Indiana Jones & The Dial Of Destiny

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio across regional Victoria on July 6, 2023.

(M) ★★★

Director: James Mangold.

Cast: Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Mads Mikkelsen, Antonio Banderas, Toby Jones, Boyd Holbrook, Ethann Isidore, Shaunette Renée Wilson, Thomas Kretschmann.

It turned out that "spelunking" didn't mean what she thought it meant.

For a generation of fans of a certain age, the first three Indiana Jones movies set the benchmark for escapist entertainment. They were, and are, the ultimate adventure films thanks to their classic set-pieces, a rampaging score, and one of cinema's most iconic heroes. In many a young mind, they inspired an interest in everything from archaeology and Biblical historicity to stuntwork and whipcracking. 

I land firmly within that generation. I've seen Raiders Of The Lost Ark more times than probably any other film. I've read the books and the comics, played The Fate Of Atlantis, cracked a whip, and dressed as Jones for a fancy dress party. I've even seen Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull three times. For me, any Indiana Jones is better than no Indiana Jones. 

Setting this high level of bias aside, I can say confidently that the fifth and final outing of Professor Henry Walton "Indiana" Jones, Jr., Ph.D. is solidly good without being great. It fails to reach the lofty heights of the first three films, but nails the tone of the series better than Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. It's authentically Indiana Jones, even though it's lacking in some departments and gets very weird in its final act.

After an opening sequence set during WWII featuring a CGI de-aged Indiana Jones, the film finds a 70-year-old Indy (played by an 80-year-old Ford) preparing for retirement in 1969. But a visit from his god-daughter Helena Shaw (Waller-Bridge) sets him on the trail of the film's MacGuffin - the Dial of Destiny. The powerful yet broken relic not only sent Helena's father Basil Shaw (Jones) mad, but it's also the target of a former Nazi scientist (Mikkelsen), hellbent on using the dial to correct some of Hitler's mistakes.

Re-watching Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull recently, I was struck by how that film's tone was ever-so-slightly off compared with the previous three Indy adventures. It accidentally erred towards goofy instead of charmingly amusing, its wackiness sucking a little too much of the tension out of proceedings. In Dial Of Destiny, the tone is spot on. The humour has a sincerity that avoids Crystal Skull's wink-at-the-audience silliness. Dial Of Destiny keeps its integrity and its sense of danger close to hand amid the silliness.

This means that even when the film ends up in a very strange place in the final third, we can still get a beautifully heartfelt moment and a hearty laugh out of it. It means that amid the seemingly endless car chases, the gags land and we worry this will be one scrape too many for this surprisingly spritely old man.

Age has certainly wearied Indiana Jones, even if Harrison Ford is in absurdly good shape for an octogenarian. That's a factor in Dial Of Destiny in so many ways, some good, some bad. It adds a certain thematic and emotional richness to the film in places - something not seen so prominently in the franchise outside of Last Crusade. Jones sees the world has passed him by in some moments, which is hard to take for him and the audience. He's as much of a relic as the ones he teaches about or recovers from lost temples. But his senior citizen status does bring its own "ooh, there goes a hip" kind of thinking to some of the action scenes.

Somehow it mostly works. The action set pieces - most notably an opening sequence involving a train full of Nazis and an early horse ride through a New York subway - are good, though a few more with iconic ambition would have been better than yet another car chase. Having very punchable Nazis as the baddies is a great move, Mikkelsen avoids chewing the scenery but brings a studied menace to his role, while Waller-Bridge makes a fantastic companion for Jones. 

As for Ford, it's one of his better performances, and easily the most well-rounded piece of acting he's delivered in the franchise. He always made Jones a man who could be hit and be hurt, but a desire to do what's right (mixed with bloody-minded stubbornness) always got him back on his feet. In Dial Of Destiny, Jones has been hit and hurt so much he's slightly broken, and he's angry at the world because of it. He's still bloody-mindedly stubborn and driven by a strong moral compass, but he has also kinda given up. And having nothing left to care about makes him dangerous. Somehow, Ford conveys all that - the rage, the fragility, the danger, the emptiness - and makes Indy more interesting than he's ever been.

