Nine Notes on Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Once again, the critics overlook a great film

Just finished this film. Once again, the critics are wrong. It’s a great film that is pretty much indistinguishable from the originals stylistically. James Mangold once again gives life to an old genre:

-Phoebe Waller-Bridge is killing it, though I’m curious about Shia LaBeouf’s absence. I wouldn’t put him in cancelled celebrity territory, considering Honey Boy was such a self-aware work about his PTSD. Was it mostly because Harrison Ford and Shia LaBeouf didn’t get along? Depending on how much you know about Harrison’s gruff personality and dislike for working with Shia, it made for some very false notes when Harrison Ford was lamenting how much his son was lost (when we know Harrison couldn’t stand his “son”).

-I notice the villain is a professor at the University of Alabama which seems a cheap shot at red states: The implication being that these states were horrible to Black people, so sure, it probably makes sense they’d harbor Nazis. In real life, Nazis were harbored in Latin American countries, which were more progressive towards race than we were at this time anyway.

-Towards the beginning when Boyd Holbrook first appears with a man in a cane or crutches and he and two other goons corner Indy in a…