if you understand something Indiana Jones It is about impossible adventures (not missions). If the impossibility had degrees and was not as absolute as it seems, which our hero faces in what is the fifth installment of the series, indiana jones and the dial of fate seems the most improbable of all. Not even poor Jason, after being forced to plow with fiery oxen to get the Golden Fleece, had to suffer so much. First, there is the issue of ageism that consumes us. Can he really continue to be the one who has always been an actor, Harrison Ford, the one that wikipedia punishes (or rewards, according to) with 80 years of fleece? To anticipate the answer, yes you can. Let’s say that this challenge is passed with flying colors. Then there is the matter of the director. Can anyone imagine a Spielberg movie (Spielberg’s movies, don’t doubt it, are his alone and no one else, and Indiana Jones is Spielberg in every step he takes) signed by someone else, let’s say James Mangold? Here are doubts. And finally, there would be the no lesser issue of the passage of time. And here it is convenient to stop a paragraph. or two.
When the first film of the unlikely archaeologist appeared on the screen in 1981, it was especially challenging at the same time. What the filmmakers presented George Lucas y Steven Spielberg it was basically supported by the guiding principle of eternal adventure. Without cynicism, without that drift towards defeat to which modernity (and let’s not say anything about postmodernity) has always been so prone, the usual cinema was reformulated, that of the primal drive that confuses reality with fantasy. And he did it from a new parameter that changed naivety for irony, leaving the fever unchanging, in the center and in a perfect state of boiling. It was, as has been said, a challenge to a time disillusioned from the value of wisdom, risk and intact morality.
From the formal level, the director gave the viewer the opportunity not only to get involved with the protagonist but to fall with him, wallow in the mud with him, fear snakes with him, and whip with him. It was essentially physical cinema. It was Spielberg. And now the question: can our time of overlords that fly, of a technology that erases the border between photography and the synthetic image, of endless platforms; Can this time without time imagine the possibility of another time fully aware of itself, time with the pause of time? Is the thing complicated or not?
Let’s say that the objective is half-fulfilled and always with the somewhat tricky resource of nostalgia. If Mangold has understood something, it is that he is not here to imitate Spielberg nor can he restrict his proposal to dusting off the sacred principles of Indiana (which has them). And for this reason, he gives much more prominence to digital effects at the very limit of reality. Someone may read it as a betrayal, but in reality he had no other choice. The entire film, in fact, is torn between the need to make each frame recognizable to all those who have grown up with the archaeologist as much as offering a primal opportunity to those who have inherited it. The hue matters. The heirs carry between chest and back four dozen, between movies and series, of Marvel superthings.
Indiana Jones and the dial of fate It works like this in a double register. And not always in a balanced way. Could I do it? The opening scene is perhaps the declaration of principles. It skips back, we go back to the Second World War of the Nazis, and there we see a young Indiana rejuvenated by the work and thanks of some artificial intelligence. Incredible. Immediately afterwards, we return to the present, not ours but his, which are the 60s, when some of the Nazis from before arrived in the United States willing to collaborate in, for example, the arrival on the Moon. Back to running, but already raw, without effects. Again: im-press-ing. And just so there’s no doubt, Harrison Ford makes us a beautiful nude of an older person that from now on we can say is a classic. David (Michelangelo’s), trembles.