Review of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) by Turmoyle2000 — 01 Jul 2023

Based on some of the reviews I had seen from people with a similar interest in movies as myself, I thought I was going to absolutely hate this. I didn’t, but it also wasn’t very good. For starters, don’t believe the reviews that say the first 20 minutes is “vintage Indiana Jones.

” It’s not. It’s too dark, too loud, generally obnoxious, overly reliant on CGI, choppily edited, and features a digitally de-aged Harrison Ford that looks frankly bizarre in some of the scenes. The rest of the movie is just one chase scene after another with little emotional investment or genuine thrills.

Each scene moves along at an overly quick pace that is done intentionally so the audience doesn’t have time to realize how much of it doesn’t make sense. Phoebe Waller Bridge’s Helena is quite annoying and has muddled character motivations, so much that I didn’t really find myself rooting for her and wished Indy would have just ventured off on his own.

Mads Mikkelsen was solid as always as the villain, and it was nice to see some of the characters from the previous films show up, but it wasn’t enough to make this film engaging or even likable. The film also has a CGI veneer over much of it that feels fake and often took me out of it.

On the positive side, the John Williams score is quite enjoyable, and the final scene did tug at my heart strings a bit. This movie isn’t terrible, but it’s badly hampered by strange filmmaking decisions and a bunch of missed opportunities to achieve the heights previously obtained in this franchise.