when it premiered the first Indiana Jones in 1981, the one who went in search of the Lost Ark, the archaeologist Mr. Jones, I was 37 years old. The action of the film took place in the sad time of 1936 and the actor, Harrison Ford, born on July 13, 1942, had turned 38 at the time of filming. That is, actor and character were practically the same age. Now that the latest installment has just been released, that of El Dial del Destino, whose action takes place in 1969 –with a prologue that takes us back to the end of the Second World War–, Harrison Ford is about to turn 81 while his character, Indiana, would have been 70 in the film. There is little news of the special effects that rejuvenate Ford in the prologue, giving him back the appearance he looked in The Last Crusade, in the Ford who presides over the last film. Consequently his body shows the aged, consumed and cracked cartography of a retired octogenarian.
The question is that the plot of the film Directed by Mangold, with the present shadow of Lucas and Spielberg snooping around, it’s about temporary setbacksof anachronistic concoctions where the genius of Archimedes, the relativity of time and Wells’s utopia provide the fantastic glue that justifies everything. But this mismatch between the character and the actor is hyperbolized in a hyperbolic story in itself.
In it start of the film, where the latest looting of the Nazi delirium is shown, an SS officer, of unknown pity and severed empathy, it reminds him of a Jones disguised in a German uniform, that those archaeological treasures that are taken, among which is the real? spear of Longinus, they are the spoils of the victor. This happens when Hitler – in the film this is not shown – walks towards suicide in his last bunker. At the end of this 25-year journey, it is Indiana who reminds the villain played by Mads Mikkelsen (mistreated and wasted by the script), that, in effect, the spoils (him) belong to the victor.
Of remains, that is to say, of what remains after having been corroded by the passage of time and the action of man, goes the fifth Indiana. 42 real years have passed since the first and, in that period, the saga has allowed us to witness the aging of the hero in real time, something that cinema has dealt with on many occasions with more or less success. From Robin and Mariam (1976) by Richard Lester, shot in Navarra and with Sean Connery, who years later would play Indiana Jones’s father, as the lead, to La hija de D’Artagnan (1994) by Bertrand Tavernier, the list is long . But no one, except Rocky, had been able to notarize the decrepitude of the hero with the same actor over time.
That sensation of fusion with reality at the time of the metaverse, where the special effects make up everything and reproduce what they want, provided an interesting fact that the writers squander. Built from the relics of what Indiana Jones treasures, Mangold drives however she can. a script that links endless action and video game sequences, with script twists and poorly drawn and untenable characters. The Banderas thing sucks. Neither Lucas, nor Spielberg, nor Mangold seem to believe in what the devil knows more for being old than for being a devil, so there is hardly any news of the wisdom treasured by Indiana. In its place, nostalgia and pathetic capering exert a combustion that leads to fits and starts a story that runs through poorly photographed spaces. Syracuse, Tangier or the New York of the parade of the astronauts who reached the moon in 1969, breathe with difficulty and in the dark. This aspiration to break up the story, to retell it, forges a slide of sensations and the certainty that this fifth installment will sell well but will not convince, which once again makes the Germans (and Europe) the eternal bad guys of the film. It is not known who evokes Hitler more, if the neo-Nazis or those who with the remains of that malignancy cover their own shame.
Indiana Jones and the dial of fate
Address: James Mangold.
Script: David Koepp Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, James Mangold.
Interpreters: Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Mads Mikkelsen, John Rhys-Davies and Antonio Banderas.
Country: USA 2023.
Duration: 154 minutes.
2023-07-07 07:33:35
#Indiana #Jones #Dial #Fate #Spoils #Film #Review
