Time travelling, obscure objects dating thousands of years ago, new plans for a revival of Nazism, kids improvised as airplane pilots merge with chasings on top of trains, fists, ancient tombs and of course the usual whip that can kick off enemies, in the last Indiana Jones.
The danger of the franchise here come to their highest, in a film that exploits the well-grounded cliches of the most renowned fiction archaeologist on earth in order to build a meaningless blockbuster that casts a dark light over the previous ones. Everyone knows that comparisons between the first movies of a series and the most recent ones should be avoided in order not to be disappointed, as the supremacy of the first well-established and much appreciated “founding father” can hardly be equalized. But there is a difference between not reaching the same heights and trashing on a character and on a fiction world that means so much to the audience worldwide, and this limit has been crossed.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is the first of the series which has not been written by George Lucas and directed by Steven Spielberg (even if they´re credited as executive directors), and this can really show, starting from a script that clearly tries to pick up on the latest tendency of time-space breaches and fantasises over the “what if” of history and to mix them up with basic action movie stunts. Sometimes it pans out, sometimes it only feels annoying, and boring.
Since the first scene in a Nazi headquarter at the verge of collapse of the Third Reich, followed by that on a train that Nazis are using to carry away the artistic and historical and some supposedly sacred spoils and since we first see the face of “Indy”, blurred and weirdly odd behind the magic of the VFX that makes him look 30 years younger, we understand the category this film will belong too. A film that was the most expensive of the whole saga and with a budget of almost 300 million is one of the most expensive ones in the history of cinema. But it does not really spring from any kind of inspiration or interesting artistic brainwave, and rather comes across as a get-more-money gimmick.
The talent of the always wonderful Harrison Ford here is combined with the great presence of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, as the two protagonists somehow fight against the Nazi comeback, 25 years after the Oxford professor Basil Shaw and Indiana – in that very train- were able to steal and “save” not the Longino spears that supposedly stabbed Christ as they initially intended to, but rather one of the two pieces of the Antikytera, or “the dial of destiny”. Supposedly invented by Archimedes some 2000 years before, the object was supposed to be able to locate space-time fissures; a power that should have been destroyed as it could potentially change the course of history. This is clear to the antagonist of the story, the German astrophysics Jurgen Voller, when in 1969 Manhattan, he is still looking for it as he unleashes his thuds after Indiana Jones, now after the death of his son and the separation with his wife, who is a bitter archaeologist professor. A pursuit that gets all the way more confusing as the thief and black-market genius Helena, the daughter of professor Shaw, comes in the picture. She, Indiana and Voller will follow each other in a never ending and frankly quite trivial rollercoaster of events that brings them from Tangeri to Athens, to Alexandria of Egypt, and not only these places. As the first two are looking for the tomb of Archimedes to find the second piece of the Antikytera, the German doctor is planning a trip to the past to change the course of Nazism and reestablish the Third Reich by taking over Hitler and ensuring that Germany will not lose the war. But something goes wrong, and instead, they find themselves in the middle of the Syracuse siege in III A.C., right at the presence of Archimedes.
The happy ending that follows this baffling trip, the defeat of the Nazism melancholics and the comeback to 1969 Manhattan seems to be the only slightly decent moment in a film that for the majority of the 154 minutes seems too bad to be true.
One cannot help wondering what could have been done differently. Sometimes stories just do not work, it can happen. But if only a little bit of the money and energy that was spent over the creation of such aesthetically mind-blowing scenes had been used to meditate better on the script, maybe this last film of the saga would have been less eye−popping but even less disappointing.
In a word, Indiana Jones 5 is a flop.
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