Review of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) by Jolokudi — 02 Jul 2023

As a devoted fan of Indiana Jones series, my heart is bleeding. I have absolutely no idea how people can say that this is better than the crystal skull. Despite some stupid monkey-swinging crap, aliens and poor CGI, that movie had soul, gave Indy a respectful and climactic send off and was actually enjoyable to watch.

Even if you didn't like Shia LaBeuf, he at least had a distinctive character with obvious flaws to be ironed out throughout the movie - we saw him grow into being a hero and at the end, I could see him carrying some future movies as the lead Indy successor.

Helena's character however seems so empty, detached and uninteresting. She starts off by leaving Indy to die, then for whatever reason decides "nah, now I'm gonna save him, why not" and Indy is supposed to be fine with it.

No character arc, no likeable qualities, she's just better than Indy in every aspect - both physically and in terms of her knowledge... Instead of giving that character any depth, anything for the audience to relate to, making her HUMAN, they gave us a plastic mannequin of a protagonist.

Additionally, I think the casting director didn't do a great job with giving the part of Helena to Mrs. Phoebe Waller-Bridge. She is a good actress, but to be the protagonist of an action adventure movie, you need certain qualities, which in my opinion Mrs.

Waller lacks. Poor physicality, clunky movement but most importantly a lack of on screen charisma make it hard to believe that she'd be able to stand any ground against the Nazi agents in the big chase sequences.

(As a side note: Personally, I think an actress like mrs. Emily Blunt, Alexandra Daddario or Anya Taylor-Joy would have been a much better fit for this role, but we'd never know). If they depicted Indy as Helena's mentor, passing the hat onto her, showing her "the ropes", making her realise what truly matters in life, it would have been 10 times better.

Say at some point he's ready to sacrifice himself to save her life, leaving the dial behind and maybe that's when she realises that it's not all about the treasure and money, but the people around you (which is really the core of being THE Indiana Jones - that's how he differs from all the villains in this series) - literally anything! Anyone can come up with something like that in a blink of an eye and I think it's way better than what the writers did here, which is pretty much nothing unfortunately.

She becomes a good guy all of a sudden, shows up to save Indy and that's it really - there you have it, now you're supposed to cheer for her. Throughout the movie you have this strange feeling that she can stab Indy in the back at any point, you don't trust her as an audience member and it just makes the whole thing uncomfortable to watch.

Apart from that, the action scenes are decent, the deaging is fine and believable for the most part, but it looks best in static closeups (and that's the main reason the first 15 minutes of the movie are actually very enjoyable), the script is an inconsistent mess (you can see it was rewritten several times), the whole ending is a nonsense.

All in all, what the hell? The movie simply made Indy obsolete - a dead weight to carry around. It's even worse than what they did with Luke honestly... F disney, F "THE MESSAGE", F "strong female leads" and destroying iconic, beloved IPs.

When is Disney going to start making use of the brilliant, creative and apolitical writers that are out there? They've already barely broke even on "Little Mermaid", lost 300 million on "Strange World" and "Lightyear" and are on their way to lose even more with "Elemental".

If they had any excuses for messing up those movies, loosing money on a huge renowned franchise like Indiana Jones will be just inexplicable. If that happens, I sincerely hope the shareholders will finally step in to save this sinking ship of a production company.

I am done with disney, period.