Vox's Alissa Wilkinson published a largely positive review while tying into the themes of aging, history, and the IP era we're in the middle of right now. She keeps most of the review vague and spoiler free, but she does mention a particular detail about the Dial itself I didn't know about (not really a spoiler, it may have already been known and I just missed it).
Of note:
Of note:
Dial of Destiny feels like an emphatic period at the end of a very long sentence, a sequel making its own case against some future further resurrection — not unlike last year’s Cannes blockbuster premiere, Top Gun: Maverick, or 2021’s fourth installment of The Matrix. That’s not just because Harrison Ford is turning 81 this summer. It’s in the text; Dial of Destiny argues, explicitly, that you have to leave the past in the past, that the only way to ensure the world continues is to put one foot down and then another, moving into the future.
Ironic, yes, for a movie built on giant piles of nostalgia and made by a company that proudly spends most of its money nibbling its own tail. In fact, the entire Indiana Jones concept was nostalgia-driven even before the fedora made its big-screen debut. Harrison Ford’s whip-cracking adventurer descends from swashbuckling heroes of pulp stories and matinee serials that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg loved as kids; like that other franchise Ford launched, the Indy series is both original and pastiche, both contemporary-feeling and set in another time, another place, a world that’s far, far away.
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Yet a thread that’s run through the whole four-decade series, with heightened irony every time it comes up, is the battle between Indy — who firmly believes that history’s relics ought to be in a museum for everyone to enjoy — and fortune-seeking mercenaries or power-seeking Nazis, who want to privately acquire those artifacts for their own reasons. (Leaving the artifact where it is, perhaps even among its people, still doesn’t really seem to be an option.) It’s a mirror for the very real theft of artifacts throughout history by invading or colonizing forces, the taking of someone else’s culture for your own use or to assert your own dominance. That battle crops up again in this installment, with both mercenaries and Nazis on offer. Shaw, voicing a darker archaeological aim, wryly insists that thieving is just capitalism, and that cash is the only thing worth believing in; Voller’s aims are much darker.
Ironic, yes, for a movie built on giant piles of nostalgia and made by a company that proudly spends most of its money nibbling its own tail. In fact, the entire Indiana Jones concept was nostalgia-driven even before the fedora made its big-screen debut. Harrison Ford’s whip-cracking adventurer descends from swashbuckling heroes of pulp stories and matinee serials that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg loved as kids; like that other franchise Ford launched, the Indy series is both original and pastiche, both contemporary-feeling and set in another time, another place, a world that’s far, far away.
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Yet a thread that’s run through the whole four-decade series, with heightened irony every time it comes up, is the battle between Indy — who firmly believes that history’s relics ought to be in a museum for everyone to enjoy — and fortune-seeking mercenaries or power-seeking Nazis, who want to privately acquire those artifacts for their own reasons. (Leaving the artifact where it is, perhaps even among its people, still doesn’t really seem to be an option.) It’s a mirror for the very real theft of artifacts throughout history by invading or colonizing forces, the taking of someone else’s culture for your own use or to assert your own dominance. That battle crops up again in this installment, with both mercenaries and Nazis on offer. Shaw, voicing a darker archaeological aim, wryly insists that thieving is just capitalism, and that cash is the only thing worth believing in; Voller’s aims are much darker.
Listen, I'm glad the actor had a life/career affirming comeback, regardless of what I think of that movie, but Short Round still sucks. Just like Young Anakin still sucks, and Jar Jar Binks still sucks, etc. You can have sympathy for the actor behind the character, but that doesn't magically make something not shit
