look too sunny for our hero.

Then appears Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), the daughter of the long deceased Shaw and Indy’s goddaughter. Helena tries to talk Indy into one last jaunt with the hat and the whip to help her find the second half of the Dial. Well, actually, it turns out she’s trying to steal the first half of the Dial from our hero to sell it - on the black market, no less. Also on the trail of both halves of the Dial as well as Helena is our old Nazi scientist acquaintance, now going by the name of Dr Schmidt. After being the architect of the US space program, he’s now planning on conquering time – for Nazidom.

What follows is the somewhat expected race around the world, during which Helena and Indy slowly grow closer to one another, Helena gets back into contact with that moral core she must have read so much about, and Indy reacquaints himself with his very special kind of luck. A good time is had by all, well except Nazis and innocent bystanders, but the former really asked for it, and are usually directly responsible for the demise of the latter.

I’m not sure which James Mangold Indiana Jones movie a lot of other people seem to have seen, but the one I watched turned out to be rather wonderful. Mangold and the horde of writers credited really seem to get the proper tone and style for the series again (ironically unlike the people involved in the fourth Indy movie, who must have forgotten when they made that one), so action sequences may be big and partially digital, but are keeping well in the spirit of the serials and old pulp adventure, where the heroes mostly win out by sheer courage and luck than the sort of competence later decades started insisting on heroes showing. Which actually makes a quite a contrast to the way superheroes not called the (Legendary) Starlord or Ant-Man typically operate, and really makes it difficult to confuse this style of action adventure with a superhero movie (unlike you’re a mainstream critic, therefore quite dense or just too mid-brow to care). Though, to be honest, one late, rather, ahem, implausible plot development in third act is certainly only thinkable because superhero movies exist. It’s also one perfectly fitting to a film that is as focussed on legacies and shadows of the past as this one is, so I’m not going to complain, particularly when it gifts us with the wonderful villain line of “Yesterday belongs to us, Doctor Jones!”.

In between a series of rather wonderful set pieces in just the right spirit of adventure and derring-do, and the kind of quietly confident and elegant filmmaking Mangold gets up to in this sort of stylistically very mainstream production, there are also a series of small and big scenes not just meant to propel our heroes (such as they are) from one place to the next, but also to comment on and mirror some of the elements of the older movies in the series. Waller-Bridge’s may at first look like a more modern by simply being more cynical version of Indy, but later developments suggest she’s just more honest about the worst parts of her character to herself than Indy is, and – in the sort of irony this particular film genuinely seems to enjoy – also less honest about the best parts of it, which makes for a nice reversal. Indy, for his part, is allowed to express all the frustrations and horrors of growing old and lonely, but, the film argues, that’s because he’s going out of his way to push away the people he means a lot to, and underplaying some of what makes him more than a graverobber to himself as much as Helena underplays her own better nature.

Which sets up one of the most traditional happy endings I’ve seen in quite some time. For once, the old hero is actually allowed to retire to the peaceful, happy life he deserves instead of dying heroically so that the younger generation must go on without him. to probably repeat that cycle again. That’s fitting to the genre Indy is working in as well, of course, because serials were eventually resolved through happy ends, instead of the old guard dying with their dreams burning down around them (hi, Star Wars).

I, for one, like to see a bit of hope in my movies from time to time.

Three Films Make A Post: Stay Alive Or Die Trying

The Furies (2019): Women are kidnapped and then trapped in a picturesque patch of Australian wilderness, together with a bunch of beefy guys in creepy masks who go about murdering them. But there’s something slightly more going on, for this is all part of some sort of live stream game for rich perverts, so there are a couple of rules for the women to find out.

So yeah, Tony D’Aquino’s film does mix a couple of popular sub-genres in not terribly original but also definitely not boring ways, throws some decent acting by Airlie Dodds, Linda Ngo and the rest of the cast in, provides some nice practical gore (if you’re a fan of eye mutilation, you will have a hell of a time), and adds the usual stuff about how people in extreme situations pretty much suck. It looks pretty good, and is well paced and competently written in any case, so there’s ninety minutes of good, icky fun to be had.

Peppermint (2018): One morning, a Hollywood studio executive stumbled upon a script about a vengeance seeking urban vigilante in the Punisher style meant for Liam Neeson, and found Taken director Pierre Morel tied to a radiator too. The only problem: Neeson had just given another one of those interviews where he says he’s not making action films anymore for at least the next couple of weeks. Fortunately, the exec’s favourite intern had an idea, so they hired Jennifer Garner for the Neeson role. Well, at least that’s what I imagine the origin story of Morel’s film to be, and it is pretty much the film you’ll imagine it to be. The set-up in this one feels particularly cartoonish, but otherwise, it’s a professional, competently done entry into this sub-genre, with a lead actress who is usually good with the more physical stuff, and a totally by the numbers script by Chad St. John that still manages to be entertaining enough, if one is in the mood for this dubious kind of revenge fantasy.


