Well, I watched it... And, you know, it was just fine? As in, somewhat as I expected from initial reports, my enjoyment of this movie was more an exploration of my own ideas around expectations than anything else — I'm so used to badly reheated leftovers of existing intellectual property that I liked in the past I had subconsciously steeled myself against another Crystal Skull... to the point that the overwhelming majority of the tension in this film was centred around the idea of "oh God, please don't fuck it up in the next scene..." For sure, the CGI chase scenes were outrageously poor given the $295 million budget: Has nobody on the production crew ever interacted with a real, physical object in their lives? Everything, especially the Tuk-Tuk chase, seemed to move in a really uncannily unnatural manner. And, yes, Phoebe Waller-Bridge should really know better. But, my "phew", counts as a positive review these days, I guess. I know that's hardly a ringing endorsement of 'The Current State of Hollywood' (and that very inditement is itself a journalistic cliche at this point), but... yeah.
Painful to admit, but the last two Indiana Jones movies don't even belong in a museum.
— John Bleasdale (Sight and Sound)
The dark flipside of Top Gun was the gruesome Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, with its worn-out leading man and its young-ish, charmless co-star who must have embodied some executive’s idea of what the kids want. It opened with a digitally de-aged Harrison Ford moving and sounding like an octogenarian, and then put the present-day Ford through hours of gloopy CGI spectacle. It exists because Disney bought Fox, and you don’t buy assets to not put them to work.
Synopsis: Finding himself in a new era, and approaching retirement, Indy wrestles with fitting into a world that seems to have outgrown him. But as the tentacles of an all-too-familiar evil return in the form of an old rival, Indy must don his hat and pick up his whip once more to make sure an ancient and powerful artifact doesn't fall into the wrong hands.