BEFORE: Well, it took almost 15 years, but I've circled back to where I started, sort of, way back in 2009. The previous "Indiana Jones" film was the first film I watched when I decided to start catching up on movies, and that was first and foremost on my to-do list. If it seemed like a lot to watch 3,500 films between "Puss in Boots" and its sequel, how about over 4,500 films between "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" and this one? Honestly, I'm no closer to finishing this process than I was back then - or am I? I've seen just about every classic film that I set out to see, from "Casablanca" to "The Seventh Seal" and then some, and I rarely dip back into the TCM-type movies any more. I don't know, maybe I have to think about stopping this - someday. Everything has to end some time, really. I guess when my heart's not in organizing movies any more, or I break my chain, or I get too old, or I just see a way out...until then, I'll keep plugging away at it.
Antonia Banderas carries over from "Uncharted".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" (Movie #0001)
THE PLOT: Archaeologist Indiana Jones races against time to retrieve a legendary artifact that can change the course of history.
AFTER: So, full disclosure, I watched this a month ago, August 1, when I had a bunch more time on my hands, the theater where I work part-time was closed and I was taking advantage of "Discount Tuesdays" at AMC, where I used to work. I'm still in their frequent-flyer program, so on Tuesdays I can still see a movie for just $7, that's a substantial savings, even from the afternoon matinee price. I saw four movies this summer on Tuesday afternoons, I spaced them out, every two weeks, and that got me through. "The Flash", "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse", this film, and "Asteroid City", which I'll review in about two weeks. "The Flash" is airing on HBO now, but it wasn't when I wanted to post the review - and "Asteroid City" is on Peacock, but I had no way of knowing for sure it would be available in August. I think "Indiana Jones" is just coming to VOD now, I wasn't sure if it would also end up on Paramount Plus, which I do not subscribe to, or Disney Plus, which I do. So catching it on the big screen was the only way to ensure that I'd have it watched when it came up in the linked chain.
All four of those films are recent releases, so a standard SPOILER ALERT tonight before you go any further, unless of course you caught this one in the theaters or you've paid top dollar to stream it at home already.
Ultimately, this both was and wasn't everything I would expect from a new Indiana Jones movie, especially one that was set in 1969, around the time of the moon landing. I wonder what other hardcore fans of the franchise thought about this - our hero is now a (very) old professor, teaching at Hunter College in NYC, and he's on the outs with his wife, Marion, which may have a lot to do with the friction caused by the fact that their son didn't make it home from Vietnam. Well, Mutt was a universally unliked character anyway, but maybe others thought that the franchise could continue with a new lead character if Harrison Ford got too old. I'm...OK with that, I suppose, though it does seem a bit like the Han Solo/Leia Organa relationship from "Star Wars" Episode 7. However, there's a big continuity problem now because there was an episode of "Young Indiana Jones" where an extremely old Indy was seen going to a museum with his adult son in the year 1992 or so. Well, I guess there's always the possibility that Mutt isn't dead, he's just MIA and off having his own adventures somewhere.
Was this film successful? It was the latest in a long line of big franchise sequels that was supposed to "save Hollywood", but did it? When a company spends $294 million to make a movie, and it "only" takes in $381 million at the worldwide box office, that creates an odd conundrum - the film made $87 million in profit, but is still considered a bomb once you factor in the costs of promotion and studio expenses. This makes no sense, everything's digital now, so it should be cheaper to make, distribute and promote a film, they don't have to pay for physical prints any more, or the shipping costs associated with them, so where the hell did all that money go? And since it's now impossible for a film that cost almost $300 million to turn a profit, then why the hell do they keep making films that cost that much? Couldn't they have trimmed the budget, you know, somewhere?
