Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

johnny_ultimate

@Silentcorner Keep it civil, please.

johnny_ultimate

Mod note:

As there are two separate conversations dominating this thread, I've created a second thread here to discuss the more macro-level issues like the state of the Hollywood system and the recent string of high-profile flops: https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058304208/is-the-hollywood-mega-blockbuster-model-in-trouble#latest

Apologies - I had hoped to move posts across but that's not so easy on the new boards platform.

Please keep this thread to discuss the film itself. Thanks.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120821902#Comment_120821902

They've been trying to make new indy movies for years now, really. If anything it's a wonder we're only at #5. When Crystal Skull underwhelmed, and became a bit of a cultural punching bag, really that should have been it. Whatever the film was or wasn't - it was an ending though. Indy and Marion, finally married and happy, a son finally connected with. I know folks are down on Indy having any backstory at all, but at least it was closure. It couldn't have been more of a closed book.

At least with this film failing, we might finally see an end? Maybe? Until the reboot I suppose lol.

As for the Jumanji reboot, it's worth a look if you want a relatively unfussy, fun Indy clone. Empty calories but of the more entertaining variety. The Rock has a little self-deprecating turn, which is rare, and overall was a harmless time. And as said it was made for 30 mill (I think) and pulled in 10x that.

SaoPaulo41

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120782844#Comment_120782844

Pretty much perfect review

SaoPaulo41

Seen it today, a bit over long, but overall good fun. The female sidekick was really annoying . The Moroccon, Agean and Sicily scenes were great had real indiana jones feel of old. If u can accept the crazy ending and turn your mind off and accept it as an adventure movie then its good craic. I do feel the film could of gone in a different direction which could of made it better. If asked would I recommend I would say see it with open mind and don't be cynical going in to cinema and you will enjoy.

My overall ratings for Indiana Jones movies are.

1 Raiders

2 last crusade

3 dial of destiny

4 temple doom

5 crystal skull

thegreengoblin

Saw it today and I was left completely unmoved. It just seemed so lifeless, devoid of any kind of soul. Crystal Skull was fairly headwrecking but at least it provoked a reaction in people. This was summed up by that bizarre scene with a stony faced Marion at the end. Did she smile even once? Why didn't she? Come to think of it, how often did Ford smile throughout the film?

Waller-Bridge's character was awful. She lacked any heart or charm, which was criminal for such a supposedly important character.

And what was the point of de-aging Ford if they didn't alter his voice? Am I missing something here? Did someone just think ah let's get Ford to use his normal voice and people won't know any different? Bizarre stuff.

I actually thought the time travel stuff, although it was bonkers, at least it was something different and completely off the wall. The fact that Indy was desperate to stay there was quite poignant, I thought. A buried in the sand scenario would have been apt for the character.

But overall the question we have to ask after seeing this film is: why?

Mrs Shuttleworth

I too went to see this today. To my surprise - I thought it was really good! Beautiful set pieces, skilfully handled action, solidly paced and directed and a brilliant central performance from Harrison Ford. Mads Mikkelsen was excellent as were all the villains. Didnt miss Spielberg at all - James Mangold did a great job. Didn't like Phoebe Waller Bridge though, who managed to be as annoying as Willie Scott and Short Round combined.

Streaming is one factor for a film like this bombing but the main reason I suspect is that most of the blockbusters the last ten years have been absolute trash and it would be reasonable to assume this would also be (and it isn't!).

Homelander

I would say that's entirely subjective.

In my opinion it didn't fail because of assumptions, it failed because of reality. It's just not a great movie and realistically it adds nothing whatsoever worthing thinking about to the canon of Indiana Jones.

That doesn't mean a lot of people don't like and enjoy it.

It will probably do very well on streaming but ultimately yeah, a total box office bomb.

Someone mentioned CGI and I think they hit the nail on the head. The original trilogy was crammed full of incredible set pieces that were brought to life by the set creators, everything felt grounded and believable, largely due to the simple fact that they were real sets.

Nowadays, it seems to be a case of, "how do we do-Marvel, more Marvel" and you end up with these ridiculous, incredibly unbelievabe CGI-driven spectacles acted off green screen that are totally disconnected from reality, in situations where practical effects would have been entirely feasible.

I mean, from the outset, I felt Dial of Destiny was a dud simply because of the sheer amount of CGI for scenes that never needed CGI. Watching Temple of Doom or Raiders is a total treat, you really buy into the adventure as it unfolds on screen, there's a real sense of stakes and weight.

Dial of Destiny is 90% CGI and it translates exactly that way on screen, it's soulless, right from the outset. All flash, zero substance.

