Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Originally published 11/07/23 on Letterboxd

Worthless slurry of computer-generated sludge and hollow nostalgia. For all its absence of Spielberg’s generally fine-tuned sense of pacing and momentum, Crystal Skull’s earnest fascination with the semiotics of 50s pulp serials, alien invasions and the legacy of the atom bomb (not to mention the undercurrent of anticommunist operations abroad being explicitly tied to nationwide McCarthyist paranoia) rendered it an object of immense fascination, if not necessarily admiration. This, however, approaches the mythology of Indy with a kind of glassy-eyed listlessness, as if trying to approximate its version of a Spielbergian set piece without actually comprehending what makes them so enthralling- namely, the fact that you can actually seewhatever’s happening. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is here for some reason, and is about as conducive to the film’s escalation of tension as the fridge magnets in Indy’s apartment