How much of that budget was spent making Harrison Ford look sixty-something in every shot, instead of 81? Would it really have been THAT BAD if he looked his age? Would the teens not come out to see a movie featuring an actor who looks that old? Or is this just a franchise that had its day, and didn't really need another installment? Maybe this film would have performed better if they didn't wait 15 years between movies? Just saying. Very late in the film, we get to see Marion come back, and she somehow looks even older than her husband, because it seems like all of the de-aging budget was spent on Harrison Ford, making every shot in the film an effects shot, and no money left for her. First there was some backlash about this, apparently, but then the acting community rushed to Karen Allen's defense, saying it was refreshing to see an older actress who looks her age, when there's so much focus on the appearance of youth, and a de facto hiring freeze forcing older actors to basically retire. My question is, where's the backlash against the effects work to make Harrison Ford look younger, and what purpose that serves overall, be it vanity or ageism - either way, it seems counter-productive.
Look, parts of this film are set in 1969, but there are flashbacks to 1944 - and both time periods have Nazis in them. OK, in 1969 there's an ex-Nazi who's working for NASA, but under another name. This should be timely now, because there were neo-Nazis just a few years ago, marching against "Black Lives Matter" during the Trump administration - remember "good people on both sides", which was our Presidents saying that some racist Nazis are "good people"? A leopard doesn't change its spots, however, so a film with a once-and-former Nazi in 1969 should be very relevant to today's audiences, unless I'm missing something.
At a low point in his life, upon retiring from his job at Hunter College, and having his wife leave him because of his depression, which is only bound to make him feel worse, Indy is visited by his goddaughter, Helena Shaw, who he affectionately (?) nicknamed "Wombat". She's the daughter of fellow archaeologist Basil Shaw, who had become obsessed with an artifact called Archimedes' Dial - in the extended opening sequence, set in 1944, we'd seen Indy rescue him from the Nazis on a train loaded with possibly supernatural artifacts that were being sent to Hitler in Berlin. Indy catches up with the train, of course, and faces off against the Nazi astrophysicist Jürgen Voller, but he manages to free Shaw and they leap from the train shortly before the Allied Forces blow up a bridge and derail it.
Helena Shaw visits Indy because she wants to research the dial, and she last saw one half of it when Indy took it away from her father, as he was planning to destroy it. (Umm, NITPICK POINT, he didn't destroy it, but how does SHE know that? Why wouldn't she think Indy followed through with destroying it, which would remove the reason for her visit?). But it turns out she's not a researcher, she's now a antiquities smuggler, and she wants to sell it on the black market. She scarpers off with it while the accomplices of Voller (now going by the name of "Schmidt") assisted by CIA agents, framing Indy for two murders on their way out. Indy's only able to escape the CIA because there's a ticker-tape parade for the Apollo 11 astronauts taking place, and the city streets are filled with crowds, including a fair number of hippie war protestors.
Indy turns to his old friend Sallah, and while it's nice to see him again, Sallah is now a NYC cab driver, which seems a far cry from his old job of supervising archaeological digs in Egypt, once upon a time. Not sure how I feel about this turn of events. I mean, it's great that Indy has a free ride to the airport, if he's going to attend the auction in Tangier, but another NITPICK POINT, this doesn't explain how Indy was able to leave the country - doesn't he still have to show his passport at the airport, and isn't he currently wanted for murder? Anyway, it's on to Morocco, for the auction and a tuk-tuk chase through the streets, then on to Greece, where Indy's got an old friend who's got a boat and some diving equipment, of course, which is just what he and Wombat need to find a shipwreck that holds a tablet that reveals the location of the other half of the dial.
