Over the weekend my wife and I watched the newest "Indiana Jones" movie. I believe the subtitle is, "The Dial of Destiny". I say I believe because we did not manage to finish the movie.

This is a long, long movie. The runtime, I looked it up, is 2 hours and 37 minutes. That is far, far too long for a movie like this. I do have to say, I have only seen two previous "Indiana Jones" movies prior to this, one of which is "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull". That movie is a pile of garbage. It is nonsensical, poorly written, the actors seem to have mailed it in and it is just plain bad. The other "Indiana Jones" movie I saw prior to this is "Temple of Doom", and I was young and do not remember much. I have heard people say it is good, but I honestly could not tell you my feelings on it. I have zero recollection. So going into "Dial of Destiny", I had no real expectations. We turned it on and we watched almost all of it.

RD talked to me about the movie on the podcast recently, and I remembered him saying that the action scenes were too long. I scoffed at this. I didn't think an action sequence could be overlong. Well, "Dial of Density" proved RD right and me wrong. The action pieces in this movie are big and expensive looking, but man oh man are they far, far too long. I was watching and thinking, a la Milhouse, "when are they going to get to the fireworks factory". The sequences go on and on and on and on. They seemingly have no end in sight. They would take a slight break to reset the scene, but then it would start up and go on and on again. The opening scene of the movie is an action piece on a train. It should be exciting and fun, but the fact that it goes on for nearly eight minutes is absurd. I didn't realize they could overstuff action like they did. And the deaging digital technique they used on Harrison Ford looked odd. It looked as if the head on the body was going to fall off. He eats food in one scene and it just looks odd. I couldn't make heads or tails of what I was seeing.

I also should mention that I had no idea that this movie was taking place in the 60's. I assumed, wrongly, that this movie was in the present time. This is my ignorance due to only seeing two movies, but it confused me nonetheless. I didn't understand Indy talking about his kid dying in the war. I didn't know what war he was referencing. They showed protesters, but I didn't know what they were protesting. I was confused.

The story was convoluted as well. His old partner's daughter comes into play. She is a grifter who ends up helping Indy, alongside her kid friend. There is time travel. No one acts surprised about said time travel, except for Mads Mikkelsen, who is way miscast here. He is a bad dude too, so I have zero feelings for his grief anyway. When we checked to see how much time was left, which was twenty minutes, we decided to call it there. They were in the past era, Indy and Phoebe Waller Bridge had no real freakouts about where they were, the bad guys had died in a plane crash and I fully didn't care how the movie ended. My wife said, "I'm sure it all works out for all of them", and I'm certain she is right.

I like Harrison Ford. I enjoy his acting. "Blade Runner" may be the best movie ever made, and Ford's acting is awesome. But "Dial of Destiny" is a miss. This movie was too long, too boring and took too long to get the point. I know I won't end up finishing it either. 

Ty

Ty is the Pop Culture editor for SeedSing and the other host of the X Millennial Man Podcast.

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