Spon Farmer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120822621#Comment_120822621

That is a very cynical attitude. Happy that a movie (or anything) has failed.

And it is the last INDIANA JONES movie - that was the intent from the start. The role is never going to be recast. There was some ideas for a another prequel show but that was cancelled long ago.

Crystal Skull underwhelmed? As I recall it made $700/800 million . Bad reviews and a “cultural punching bag”? Nobody who profited from that gave a ****.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120824245#Comment_120824245

90% CGI ?

Where did you get that number?

Out of thin air or out of the blue? Either way it is wrong unless all the magazines, cast and crew are lying …

It has not failed at the box office because it is a bad movie, it has failed because people are not going to see it. Likewise, people going in droves doesn’t mean a movie is good - it just means it has attracted attention.

Spon Farmer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120822492#Comment_120822492

Sorry I didn’t see that before I posted -

Spon Farmer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120824051#Comment_120824051

Your first paragraph - that is exactly how I feel with the exception of being annoyed by Helena. I thought she was great. And Willie is supposed to be over the top annoying. ;)

silverharp

it lost the number 1 slot to a movie Ive never heard of, and it was down 68% on Friday, MI is out next week and thats all anyone is going to be talking about

https://twitter.com/ERCboxoffice/status/1677714256001900545

Homelander

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120824263#Comment_120824263

It was hyperbole. Whatever the figure the movie is crammed full of CGI that easily could've been practical, and if practical, would've been far more realistic rather than a weightless CGI spectacle.

It's not an argument against CGI. It's an argument against excessive CGI and CGI being used to create scenes that practical could deliver, and the loss of relatability as a result.

That's without touching on other issues like casting and plot.

As for box office, you are obviously correct that box office takings have no correlation on a movie being good or bad.

However it's a little more nuanced when it's a massive established franchise name tanking at the box office. A new IP failing to make headway is more understandable than a massive, well establish franchise flopping hard.

We already know there's nothing wrong with the Box Office widely speaking and so the issue isn't audiences. So the question is specifically why aren't people going to see Indiana Jones?

For me it's a simple combination of a) indifference to a sequel there was no particular demand for and b) it being a weak movie. I paid my ticket price but didn't think it was very good nor did the people I went with. All of us then told people the same thing, making them even less likely to consider it a must watch in the cinema.

That was replicated across the world. This is how weak films get hurt at the box office, too many people relegate them to "Sure I'll wait until it's streaming".

None of that means it's expressly bad or unwatchable, but there's no great mystery as to why it flopped to my mind. It's just a redundant and weakly made sequel that didn't need to be made, and if they were going to make it, it had to be far better than just "ok".

MisterAnarchy

It has not failed at the box office because it is a bad movie, it has failed because people are not going to see it. Likewise, people going in droves doesn’t mean a movie is good - it just means it has attracted attention.

Its largely failed to attract cinemagoers because of a few factors.

1.Harrison Ford is far too old to play the lead character. He was too old for Crystal Skull and is is ancient now , 80 , I mean come off it.

2.The early release at Cannes and bad reviews

3.The Crystal Skull was a terible film and ended the franchise for most fans

4.Poor time to release it

5.Apathy, people know it will be on Disney Plus in a couple of months and they can watch at home on a big tv.

silverharp

6 PWB is not a box office draw , not sure how she ever made it past TV?

Mrs Shuttleworth

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120824601#Comment_120824601

I actually think I must have seen a different film to you. Do you know I nearly didn't go and see this film because of the comments on this thread? I'm glad I ignored the snide comments on here because they were wrong.

I don't know how you can say the CGI in this film was poor or that it was "90%". This film is a character study, the action scenes were brilliant and they used throughout the camera filter that takes away the pixelly digital look and gives depth and grain to an image.

I agree with you CGI is awful but please reserve your criticism for the correct targets ie all Marvel and DC output since 2010.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120824263#Comment_120824263

Not happy as such, just being hyperbolic, based of a degree of jaded impatience towards the culture of legacy sequels, and that having been given an ending, perhaps it was best to let this story end where it did. Sounds like I'll have a chance sooner than later to check this out on Disney+

silverharp

Getting tickets for MI for the Point and noticed Indie 5 is downgraded fittingly enough to their screen 5

Decuc500

I loved this. Maybe it's the connection to the character. I've seen all 5 films in the cinema so I definitely grew up as an Indiana Jones fan. I got the sense that everyone involved had an emotional attachment to what they were doing.