After several more reversals, our heroes and the other team led by Schmidt end up in Sicily, at the site of Archimedes' tomb, where they find the other half of the dial, and its true purpose is revealed, to locate time fissures. Schmidt intends to use this for an unexpected purpose, to travel back in time to 1939 and assassinate Hitler - this seems like a strange goal at first for a Nazi, however this is a Nazi who has already seen that Hitler failed, and he somehow believes that if Hitler weren't in charge, the Third Reich would have been stronger, and would have succeeded in taking over the world back then. Sure, go ahead, create a time paradox, what could possibly go wrong? Will someone please explain to this guy that even if his plan succeeds, if he goes back in time to kill Hitler (which seems to be first on everyone's checklist when they get their hands on a time machine) then he changes the timeline, and then he creates a new timeline where he doesn't need to go back in time to kill Hitler, because Hitler was already dead? So even if he does that, he then creates a new course of events where he didn't, so in the end his work is all for naught? Silly Nazi...
OK, no more about the plot, because the film has one more big reveal that I won't disclose here, and anyway it scarcely matters because the most important thing is the ending, and that the good guys survive and the bad guys don't, and Indy gets back home to NYC and reconciles with Marion. And he's going to live forever because he drank from the Holy Grail in the third movie, and well, she won't. Maybe that's why his character looks 60 here instead of 80?
Well, I suppose this is the end for the Indiana Jones franchise, it's also John Williams' final film, or at least he announced his retirement and then maybe reneged on that, too. I guess the moral is "Never say never" but if we have to wait another 15 years for another sequel they might as well just not bother at all. For me, it's also the end of the Antonio Banderas portion of the chain, I'll follow another link for tomorrow. But hey, that's two films in a row about treasure hunters traveling around the world, solving puzzles and disrupting auctions and falling out of planes. Weird how things work out sometimes, isn't it? It's not the end of summer blockbusters for me, though - fall doesn't start officially until Sept. 21, so I can squeeze in a few more.
I don't really know how to rate this one - it was exciting, sure, but it also fell back on so many overused tropes from this franchise, and also from other action movies and time-travel movies, plus there were a lot of sad parts, and, like, why? I don't go to the movies to feel sad, just saying. There's that feeling again, like I kind of got where I had wanted to go, and then once I got there, I sort of wondered why...I suppose I could watch this one again once it's on premium cable and maybe I'll feel differently about it, who knows.
Also starring Harrison Ford (last seen in "The Call of the Wild"), Phoebe Waller-Bridge (last seen in "Goodbye Christopher Robin"), Mads Mikkelsen (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore"), John Rhys-Davies (last seen in "The Game of Their Lives"), Toby Jones (last seen in "The Pale Blue Eye"), Boyd Holbrook (last seen in "Beckett"), Ethann Isidore, Shaunette Renée Wilson (last seen in "Black Panther"), Thomas Kretschmann (last seen in "Downfall"), Karen Allen (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Olivier Richters (last seen in "The Electrical Life of Louis Wain"), Mark Killeen (last seen in "The Batman"), Martin McDougall (last seen in "Edge of Tomorrow"), Aala Safi (last seen in "American Assassin"), Chase Brown, Nasser Memarzia (last seen in "The Devil's Double"), Anna Francolini (last seen in "Emma."), Gabby Wong (last seen in "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story"), Adolfo Margiotta, Antonio Iorio, Holly Lawton, Guy Paul (last seen in "The Sense of an Ending"), Harriet Slater, Ian Porter (last seen in "The King's Man"), Ali Saleh, Amara Khan, Billy Postlethwaite (last seen in "Tomb Raider"), Edoardo Strano, Angelo Spagnoletti, Henry Garrett (last seen in "A Little Chaos"), Elena Saurel (also last seen in "The Batman"), Corrado Invernizzi (last seen in "Ford v Ferrari"), Joshua Broadstone, Bruce Lester-Johnson (last seen in "The Contractor"), Martin T. Sherman, Allon Sylvain, William Meredith, Kate Doherty (last seen in "Secrets & Lies"), Eliza Mae Kyffin, Mauro Cardinali, Douglas Robson, Bryony Miller (last seen in "Rebecca"), Tiwa Lade, Brodie Husband, Lily Catalifo, Cris Haris (last seen in "How to Talk to Girls at Parties").
RATING: 7 out of 10 noisy neighbors
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