- DB
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny | Foundation, Season One
Different times, different spaces and somehow still Nazis and megalomaniacal rulers.
Christmas is over and I have a backlog of movies and TV shows to write about that is only going to grow over he next few days as my day job isn't back again until 2nd January! I'm going to space things out though, so there should be plenty of new reviews for the foreseeable future.
Saying that, it'll be a bit different next week with it being the first post of 2024 and I'll reveal what my favourite game, TV show and movie of 2023 were.
MOVIES
- Let's start with a movie that, like The Marvels, wasn't well-received on release and, after watching it, I don't really understand why that's the case for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
- First off, it's not as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Last Crusade, but very action-adventures are, so director James Mangold has very little to be ashamed of on that front.
- Secondly, I like it very much more than The Temple of Doom or The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and would gladly watch it over either of those films any time when given the choice.
- I don't know if it's a case of this feeling very much like it was intended as an actual ending for Indiana Jones as a character, with a very real acknowledgement of Indy being done with his life as the audience knows it?
- Hell, you could argue that Mangold has already covered the same ground in Logan to an even higher stand, albeit with significantly more blood and cursing.
- The difference is that Indy and Logan are very different characters, one more cerebral and the other more instinctive, and are obviously going to have extremely different reactions to looking back on the lives they've led and how that's affected not just their own lives but those of the people around them too.
- But it still feels like an Indiana Jones movie to me and that's why I enjoyed it: Harrison Ford clearly loves playing the character, Phoebe Waller-Bridge is a great addition as his god-daughter, the John Williams score is there to make everything sing and Mads Mikkelsen is enjoyable as yet another Nazi villain.
- Yes, the CGI is a little spotty in some places, and the de-aged Indy suffers from sounding and moving like the much older Harrison Ford playing him, but those certainly aren't big enough problems to stop me enjoying the movie.
- Ultimately, I think if you like Indiana Jones, then you'll mostly likely enjoy Dial of Destiny too, just don't go in with your expectations so high that it needs to rank alongside the best in the series. [7/10]
GAMES
- Going away to my parents meant not a lot of gaming has been managed since last, time, so we'll swiftly move on here...
TV
- I'm continuing to churn my way through Apple TV's selection and Foundation's first season is part of that, and ending up being something I really enjoyed despite some pretty severe flaws.
- To start with, it's very much a serialised story so there weren't any particular stand-out episodes for me, plus some of the plots seem pretty far removed from each other.
- As I understand it, the story for the series has been pieced together from various books and short stories to show events in the order they happened rather than how they were published, so a lot of what might seem unrelated now may come together in a later season, but it's still quite jarring at times to jump from one branch of a story to another.
- Also, I'm not sure if it's simply a reflection of Asimov's writings, but the technologies shown seem really oddly mashed together and I don't remember the show giving an in-universe reason for this being the case.
- Then there's the accents, with what sounds like a lot of performers being asked to speak with an accent not their own and being unable to keep it up consistently.
- It's really odd with Lou Llobell, who plays Gaal (a main character), and an accent that seems to drift from Londoner to Australian to South African with occasional moments of generic American.
- I'm not sure if she's just struggling to do whatever accent the show is asking for, if it's deliberate to match a unique style of speech from the source material, or even if it's just her own natural accent as a Spanish-Zimbabwean who spent time growing up in South Africa and has now been in London for a while.
- Just to be clear, I'm not criticising Llobell's performance, which I really like, but sometimes I get so caught up in listening to the sound of her voice and the way she speaks that I do sometimes get distracted from what her character is saying, so I'm glad I always have subtitles on so I can take in the dialogue and simply enjoy listening to the sound of her voice.
- Like with the contrasting technology levels and what can feel like entirely unconnected stories, these aren't really negatives per se, but things that do slightly decrease my level of immersion and suspension of disbelief, making me wonder why certain choices were made for the show.
- It looks fantastic though, Bear McCreary's score is excellent, the cast is great (Jared Harris, Lee Pace and Lou Llobell being the standouts for me) and I sure do love me some more thoughtful, 'big picture' science-fiction. [8/10]
