Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023, James Mangold)

⏰🚂🚗🛥️🐍🪦🛩️🏛️🙂 Not a thrill ride. Not the same as the old days. Not fantastic. Not groundbreaking. Watered down, safe, corporate Disney affair. Checks all the boxes. Basically fan fiction. But I didn’t hate it, and only a few times got bored enough to walk away from the screen. (I didn’t hate Crystal Skull either, which took way more chances.) Every review I read was like “omg they de-aged Harrison Ford but they didn’t change his voice so it was so fake!” and I thought, huh, I didn’t even notice. His voice has always sounded the same to me through the years. I thought it was one of the best de-agings I’ve seen to date, except for the action parts where the face was moving a lot. There’s a weird sort of unnatural post-processed motion-blur look that a lot of heavy effects shots have. I mean I say it was good, but there was never a moment when I was looking at the de-aging that I thought I was looking at an actor instead of a visual effects shot, but it was fine. The whole thing was fine. Nothing special, like most blockbusters. The more I talk about it, the closer I get to the most dreaded condemnation of all… It was mediocre. But I can’t really point to anything I didn’t like. But the bad thing is I also can’t point to anything that I particularly liked. It was… unmemorable. It was like watching a really expensive clip show. Actually, I thought of one part I liked. I thought the best character moments came in the very last scenes. Where was the rest of that movie? (Disney+.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Jones_and_the_Dial_of_Destiny