638 words
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny isn’t good enough or bad enough to merit a review. Which I guess is a review in and of itself.
I enjoyed the first three Indiana Jones films a good deal. They aren’t serious movies, but they are well-made, entertaining piffle, with Harrison Ford as an unusual hero who combines two-fisted paleo-masculinity with intellect and taste. But I don’t think I was ever young enough to take the character of Indiana Jones all that seriously. Thus I am pretty much immune to a big-budget nostalgia-fest about the character. If I were feeling nostalgic, I would simply watch the original films. Or better, just listen to John Williams’ wonderful music.
So it would take more than nostalgia to sell me a new Indy film. It would take something new and surprising, not a calculated, hackneyed, and mechanical trip down memory lane. Ancient occult McGuffin? Check. Fights? Check. Chases? Check. Nazis? Check. Hat? Check. Whip? Check. Bugs? Check. Non-white sidekick? Check. Strong woman? Check. John Williams? Check. Snakes? That would be derivative. Let’s try eels.
Disney spent $300 million on this film. Would it have taken an extra $50 million to include some originality? Couldn’t they have found space for a few twists in a running time of more than two-and-a-half hours?
You can buy Trevor Lynch’s Classics of Right-Wing Cinema here.
A major problem with this film is Harrison Ford. He was never a great actor, but he could pull off the role when he was young and virile. Unfortunately, the years have not been kind. The film could have worked if Ford played Indy like Sean Connery played his father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: as a wise mentor to a younger man, who could have taken over the action sequences. But no, old Indy is still playing the action hero. A better actor could have made it all poignant, but without that spark, today’s Harrison Ford is just a loathsome spectacle of wheezing, lurching, kvetching decay. Does he look different to eyes blurred by nostalgia? Maybe. But people are staying away from this movie in droves for some reason.
Frankly, I had enough of Ford in Disney’s cynical Star Wars nostalgia reboot. I liked Star Wars a whole lot more than the Indy films because of the imaginative world-building. But I never took Harrison Ford’s character, Han Solo, all that seriously, either. The Force Awakens and The Rise of Skywalker are so systematically repulsive that they almost qualify as works of genius. But for me, the worst moments were when Harrison Ford appeared on screen. The first time I saw Ford’s grizzled mug, I felt I was reliving the worst moment of nineties TV: when Star Trek’s Walter Koenig showed up on Babylon Five (hey, pickings were slim, and I gave it a chance). I turned to a friend and said, “Science fiction will not be safe until all these people are dead.”
One of the evilest films of the last two decades is Mama Mia, which turns ABBA’s wonderful songs into a musical about how love and marriage are not for the young and fertile but for the paunchy and menopausal. As the sixties counter-culture shrivels into a smug, power-mad gerontocracy, we will only see more cinematic celebrations of sexual senescence. We saw it with Jack Nicholson and Dianne Keaton in Something’s Gotta Give. We saw it with Sam Neal and Laura Dern locking dentures in Jurassic Park: Dominion. Now we get it here with Indy and his statutory rape victim Marion Ravenwood, reunited in what is supposed to be a touching ending. I found it distasteful.
Many people are complaining that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is “woke.” But it is no woker than any of the preceding films. I am glad audiences are rejecting PC messaging, but in truth they only see wokeness because the film lacks magic.
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40 comments
I haven’t seen it nor do I have even a smidgen of interest in doing so, but the one “woke”(I really do hate using that word) instance I noticed in a trailer released in May was Indy asking his female sidekick “How did you turn out this way?” Her response was “What, resourceful, beautiful, daring, self-sufficient?” There was a time when writers didn’t need to spell it out and impose an impression of certain characters based on the hue of their genitals. They crafted complex, personable and flawed characters that were easily relatable. Sadly, those days appear to be nearing an end, at least for the big studios that are infected with the CEI/ESG/DIE suicide cult.
Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade should’ve been the last crusade.
On a positive note, whilst there was no archetypal feminine heroine, at least PW-B’s tomboy character didn’t have to have a sex change just because she occasionally liked to wear the pants. There was even a suggestion of a failed romance with an Eastern potentate, she’d ditched him of course, and I detected no overt Sapphism. In Clown World terms it was pretty straight.
Just terrible, the complete lack of dignity and humility; others are supposed to recognize our merits (if we have any) and praise us for them. If they don’t, then we don’t get praised, by them anyway. That’s how it works.
Praising one’s self is a black thing. But because of pervasive negrification, doing so has naturally become the go-to behaviour for everyone else.
I marvel at how members of a once great race debase themselves daily by mimicking the world’s worst.
Isn’t that the truth. I recoil in horror every time I witness one of our co ethnics aping a sub Saharan.
100%
Her character, brash and obnoxious, was replying to a challenge. Was her riposte really that offensive? Forty years ago Karen Allen’s Marion in Raiders was a rough and tumble alcoholic/piss-cutting legend. Hardly lady-like behaviour.
Perhaps the difference is the lack of a romantic resolution in the most recent film; no life-affirming connexion between hero and heroine, just the likely-to-be-barren feminist putting the old white guy in the corner.
Yes, this movie really is no woker than the first. But people are more sensitive to it, and the movie lacks magic, so people are unwilling to overlook it.
No, the point was that, in previous generations of movies, the Tough Female Character didn’t have to provide an oral recitation of her resume. The fact that they all have to do so now is a comment on both how stupid and lazy modern audiences have become and how ravenously devoted the writers are to the phony girl power narrative.
