Review: Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny (spoiler-free)

Indiana Jones
And The Dial Of Destiny
(spoiler-free)
Cert: 12A / 154 mins / Dir. James Mangold / Trailer

Short and sweet then, you don't want to be reading all about Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny at this point, you just want to know if it's worth the journey to the cinema. Your humble correspondent is delighted (albeit predictably so) to report that Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny is worth the journey to the cinema.

We open - as is traditional - with a pre-main-movie adventure, set in the last days of the Second World War. Henry Jones (Harrison Ford) and fellow archaeologist Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) are on the trail of an historical artefact coveted by the nazis (no change there) when they inadvertently stumble over another, potentially far more powerful, one: Achimedes' Antikythera. And so, Indy makes another enemy-for-life in deranged scientist Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen). Fast forward to 1969, and Doctor Jones is about to retire from professorship in New York when his yearned-for release is interrupted by the arrival of his estranged goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller Bridge) and - not unconnectedly - Dr Jürgen Voller. Because you can't keep a good Macguffin down, and another adventure is about to begin...

GRAVITY

Director James Mangold has channeled the ochre colour-palette and emotional gravity of his spin with Logan for this fifth cinematic entry to the series. Considering how reluctant so many of the characters are to get actively involved in life-threatening high jinks, the whole thing zips along (mostly) at an exhilarating pace. The story is linear enough to get by without being overwhelmed by exposition, but also facilitates the introduction of new characters as well as a handful of old favourites. Bathed in a Kodak-glow, cinematographer Phedon Papamichael channels warm vintage tones long before we're whisked off to the Mediterranean, while the three-strong editing team balance the relentless chase sequences with conveying the weight on Indy's shoulders. Meanwhile, John Williams is on outstanding form with a score which fits seamlessly into the canon and channels some of his best work from the Star Wars prequel-era.

It's not all plain-sailing, of course. The film is longer than it needs to be (because we're never more than five minutes away from one of those chase-sequences), there's a definite sag in the second-act, and the mechanics of the crucial central premise itself feel under-explained; not in a mysterious way, more that the writers couldn't agree on how it was actually going to work and so It Just Does. The recovery of each prized antiquity leans toward a straightforward checklist, and the antagonists are always a conveniently-assured two paces behind, despite rarely showing their working-out. All of the cast here are competent and great fun to watch, but swathes of them carry a very 21st century sensibility which feels out of place for 1969. And the worst offender here, unfortunately, is Phoebe Waller-Bridge (who is otherwise excellent as usual). Oh, and that CGI on the wartime-Indy is still far from perfect. It's way better than the Rogue One debacle, but once again the images that look amazing as stills fall down when they're moving, and our hero's face always feels like it's lit separately and from a different angle. The overall effect is of a video-game cutscene; something which really looks like Harrison Ford but is definitely not him on a subconscious level.

INTERSTELLAR

The best trick the movie pulls, though, is that ultimately none of that matters. The love and attention to detail which have gone into this more than make up for its shortcomings in a year where mediocrity seems encouraged. And extra points should be awarded for a bittersweet ending which doesn't take the glaringly obvious feel-good route many other films would have (more on that in the upcoming spoiler-review).

Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny never quite matches the rip-roaring highs of the first three movies (and frankly, no one expected that to be the case), but the energy, enthusiasm and sincerity are more than enough for long-haul Indy fans to love.

Go. Go to the cinema.
Now.

DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: Elemental

Elemental
Cert: PG / 109 mins / Dir. Peter Sohn / Trailer

I must confess I’ve skipped on several recent animated offerings from Disney/Pixar after my lukewarm response to Inside Out, their psychological-explorational adventure which made several people I know act like a light had been switched on while I thought ‘wait, doesn’t everybody visualise their inner monologue this way?’. Don’t get me wrong, that’s enjoyable enough to watch, but I found it withered under the Battleship Curve™.

