RE: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) review: Let's get some closure.
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You have an interesting perspective, and I honestly find it difficult to combat any of the points you made.
I feel the ending of Dial of Destiny could be considered unnecessary and satisfying at the same time, although it's definitely a lot more bitter than what we saw in Crytal Skull and Mutt's (enforced) absence didn't help counter this case.
I guess the connection that I saw thematically speaking between this movie and Crystal Skull had to do with how they introduced us to an older Indiana Jones, making a feint of passing the mantle to a younger character without having to do it at the end, Wombat for me it fulfilled that role effectively, although in the end it is a personal matter to prefer how this was executed in Indy 4 or Indy 5.
It's not impossible that they will resume the franchise, although I would honestly prefer that they didn't... Maybe a spinoff, nothing more.
Getting a little more personal, I quickly grew fond of Dial of Destiny because it was my first opportunity to see an Indiana Jones movie directly in theaters (When Crystal Skull I was very young and had no interest in the franchise) even though I just watched them for the first time and I was barely attached to their characters I knew deep in my heart that this was very likely not to happen again, it's like when you grow up with a version of Star Wars (Original, prequel or sequels) and you tend to advocate for them because of the shared connection.
Out of curiosity, what did you think about Wombat forcing Indy back to the present day at the end? The handling of that climax was very strange, but I liked it.
I think it shouldn't have been written that way. Indy was for a time, the villain that needed to be defeated to preserve the future. It created a situation that is common in modern films where a scene or arc becomes a pointless detour. Pointless because if it were completely cut from the film, no one would notice. It resolves at the point that it starts. Like when the protagonist creates a situation he/she must solve. Kind of like the Canto Bight arc of the recent Star Wars films. It existed to introduce a character that gets thrown out later, so they didn't really matter in the first place. The whole arc could have been cut. In episodic films, this is fine because it usually leads somewhere or at least introduces a new character in some way that is important to a future arc. In the case of the ending in Dial of Destiny, the entire film is like that. It's a chase for a macguffin. There's a situation where the protagonist creates a problem must be solved. They fix it. The end. Back to the beginning. Could have skipped the whole movie. It could cut and no one would notice or care.
I blame the writing because it's time travel. How else can it end? Either the past is changed, or it isn't. In the end, the nobler choice is to not change it. It's a trope. It's so easy and so lazy that there's two movies released within a week of each other using it.
If I had to write it though, I would have written it kind of like the series "Timeless". Tell the story backwards. Instead write it so Indy learns that someone has already used the Dial of Destiny to sabotage him, his family, and kill his son. Then, he has to somehow recover the Dial (or just find the correct time fissure another way) to restore the past to the correct ending. I think this would have been so much better. It wouldn't be an overdone copy of another movie. Now that I think about it, finding a time fissure another way is probably better because then it's not just another chase-the-macguffin story.
That's a pretty interesting pitch, specially because you could use it to implement someone like Marion in the plot in a way more organic manner, although we have to admit that Harrison Ford managed pretty well that moment in terms of acting.
Now that we are talking about it, I wish that the film did more with the time traveling thing in a less cliché way.
I have to completely agree here.