Also, there is a sexless, third-wave feminist style mockery of Indiana Jones that most certainly did not exist in the first three films, from any of the female characters. It’s perfectly exemplified by the dyke’s punch of Indiana to ensure that he stays in the time period she has decided he needs to stay in.
Deftly put.
You’re reading too much into a throwaway witticism.
Read Fire Walk With Lee’s original comment more closely; we’re discussing more than “throwaway witticisms.” The character’s comment is just a springboard to a broader matter.
I thought Morgoth summed it up nicely for those who, at least initially, may be less immune to the “nostalgia-fest”: https://morgoth.substack.com/p/indiana-jones-and-the-lost-enchantment
I am agree with this author.
Trevor Lynch reviews are so satisfyingly caustic.
“…a loathsome spectacle of wheezing, lurching, kvetching decay.”
Lol
I love that.
😊
I laughed out loud at this one: “We saw it with Sam Neal and Laura Dern locking dentures in Jurassic Park: Dominion.”
So funny!
This reminds me of the South Park episode back when they weren’t preachy about Indiana Jones being exploited by the producer.
SQUEAL!
One of the funniest moments from that show.
“They’re RAPING him!!!”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AmY2yb_84kw&pp=ygUiU291dGggb2FyayByYXBpbmcgb2YgaW5kaWFuYSBqb25lcw%3D%3D
Thanks for this clip.
And great username.
I haven’t seen it, but I sure hope they didn’t nuke another fridge.
When I watch a movie, I think at all times about the effect/impression that it will have on the general public (Normies). I don’t try my best to ignore that for the sake of it’s entertainment value, or try to alter my perception or apply some mental filter in order to justify it.
So happy to see a new film review by Trevor Lynch! Keep ’em coming…
Thanks. I am looking forward to Christoper Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Miyazaki’s How Do You Live?
Christoper Nolan’s Oppenheimer
Again the old story about poor and oppressed great scientist, framed by bad evil mccarthyist Anti-semites?
It’s all so tiresome, isn’t it?
Oppenheimer really did meet with Soviet intelligence officials when he was building the atomic bomb and after that. There are evidences incl. VENONA, and witnesses, incl. General Pavel Sudoplatov’s memories. In any country and at any time, this would mean his suspension from any work requiring access to important state secrets. It was at the height of the Cold War and the hostility of the USSR to the USA was obvious. The fact that the main information about A-Bomb was transmitted to the USSR even earlier by Harry Hopkins and quite officially does not change anything. Even if the effect of American “Atom Bomb Spies” for the creation of the Soviet Bomb was exaggerated, they did exist, they did harm, and they were guilty. Why most of those Atom Bomb Spies were Eastern European Jews is another question.
And, let’s say that in reality, nothing particularly bad happened to Oppenheimer. For comparison, the Soviet atomic scientist Andrei Sakharov was for a long time suspended from any job, partially deprived of his civil rights and deported to the city of Gorky, which is closed to foreigners. And here we should note, that Sakharov did not have contacts with foreign intelligence services, but only made proposals for reforms in the USSR, and his proopesed reforms were very moderate, he was not even an opponent of communism and the Soviet order at that time, but only wanted to improve them, to make the existing system more human. Sakharov at that time was no longer engaged in the development of nuclear weapons, and this was during the time of detente and nuclear parity between the superpowers (MAD). But he got worse treatment than Oppenheimer.
See John Wear. Was Robert Oppenheimer a Soviet Agent?
https://inconvenienthistory.com/13/2/7820
I’ve never really much liked films about Indiana Jones, among others also because of the someway clownish anti-Nazi rhetoric (which might well have softened during the making of these films forty years after the war), which was too pronounced in them. Eternal bad Nazis – and until the fourth film, no bad communists. Yes, and in the fourth film, the communists were shown as bad already more than twenty years after the fall of Soviet communism. Of course, these are all just adventure films, in many respects ironic and comedic films, maybe even more comedic than the obvious parody of James Bond films, but this left-wing agenda already irritated me even then.
The nazis again. I wanted nothing to do with the movie for that reason.
That was annoying for me even 30 years ago.
Harrison Ford is 80 yrs old yet computer graphics filters have de-aged him about three decades for this film and he’s flinging a whip around and getting into dustups. What’s even the point of movies with actors now?
Honestly it would have been a better film if it were all CGI or whatever.
I’ve loved Star Wars since as far back as I can remember, but was never into kosher Indy. The super unique and unprecedented use of uber Evil National Socialists as the villains probably had something to do with it. I also don’t like mischling Harrison Ford, and yes Han Solo is grossly overrated as a character.
R2D2 is truly the most likable character in the entire franchise, and also quite often the unacknowledged hero of many situations.
Why any “aware”white male would watch anything that comes out of hollywood these days is beyond me. They hate you and what you believe in.
I just don’t get it
We review movies to help people see through the propaganda. When we sensitize people to propaganda, they begin to see it everywhere. When that happens, the propaganda no longer promotes the enemy message. Instead, it reinforces our message. They invest billions in creating propaganda. By contrast, our investment to subvert it is minimal. It is highly effective asymmetric cultural warfare.
“When that happens, the propaganda no longer promotes the enemy message. Instead, it reinforces our message.”
Exactly! I have experienced this personally. With everything now, even the most routine news broadcast, I see right through it to the underlying anti-White, antisocial messaging. The propaganda put out by the enemy is now as toxic to me as is the deadliest poison. I avoid it completely; but I still very much appreciate and enjoy the critiques, like this piece on an Indiana Jones movie I will never watch.
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