Overall it's a bit long (I blame the car chases), some of it feels kinda tepid or lazily plotted, and the ending is going to take some getting used to, but it has its heart and its tone and its fedora in the right place. Is it a fitting end to all Indiana Jones movies? Its final moments are subversively perfect in one sense, while in another sense, they can't match the wit of Raiders' conclusion or the grandeur of Last Crusade's.

But like I said, any Indiana Jones is better than no Indiana Jones. And if this is the end, well, thank you, Indiana Jones. It's been a wild ride, and we've loved every minute of it. Even the bit where you dodged a nuclear blast by hiding in a lead-lined fridge.

Elemental

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio across regional Victoria on June 22, 2023.

(PG) ★★★

Director: Peter Sohn.

Cast: (voices of) Leah Lewis, Mamoudou Athie, Ronnie del Carmen, Shila Ommi, Mason Wertheimer, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Catherine O'Hara.

"What makes you think we overwatered and then set fire to the plants?"

Water falls in love with fire. That's the elevator pitch here. Oh, and it's a reflection on the immigrant experience. And it's made by Pixar. How could it miss?

Pixar films are great at being several things at once. Inside Out is about anthropomorphic personifications of feelings go on a twisted journey through the human mind, but it's also about becoming a teenager and leaving childhood behind, plus the power and necessity of all our emotions. The Incredibles is a superhero movie, but it's also about being true to yourself, and what makes everyone special. Finding Nemo & Dory are great adventures, but are also about disability. This combination of deep themes and all-ages entertainment is the secret to Pixar's success.

Elemental is great at juggling its surface love story and its deeper immigrant themes, but, oddly, it only does a passable job at getting all the, ahem, elements to work together across the whole of its runtime. As a result, Elemental is good, not great. Maybe that says more about the "great expectations" that come with each new Pixar film, and maybe I'm wrong - I was wrong about Ratatouille after my first viewing. But Elemental has all the necessary pieces, yet it can't get the puzzle to fit together like you'd hope.

The romantic odd couple here are Ember, the fiery daughter of immigrants, who is destined to take over the family business, and Wade, the wet son of privileged upper class water elements, who works as a council inspector. Wade literally spills into Ember's life and puts Ember's family business at risk of closure, but the pair soon have to work together to find the source of a major water leak that threatens to cause major damage and loss of life in Fire Town.

Firstly: don't think too hard about the physics of Elemental, otherwise it will start doing your head in. Why is water different in its water form to its person form when a Water Person can disappear into the water water? And how come the heat of a fire person... anyway, I need to stop thinking about this, or I'll get a headache.

But, more importantly, its the story that seems to have pieces missing from the equation. A moment where a character professes their desire to see a particular flower as a child seemingly comes out of nowhere, leading to a beautiful but ultimately distracting divergence. And given we don't see a single other example of a Fire Person romantically or even platonically involved with a Water Person, it feels like their relationship doesn't attract as much interest/attention as it could or should. Similarly, a subplot about a leak threatening Fire Town feels underdeveloped - was there a villain removed from the story? And why aren't more people concerned about this leak given it could literally kill thousands of people?

The film really hits its stride when Wade and Ember are forced to work together and their romance can blossom, but getting there is a bit of a struggle. What's consistently good is the world creation (physics questions aside) - the otherness of the Fire People is captured wonderfully, and their experience will no doubt speak volumes to people from migrant backgrounds - but dotted in between are story elements that don't flow as beautifully as a Water Person on a slide.

The characters are great, and the visuals are impressive, even if the cartoonish nature of the Fire and Water People is sometimes jarring against the real-looking objects they interact with. Still, it's a wonderful feat of animation to make everything as stunning as it is. Fire and water are two notoriously  difficult elements to animate, but Pixar takes such challenges in its stride these days.