The Fugitive (1993): But let’s finish on a blast from the just as competent past, when Harrison Ford was an action star, people wanted to work with Tommy Lee Jones, and director Andrew Davis was semi-hot as an action and action thriller director. The script by David Twohy and Jeb Stuart is – despite a running time of over two hours – efficient and economical, which does provide the film with a breathless pace that’s exactly right for Davis’s particular talents. However, the writing is so stripped down that what little actual plot there is feels rather undercooked, the identity of the killer’s boss obvious simply by that character being the only one on screen who has enough lines to be a traitor to Harrison-Ford kind, and while everything’s certainly very exciting, it’s never surprising or particularly interesting. Though, to be fair, if you’re looking for an ultra-efficient rollercoaster without any ambition apart from that, this is pretty much your perfect film.

Some Scattered Thoughts About Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens (2015)

It is somewhat ironic that you have to drag the Star Wars universe out of the hands of its original creator to actually get a watchable film taking place in it again, but then, creating something doesn’t necessarily mean understanding what’s best about it.

Sure, you could argue that a lot of the impact of J.J. Abrams’s film lies in the way it harnesses its audience’s nostalgia and general love for Star Wars and I couldn’t exactly call you wrong. However, you could just as well argue that doing this is actually what this particular film should do, respecting what the audience loved about the original trilogy and using it as the stepping off point for its variation of the original tale, instead of pretending to make everything new. And, while the film does perhaps repeat one plot beat of the originals too many, it gives most of its repeats little twists that to me feel very important. I don’t really need to explain why there’s more than just one difference between the scene between Kylo Ren and Han Solo and the parallel scene in the original trilogy nor why that’s important, do I? And while we’re talking about changes, to my eyes, it’s rather important and special too (in a good way) that Abrams also gives us a new entry in a beloved nerd mega-franchise whose heroes are a young woman and a young guy of colour, building on what came before and reaching towards inclusivity not as something to be prescribed in a dogmatic manner but as something that’s just normal (in all the good meanings of that word).

I also found myself decidedly happy with the film’s look which brings the Star Wars aesthetic back to its 70s SF paperback cover roots (that’s a compliment), its expectedly exciting action sequences (seriously, if you’re operating in the blockbuster world, good action sequences really should be a given by now, though it doesn’t seem to hurt Michael Bay his films only have crap ones), and the general air of the film very much caring about the tradition it stands in.

Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

The Old West. A man (Daniel Craig) with a pretty strange wound, a futuristic looking bracelet around one of his arms and not a clue who he is and how he got there wakes up somewhere in the desert. After proving his alpha male badassitude on some ruffians and demonstrating why men with tiny little heads shouldn't wear hats, he reaches the nearest town, where he eventually learns that he is a wanted robber and possible murderer named Jake Lonergan. His trip to a federal jail is cut short when aliens attack the town and, as aliens are wont to do, abduct some of its inhabitants (among them a badly underused Keith Carradine). Fortunately, Jake's fine little bracelet turns out to be some sort of blaster, which doesn't save everyone from abduction but is rather helpful in pushing the rude aliens back to wherever they came from. For now.

Lonergan (still wearing hats though he shouldn't) becomes part of a posse of townsfolk trying to rescue the abductees. Among the (obviously rag-tag) bunch are the local sadistic torturer and potentate with a hidden heart of gold Woodrow Dollarhyde (Harrison Ford, better at wearing a cowboy hat) and his kinda-sorta Apache adoptive son (Adam Beach), the mysterious Ella (Olivia Wilde, much better at wearing a cowboy hat than Craig), a shotgun-toting preacher (Clancy Brown in a too small role), a wasted-on-his non-role Sam Rockwell (he's the mild-mannered shop keeper learning to be A MAN, you know), a goddamn orphan boy and his stupid dog and various other alien fodder characters.

Later developments will see the group team up with some bandits and a small tribe of Apaches as the only hope to save Earth from the scouts of an alien invasion. Because no alien baddies ever follow up on their lost scouts.

Wasted as a bunch of great to competent actors are in it, I did find Cowboys & Aliens much easier going than the full-grown catastrophe its critical reception let me expect. Sure, it's a film full of tired old cliché characters doing tired old cliché things, but it's also a film actually willing to use the oldest tropes in the writing book (and by the way, why are scriptwriters Orczi, Kurtzman and Lindelof so much less intelligent when they write for the movies than when they write for TV?) to entertain an audience in an adequately old-fashioned style. There are some moments of the dreaded "wink-wink, nudge-nudge, we know how silly this all is", but more often than not, Cowboys & Aliens plays its silly nonsense straight, which of course is the way silly nonsense has to be played to be any fun at all.

For me, more problematic than the clichés alone ever could be is the film's length in combination with these clichés. There's really no reason for a concoction about cowboys (and Native Americans and bandits) fighting off an alien invasion to be one-hundred and thirty minutes long when ninety would lead to a faster, punchier and less bloated feeling movie; I don't think Cowboys & Aliens would have lost anything by cutting thirty minutes of character bits (and the orphan and his dog), especially not when all the character bits are taken from the handbook for blockbuster writer beginners and are below actors like Rockwell, Brown, Beach, Carradine and Wilde (see how I cleverly not mention Craig and Ford?).

And here I go again making a film sound much worse than I actually feel about it. For most of the time, Cowboys & Aliens is utterly serviceable - if dumb - entertainment that may be completely forgettable, but is at least mildly exciting while it lasts. Which, sadly enough, makes it much better than your average blockbuster shat out by Hollywood these days.

 

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