You can't compare this to superhero summer blockbusters. It's apples and oranges. I watched the first 15 minutes of Black Adam and had to turn it off. Green screen rubbish. Bright colours, loud noises, annoying characters. It's aimed at teenagers and nobody else. Happy meal cinema.

This new Indiana Jones film doesn't reach the heights of McQuarrie/Nolan/Miller blockbuster cinema but it's comfortably ahead of everything else.

El Duda

Indiana Jones and the Flea of the Bag – 4/10 (Cinema)

Boring and too long. 

You know that scene at the end of The Goonies where The Fratelli’s finally catch up with The Goonies? That scene happens at least 6 times in this film. 

I walked out with about half hour to go and by all accounts I missed the best bit. Never mind, i'll catch up with it on Disney+ next week.

//cdn.theforum365.com/emoticons/icon_surprised.gif

Mrs Shuttleworth

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120833950#Comment_120833950

Perfect review of Dial of Destiny. 100% what you said.

Re Temple of Doom - it's spectacular. The opening "Anything Goes" number rearranged by John Williams sung in Cantonese and directed by Spielberg "Busby Berkley" style is worth admission/streaming price alone.

HazeDoll

I finally saw it this evening. These are my disjointed thoughts.

Like a lot of people, Indiana Jones has been a huge thing for me since childhood. All tied into fond memories of my Dad, my carefree youth, a lost sense of adventure, a sense of wonder. I don't know if many people are in a similar position but I definitely bring a lot of emotional baggage to the film. It's not really fair to expect Ford, Spielberg, Lucas and Disney to take all that into account. I think a lot of the time when we get worked up about franchises we forget how subjective these things are.

My emotional investment will never be satisfied by a new installment because what I actually want is to watch Raiders, for the first time, forever, with my Dad.

Hated Crystal Skull, obviously. I was so excited about it and so willing to be swept along and it was a huge let down. I'm not certain about this but I think it was the last film I saw in the cinema with my Dad. I have always taken its failure to entertain us personally.

I didn't hate DoD. I missed the little opening sequence that has nothing to do with the rest of the plot. (Rolling boulder in Raiders, the Shanghai bit in Temple of Doom, the River Phoenix bit in Crusade). I don't know if the Tobey Jones part was supposed to be an 'opening sequence' but it went on too long and was far too plot-related to work.

I liked the Helena character. I'd watch a spin-off featuring her, if that's what's coming next. She's likeable and her baddassery is believable enough to be engaging.

I couldn't figure out what that Teddy character was for. Maybe there was something weird going on with the sound in the cinema but it sounded like all his dialogue was badly dubbed. At no point did he contribute anything beyond plot mechanics. I wonder if he had a much more central role but a bunch of pivotal scenes were cut. All he did was remind me that Short Round wasn't in this film. I honestly think I couldn't have picked the actor out of a lineup if they had been in the cinema lobby the minute the film ended.

It was nice to see Sallah, shame he played such a minor role.

It was good to see Marion too but a little disappointing to see her reduced to the role of a sideline character. She was always so spirited and stroppy, I hated to see her so diminished.

I enjoyed watching out for little details that harked back to the other films. I bet I missed a bunch of them but they were fun. Of course, the danger with referencing the classics is that the audience is reminded of how great the other films were and how forgettable this is in comparison.

The big criticism that I have is quite hard to articulate. I think it's probably to do with pacing or editing. In the first three films the action slides from location to location in a way that feels smooth and weirdly believable. This is less true of Temple of Doom but it still works. I don't know how to explain this but it's like the rhythm of the film is very subtly dictated by the music. Crystal Skull and DoD don't seem to manage this. If it was a line of poetry you would add a stressed syllable here, two quick unstressed syllables there, to make the whole poem scan.

There was far too much 'Phew, we got away from them - Oh no, they found us!'

I didn't have a huge problem with the bit at the end. I was on board with the biblical face-melters in Raiders, the magicky stones in Temple of Doom, the ancient knight in Crusade. I can get on board with a bit of time travel. I didn't quite catch it, but was there a Terminator II type of loop, where the technology wouldn't have been invented if it hadn't been brought back in time?

*Editing to add: I somehow forgot to mention that Ford carries the whole thing with great style. He had some good lines but really he just inhabits the leather jacket, hat and whip in a way that makes the character feel real. I can't imagine Batman being Batman once the cameras aren't pointed at him, and the same goes for Bond, Skywalker and anybody else I can think of. The thing that was always different about Indy was that I could believe that he had lots of other adventures when nobody was watching. While I was doing my homework he was out there going about his day, wearing his hat and saving the world.

Here's how things currently stand. I might feel differently in the morning.