Lewis and Athie give vibrant performances, with Athie somehow making Wade's predilection for bursting into tears believable. There's a strong support cast as usual, and the match of voice-to-character is an under-rated part of Pixar's magic.

Enjoyable and beautiful, Elemental manages to nail its themes and its love story, but doesn't flow or sizzle quite like its fire-water combo suggests it should.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (no spoilers)

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio across regional Victoria on June 8, 2023.

(PG) ★★★★

Director: Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers & Justin K. Thompson.

Cast: (voices of) Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, Brian Tyree Henry, Luna Lauren Vélez, Jake Johnson, Jason Schwartzman, Issa Rae, Karan Soni, Daniel Kaluuya, Oscar Isaac, Shea Whigham.

Come-As-Your-Favourite-Superhero Day was as predictable as ever.

So you've made a successful Spidey-movie. In fact some say you've made the greatest comic book movie of all time. Your success can buy you creative freedom, and the power to tell yet more Spidey-stories.

But with great power, comes great responsibility (phew, got there in the end). After all, there is a rich web of Spidey-tales to honour and be true to, even while weaving a brand new strand. This is both the curse and the beauty of Spider-man storytelling in this day and age. Much like Batman, we are so familiar with the origin stories and raison d'êtres that we don't even need to have them explained, but it means you need to do something different and fresh each time because of that familiarity. 

But with great familiarity can come great innovation. Batman and Spider-man are ideal for telling a range of different stories in a range of different styles for this very reason. Want a noirish detective story? Both can work for that. Manga and anime? Go right ahead. Or, as is the case in Across The Spider-Verse, you can use a Spider-man story to explore the very nature of Spider-man stories. No Way Home did a similar thing, digging into what makes Spider-man Spider-man via the multiverse, but Across The Spider-verse goes even more meta. And a little bit crazy. In a good way.

The story again follows Miles Morales (Moore) AKA Spider-Man, 16 months on from his first adventure. It finds him more at home with his powers, but still struggling with his responsibilities. A new villain named Spot (Schwartzman) is giving him grief, he's finding it hard to balance his school/home life with his web-slinging life, and he misses Gwen Stacy (Steinfeld) AKA Ghost-Spider/Spider-Woman.

But when Gwen drops in from the multiverse, Miles finds there are more Spider-people out there than he ever imagined, and their role in the multiverse is more complicated than he ever realised.

Basically, like most sequels, Across The Spider-Verse is about doing "more" of everything. More of the insanely inventive visuals, more Spider-people to explore in relation to the mythos, more gags, more action, more everything. Chaotic, ferociously paced, frenetic and fun, Across The Spider-Verse almost goes too far in this more-is-more approach. Some action sequences only just stay on the right side of being too much, and the blurring of visual styles can be jarring and hard to take in some moments.

But the sequel is also excellent at expanding the themes of the first film. Whereas Into The Spider-Verse was very focused on the perils of teenage life, this one spends a welcome amount of time on the perils of being a parent of a teenager. The nature of what Spider-Man is and what he represents is taken to an exaggerated post-modern level, which actually gives the film a lot of its central tension.

Despite this bigger-is-better approach, the film still works. It's as fun and free as the first, though there's a dark undercurrent that grows as it barrels towards its cliffhanger ending (Beyond The Spider-Verse is due out in March next year). And it never forgets where its heart lies, which is in the teenage chests of its two main heroes. Their respective plights are painted in metaphorically rich colours to match the literal visual splendour going on around them.

Into The Spider-Verse was undoubtedly one of the great superhero movies, and easily one of the most important animated films of the past 20 years. That's a tough act to follow, but Across The Spider-Verse lives up to its predecessor, continuing to spin another vibrant thread in the tangled web of Spidey-stories.