Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

It's probably a bit late for this review, but I'm not used anymore to jump up to watch a box-office title in its first day of release. Actually, for a few years already, I'm more like avoiding these. "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" was an exception, but one still far from exceptional. The perfect artificial rejuvenation of Harisson Ford in the beginning of the movie is pretty much the single memorable thing about it. Besides that, you can still appreciate that it's a bit above the common superficiality found in most summer movies. But not with much.

The above appreciation stems from the story the movie offers. Not spectacular, but it's pretty consistent. The object of the quest this time, is a mechanism, Antikythera, fictitiously conceived in the movie by Archimedes and capable to predict temporal fissures. The reality about the artifact is obviously a different one, but let's move over it (you can Google it). The nice part in the movie, especially if you didn't have much of a vacation, is that it gets you through a classic quest moving between various touristic locations, until the tangled puzzle is completed. After which, finally (spoiler) we also have a brief travel back in time to the ancient Greece.

Initially the movie seems catchy, throwing at you familiar facts and faces from the Indiana Jones universe, the end of WW2 introducing the villain - a nazi physicist, the return of Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) - migrated from the first movie's Egypt to New York, the tour of an exotic location - Morroco in this case, the well-known melodic line by John Williams, and others. But slowly, this starts to drag, and the action becomes somehow dull. What saves it, more or less, is the time travel element in the end, but the fact you know from the start where the quest goes, doesn't make it a surprise anymore. Unlike, for instance, "Raiders of the Lost Ark", where you have no clue up to the end what exactly happens when the ark will open. Here, the final feeling, after more than two hours of movie, is somehow similar to the main character who being at the age of retirement complains that he doesn't fit anymore in such a story - the movie's sort of meeting the base expectations through its background elements, but seems a bit too "tired" to deliver enough impact. Even so, compared with the precedent exaggeration atempted by Spielberg in 2008 for reviving the character, what we got here seemed to me more in tone with the Indiana Jones I remember from when I was a kid.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5