1. Raiders
2. Crusade
3. Temple of Doom
4. Dial of Destiny
5. An episode of Duck Tales that I vaguely remember.
6. Crystal Skull.

Homelander

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120833950#Comment_120833950

Bit disingenuous to use Black Adam as a representative of Marvel/DC movies. It's absolute crap, recognised as same generally, and was a box office flop as well.

Something recent like Guardians of the Galaxy 3 is not only incomparably better than Dial of Destiny and far better critically and commercially received, but a genuinely good movie.

In fact the director of Dial of Destiny also directed Logan, another excellent comic-book movie that's several rungs above most of them.

Of course there are "bad" or even just average superhero movies, any amount of them. But there's also remarkably good ones. To dismiss them all as rubbish or vapid, and most especially to use Black Adam of all things as an example in a discussion, is rubbish in itself.

Decuc500

I'm well aware that James Mangold directed Logan. He's a proper filmmaker and Logan is a great film. It's totally different from most superhero movies ( or shows) that 'drop' on Disney every week. There's very little artistry involved in most of these things. And maybe I shouldn't be using Black Adam as an example if it's not considered good and flopped but I don't really care. For one James Mangold there are 10 Black Adams.

To me it's representative of how these films have taken over popular cinema. I'm not in the target audience for superhero films anymore so maybe my opinion is invalid but I've seen enough of them to basically detest them now.

So please don't tell me my opinion is rubbish if I value a thing such as quality popular cinema over mass produced rubbish.

B.A._Baracus

Watched it tonight and I enjoyed it. Maybe that's because I heard so many people saying it was garbage my expectations were low.

Go in low and be entertained.

beastfromtheEast

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120828215#Comment_120828215

Seen it the other week and it was ok.

Not nearly as bad as most are making out but at the same time it's not a patch on Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The CGI or Green Screen effects on the Train don't look very good the real Train at the start of The Last Crusade blows it out of the water.

Agent Coulson

Reading today that this will be Disneys biggest live action flop since John Carter.

~Rebel~

Finally got around to catching this in cinema. Totally fine bit of fun. Much much better than Crystal Skull, but a pale shadow of the original trilogy. But a grand bit of reasonably empty light entertainment. Was glad to see all the nonsensical hand-wringing about the dynamic between Indy and Helena was totally wrong and unfounded. I also kinda think a lot of people totally misinterpreted the role of Helena in this - she's not there as his snarky sidekick, she's his antagonist almost as much as Mikkelsen is. She's trying to assert her own position, with her own financially driven goals in direct conflict to Indy, but Indy is the one who is always always right, including, finally, about her own deeper motivations for her chosen life path. Her trying to undermine him is her own effort to justify herself - but Indy always has the upper hand, and always knows better.

Having had a quick scan through the comments... some people need to refocus their thinking I think. It's far less useful to focus on a negative, the thing you don't want, rather than what you do want. Seems a few people can see nothing but 'wokeness' wherever they look, to the extent of losing the bigger picture. The entertainment industry doesn't have a 'wokeness' problem. One need only glance at TV to see wokeness is not a prerequisite - TV is full of all kinds of everything. Film's problem is that all the best talent is in TV now, writing brilliant nuanced intelligent exciting content. I saw one of the comments complaining about the lack of iconic movie characters over the past few years - again attributing wokeness - well, there's no end of iconic TV characters in that time.

At the same time as all the money entered TV, Film was shifting their model to bet big on known-IP, limiting the opportunities for writers, pushing them into this burgeoning TV market. Meanwhile, the obvious issue with those big IP projects is that if they're your long term, they need to be protected. So you get increasingly inoffensive content (in every way, not just political correctness) that doesn't push boundaries, because each of these installments is just one piece of a massive financial pie, so it simply isn't worth the risk of potentially spoiling the property by deviating from the safe (like the backlash to Last Jedi taking a few risks). It's the major downside of working with ideas/concepts/worlds that have such a strong attachment already built to them.

The hope is that the diminishing returns of these massive IPs will eventually require taking more risks on original content, bringing some of these writers who have been excelling in the TV space back into the film world, and broadening the range of the big studios output - going from a small handful of massive budget projects to a broader spread of medium budget films.

(also, i fcking hate the word 'woke', so gonna avoid it for another while!)

pixelburp

A little longer than I had speculated given the box pummelling this got, but Indy 5 is arriving on digital platforms August 29; no mention of Disney+ but I presume that'll happen later.

Tony EH

Stopped watching this at the 1:20 mark. It's incredibly dull.

Might pick it up again tomorrow.

Really though...phew.