"Indiana Jones" reaction - Variety

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This article gave me a bit of a disappointed feeling; apparently, the Cannes crowd wasn’t impressed (don’t go by the truncated headline in the link description):

Indiana Jones 5 Stuns Cannes With Standing Ovation for Harrison Ford - Variety

Then there is this review:

‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ Review: Hokum Minus the Thrill - Variety

Overall, if one reads between the lines of the review, it seems like it will be a good film. I just hope it has a lot of sequences in exotic locales, I sort-of get the feeling it’s a lot of city-scape.

I’ve been looking to see if the film will have an accompanying novelization, but I so far have not seen anything indicating it will. That would be very, very strange if it didn’t, since all the previous movies did have one. Anyone happen to know?

To be honest, I am still wary about going to the movies, but I may have to make an exception for this one…I remember seeing “Raiders of the Lost Ark” for the first time, and I would love to see the final one with Ford in theaters. May have to try and figure out when I can see it when hardly anyone will be in the auditorium.

I think it will have a large box-office gross, but I’m not sure it will break records. Time, a theme of the movie, has moved on, and so too has the marketplace; will the T-Tok generation be as impressed with this project as with Marvel and Nintendo films? To them, this is probably what an old film from the 1940s was to older folks like me when we were young. (Not that films from that period were necessarily bad…just most seemed unavoidably dated to me and my peers at the time of “Raiders”)

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I will probably see it, at some time. So far, I regard “Last Crusade” as the best, because Sean Connery provided a fairly good second lead, and “Temple of Doom” the worst, as it was clearly aimed at 9 year olds.

Steve

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Doom had a much different tone than the others, I agree. I always have a difficulty explaining something like that, don’t have the film-school/critical vocabulary and understanding for it, but one of the things about the film is it seems to look different than the others. The cinematography just appeared to be not as attractive as Raiders or Crusade. After that, I’d say another fault is there was more comedic sequences meant to increase characterization for some of the protagonists…this took away from the speed of the plot, perhaps. Everything in the first film that wasn’t action was a segue to the next action sequence that used the downtime efficiently for exposition or whatever…the second film just was, different, I guess. I agree that the third film was the best. The fourth I was okay with as well, as I recall consciously lowering my expectations before entering the auditorium and just going with it after taking my seat.

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I thought Dial of Destiny was in the Top 3 Indiana Jones films, fwiw.

I’d rank Last Crusade and Crystal Skull (horrible!) below it, with absolutely no doubts. (Unlike commenter above, I disliked The Last Crusade, except for the opening sequence with young Indiana Jones on the train. The rest of it was rock-bottom. Until the Crystal Skull was made, I couldn’t imagine a worse Jones movie.)