It was with some trepidation then, that I was treated to the mega-studio’s latest offering, Elemental, courtesy of my local Cineworld’s Secret Screening programme, whereby the film you’re going to watch is unveiled with the BBFC card after the ads and trailers. So the least I could do was give it a go, what with being already settled in to my favourite seat and half way through a coffee*¹.

SHORT

We open with a separate, five-minute short, Carl’s Date, which sees the elderly protagonist from Disney/Pixar’s Up asked out on a date by Ms Meyers from her nursing home. After initially panicking over the morality of his acceptance while still having his late wife’s picture on the mantlepiece, he’s convinced to follow this up by his dog, Dug.

What follows is an extended farcical montage as Carl realises he’s completely forgotten what he’s supposed to do on a date. This in itself is amusing enough, but the rock-solid heart of the piece comes from seeing the relationship between Carl and Dug (skewed of course by the fact that although Dug has a means of physically speaking to Carl, he still thinks like a dog).

The compacted run-time doesn’t allow for any slack, so writer/director Bob Peterson is incredibly focused on what he has to achieve and pulls the whole thing off masterfully. Carl’s Date also shows way more sincerity and comic inventiveness than the feature which it precedes, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves…

MERRY GO

And so onto Elemental. We open in Element City, a bustling metropolis peopled by anthropomorphised air, fire, earth and water. Each of these features the physical bonuses and drawbacks of their lineage, and we see how the ‘tribes’ come to settle into localised communities while still making up the cohesive city as a whole.

The story follows Ember Lumen (voiced by Leah Lewis), a fire elemental who dreams of taking over her elderly father’s ‘fire goods’ store once he retires. After a meet-cute with a city inspector who’s a water elemental (Wade Ripple, voiced by Mamoudou Athie), their frustrated lives become intertwined. But how can fire and water ever hope to mix?*²

With the setup firmly established, cue lots of scripted and visual puns (seriously, those character names are the tip of an iceberg), interspersed with Thomas Newman’s placeholder score and some of the blandest incidental pop-soundtrack you’ve ever wanted to stab biros into your own ears to stop listening to.

BONASERA

Elemental is, in its first act, a heavy-handed metaphor for the New York immigrant-experience of the Liberty Island-era; a tale about how cultural differences aren’t obstacles to divide us, but opportunities for partnership and collaboration. And admittedly this message is probably more relevant than ever, but for a film which is 80% metaphor, the script is remarkably linear.

It doesn’t help that the story gets bored exploring this idea and turns into a meet-the-parents comedy with added elements of class-divide and self-actualisation. Again, all of this is fine in itself, but Elemental’s screenplay was written by four people and feels like it. This is a diluted Inside Out, Zootropolis, and Onward, and as the film plays on the feeling quickly grows that you’ve seen it before.

FERRERA

Pixar’s visuals are solid of course, with backgrounds looking genuinely photo-realistic in certain lighting-states and physical textures exquisitely realised. The earth elementals (so usually looking like plants) are rendered as one would expect, but the visual over-engineering of air (so, clouds), fire and water elementals often feels more like an animation test-reel than the creation of properly memorable characters.

It’s also worth noting that the vocal performances are all over the shop here, even allowing for the random array of accents which are supposed to help the central premise along. Ember’s family are “Firish”, so half the time her apparently-first-generation father has a faintly Celtic twang, while in the rest he somehow sounds like a cross between Super Mario and Big Chief Sitting Bull. This undoubtedly undoes some of the good work that the movie’s setting out to bring.

Worse still, sadly, are the central turns from Lewis and Athie. Both are expressive enough as voice-performers, they just sound way too old for characters scripted like teenagers (even if they're probably supposed to be early twenties). Leah Lewis is 26, Mamoudou Athie is 34, and those years are written right into their voices. Neither feels cut out for the protagonist in a coming-of-age tale.

