Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

No doubt a lot of people didn't enjoy the fifth installment of the Indiana Jones Trilogy. It seems to have done pretty badly on its opening weekend, especially since it is apparently the most expensive film ever made (though it's hard to remember a film that wasn't). I quite enjoyed it. The dialogue was grating, incredibly so at times, and the story didn't quite match up to the original, but hey maybe I'm just a happy go lucky sorta fellow who enjoys a crappy adventure film.

But this review isn't about the 'quality' of the film, that would be gauche and unbecoming of a serious intellectual such as myself. Therefore I shall enumerate four points of immense import and you shall become wiser for reading them.

1) Smoking

In 1969 the average American smoked a lot. They were constantly at it, it was a big deal. It's strange that a film set in 1969 featured only one and a half scenes where someone smoked (one where someone actually lit a cigarrete and smoked it and one where someone attempted to light a pipe). Both of these scenes were essential for a plot point. It's strange that this kind of thing is unacceptable in films unless it's absolutely necessary. It's not like the film shied away from other forms of vice, drinking at 8 am, gambling, theft, listening to the Beatles, all of these are shown, heck some guys were even dressed as Nazis! But watching someone smoke would be totally unacceptable. It's funny how tabboos work like that.

2) Cinemas are too loud

Yeah ok, this one's just here to fill up space. But for real, I get that you have Dolby Surround Sound and you need to show it off but please stop. Maybe it's because the Zoomers can't understand unsubtitled films unless they're loud enough to drown out their thoughts?

3) Nazis as macvillains

Indiana Jones is famous for its macguffins, objects which exist purely for the goodies and baddies to fight over. A macguffin exists for no other reason than to drive the plot forward. I personally think the very concept is utter drivel, what goal could possibly not be a macguffin, the whole point of films is that they have some kind of plot (or a conspicuous abscense thereof) so obviously the arc of the covenant has to serve that purpose and in every Indiana Jones film (and every other film) we are given reasons that the characters want the object, a good film might even pick an object that fits in with a broader theme that the film explores. Well anyway, I contend that there is such a thing as a macvillain —that is to say a villain whose villainousness doesn't really fit in with the themes of the film. Nazis are bad, indeed they are ontologically bad, but while in the previous films they fit well as the obvious baddies they felt sort of grafted on here. It's not just that world war 2 has ended, the film kind of has a downbeat view of post war America, and not in a 'we've failed to live up to our ideals sort of way.' It's not an overly anti-American film (maybe even less so than Crystal Skull from what I remember) but the undertone is definitely there. Early on the baddie asks a black man where he's from originally, I assume this was meant to make us think 'jee what a racist' but instead it reduces an ideology of barely comprehensible evil to a sort of faux pas.

I recall there being a tweet about how this film was bade because it tells us it's good to punch nazis but not how to identify them. I assume the author meant that we should be learning that Actually the Liberals or the NIMBYs or whoever are the real nazis and it should have been about that, but there is an actual point burried in the tweet. This film lacks a clear idea of why the nazis were so bad and this contributes to a kind of disjointedness what with them being evil on the face of it, but not for reasons that are particularly linked to the plot. We don't exactly need a philosophical refutation of nazi ideology, but the themes of the film and its idea of what is good needed to be better aligned with its villain. The Michael Caine film The Holcroft Covenant does a much better job at this, even though it has Nazis as the villains long after Hitler had been defeated. It does this by linking them to themes which match post war concerns, when the Nazis weren't a threat as such but they could be turned into a conspiracy which was exactly what people in the 70s were worried about. For this film to have Nazis as the villains you really needed either a positive view of American ideals, ie "we beat them and we might not get everything right but dammit we've got the right ideas," or a very negative one where actually capitalism and structural racism and such mean that the US government or US elites or whatever are actually trying to help out the Nazi scientist.

4) Please write better dialogue

It's tragic how terrible the dialogue in this film was. Almost every line was grating and the two worst ones featured in the trailers so I guess that's why the box office was so terrible. The absolute worst of the lot was when Indiana Jones said something along the lines of "It doesn't matter what you believe, but how hard you believe it." This is such a terrible line given that this fella is trying to stop Nazi Germany conquer the world. Indeed the disjointedness of villain and theme was mostly the result of dialogue like this (the other standout was the infamous 'capitalism' line). This last point is probably the problem from which all the others stemmed. We should probably ban anyone under the age of 50 from writing films.