DRILLER KILLER

Don’t get me wrong, Elemental is an enjoyable enough hour and a half (note: there are no scenes during or after the credits) and means well to the point where its intention really cannot be faulted. It’s just the Disney-Mouse eating its own tail. It’s Pixar being so Pixar that the movie has next to no personality of its own.

The short film brought tears to my eyes. The long film did not. Elemental is still more technically accomplished and thoughtful than most other animation studios could produce, but when your self-set bar is this high, it’s no excuse for mediocrity…

CARL'S DATE:

ELEMENTAL:

*¹ Seriously, if it had been Gran Turismo I’d have bailed. You won’t be reading a review of that terrible-looking shite round these doors, summer-season or otherwise.
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*² Don’t worry, the film teases and teases and eventually goes on to answer this, and at the same time absolutely doesn’t.
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DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: No Hard Feelings

No Hard Feelings
Cert: 15 / 103 mins / Dir. Gene Stupnitsky / Trailer

Gene Stupnitsky directs and co-writes this bawdy tale of Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence), a single woman in her early thirties living in Long Island NY, massively in debt because of rising property taxes due to tourist-gentrification. When she answers a classified advert from shipped-in helicopter parents Laird (Matthew Broderick) and Allison (Laura Benanti) wanting to hire someone to 'date' their timid son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) over the summer before he goes to Princeton University, she jumps at the chance. But it turns out, they might both just learn a little more about themselves as etc etc finish setup paragraph here.

Playing out like a substandard mashup of the worst American Pie instalments and the lamentable Bad Teacher, this sort of film certainly has its cinematic place. That place is twenty years ago. It's aware of this displacement. Stupnitsky takes random potshots at the apparent over-protectiveness of parents in 2023, and at the changing attitudes of youth as a whole. But he does this in a glibly observational way, without understanding how that's happened and what these changes have been a reaction to.

As predictable in its mawkish moments as its Outrageous™ ones, No Hard Feelings is sketchily written, timidly directed and performed like a dress rehearsal. The piano rendition of Maneater in the restaurant scene is the only good thing the film has to offer, and even that occurs too early in the script to fulfil its emotional potential. Give it a few weeks, look that up on YouTube.

Managing to feel at least half an hour longer than it is, No Hard Feelings is a straight-to-Netflix anachronism that's somehow landed a coveted theatrical window between superhero movies. And short of crippling mortgage repayments or former colleagues desperately calling in a favour, the acclaimed and provably capable Jennifer Lawrence certainly doesn't need to tarnish her own CV with this. But it's done now, so well done everybody.

And yeah, I'm taking a point off for that gratuitously cack-handed Ferris Bueller reference.

DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: War Pony

War Pony
Cert: 15 / 115 mins / Dir. Gina Gammell & Riley Keough / Trailer

A sign of our post-modern times I'm sure, War Pony is about neither war, nor ponies. And that's okay, not everything needs to be literal. But I'm guessing directors Gina Gammell and Riley Keough were paying by the letter, so it was cheaper than calling the film "Two Hours Of Red-Dirt Squalor, Unlikeable Characters, Unintelligible Dialogue, Face-Tattoos, Bad Hip-Hop and Dead Animals". They also appeared to have comfortably met the budget by not wasting time on things like rehearsals, or a young cast who've ever seen the end of an acting lesson. Although all of this in a project which had its genesis in American Honey comes as approximately no surprise.

The film is a thanklessly grim montage of moral agnosticism where mood and tone override narrative convention, baiting the viewer into bracing themselves for the worst and then pulling back to reveal merely more muted misery instead. Credit where it's due, the dual-thread events of 'Hallow'een night' in the third act are tense, but that could be because by this point the audience has been waiting an hour and a half for something to happen.

It's awful.

Obviously, I don't expect anyone to actually agree with this ill-tempered summation. Under normal circumstances I'd call War Pony unwatchable, but the fact that I somehow sat through it until the closing credits seems to indicate I'd be wrong about that, too...

DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.