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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Sorry for the spoilers folks, but they are necessary!

Spoiler:

I do get where you’re coming from. But it’s how the film handled it.

Nazi and Basil both made leaps of logic. And those leaps were seemingly into…nothingness. But we have seen just as weird and wonderful before.

In terms of the real world device? The Antikythera Mechanism has long been a fascinating piece of Forteana. Because Fortean Times was the first source for me learning of it.

So long ago, nobody had quite figured out what it was for. And it is an inherently fascinating trinket. A glimpse into what our relative ancients were able to create. All the more fascinating because, to the best of my archaeological understanding (it’s wee. Very wee)? A clockwork device out of nowhere. No preceding applications of such a mechanism have been found, so in the archaeological record it absolutely juts out. It appears to be a one off - and an incredible application unto itself.

But the fact I’d wager most outside the Nerdosphere have even heard of it gets the film a pass. And not to be rude? How many of us as kids had heard of the Grail or Ark before we saw those films?

I was proper wee, like teensy tiny wee, no more than 9 for Grail, and from a non-religious home for clarity and honesty of position.

The Antikythera device I first learned of probably…late 20’s

Not to be too nitpicky, but it's a pet-peeve of mine:

Another good Indy adventure with plenty of action and globe trotting, but might feel like one film too many for some.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

SamusDrake wrote:
Another good Indy adventure with plenty of action and globe trotting, but might feel like one film too many for some.

I'd argue it's the second "one too many" after the last time that was supposed to happen.

In response to Gert?

 Gert wrote:

I'd argue it's the second "one too many" after the last time that was supposed to happen.

One thing I could never stomach about Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull...

...all the god damn haters.

Tsagualsa wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Sorry for the spoilers folks, but they are necessary!

Spoiler:

I do get where you’re coming from. But it’s how the film handled it.

Nazi and Basil both made leaps of logic. And those leaps were seemingly into…nothingness. But we have seen just as weird and wonderful before.

In terms of the real world device? The Antikythera Mechanism has long been a fascinating piece of Forteana. Because Fortean Times was the first source for me learning of it.

So long ago, nobody had quite figured out what it was for. And it is an inherently fascinating trinket. A glimpse into what our relative ancients were able to create. All the more fascinating because, to the best of my archaeological understanding (it’s wee. Very wee)? A clockwork device out of nowhere. No preceding applications of such a mechanism have been found, so in the archaeological record it absolutely juts out. It appears to be a one off - and an incredible application unto itself.

But the fact I’d wager most outside the Nerdosphere have even heard of it gets the film a pass. And not to be rude? How many of us as kids had heard of the Grail or Ark before we saw those films?

I was proper wee, like teensy tiny wee, no more than 9 for Grail, and from a non-religious home for clarity and honesty of position.

The Antikythera device I first learned of probably…late 20’s

Not to be too nitpicky, but it's a pet-peeve of mine:

Spoiler:

The awesomeness of the Antikythera mechanism is somewhat overblown. It is not a clockwork mechanism in the strict sense: it does not run 'automatically' by a spring or weight movement, but is hand-driven. It is an awesome feat of engineering nonetheless, and some definitions of 'clockwork' take it as the first example of it because of its high complexity, but still a lot of the mysticism surrounding it stems from the fact that due to its bad condition when being found, we had no good idea of its workings until relatively recently, because they had to look for a method to analyze it without destroying it in the process for quite some time. So there were some credible theories, and a lot of overblown pseudo-science, about what it was supposed to do etc. until recent progress in computer tomography allowed a thorough, non-destructive scan of the artifact in the mid-2010s. Again, it's an amazing artifact, but it's always good to stick to reality. Then again, it's a very good device to put into a pulp movie, and on top of that, the screenplay may actually be older than the relevant breakthroughs

In response?

Tsagualsa wrote:

Spoiler:

The awesomeness of the Antikythera mechanism is somewhat overblown. It is not a clockwork mechanism in the strict sense: it does not run 'automatically' by a spring or weight movement, but is hand-driven. It is an awesome feat of engineering nonetheless, and some definitions of 'clockwork' take it as the first example of it because of its high complexity, but still a lot of the mysticism surrounding it stems from the fact that due to its bad condition when being found, we had no good idea of its workings until relatively recently, because they had to look for a method to analyze it without destroying it in the process for quite some time. So there were some credible theories, and a lot of overblown pseudo-science, about what it was supposed to do etc. until recent progress in computer tomography allowed a thorough, non-destructive scan of the artifact in the mid-2010s. Again, it's an amazing artifact, but it's always good to stick to reality. Then again, it's a very good device to put into a pulp movie, and on top of that, the screenplay may actually be older than the relevant breakthroughs

Commenting solely because I guessed what the 'Dial' in the movie would be the moment the title was announced and am surprised I guessed wrong. I thought they were going to resurrect that whole Maya calendar 2012 thing a decade after that nonsense stopped being cool XD


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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

Spoiler:

We are pretty nerdy as a bunch of commentators. I dare say we’re as a result somewhat more familiar with the Antikythera Mechanism than most. And perhaps to the majority?

I think that's part of why it lacks the grandeur though.

The Holy Grail and the Lost Ark have a wealth of mystique surrounding them.

The Dial is comparatively, something only very nerdy commentators probably know anything about. It correspondingly lacks that mystique and much like the Crystal Skull is a big old nothing burger on the face of centuries of cultural memory. It'll never strike the same cord, especially not when they go wildly off into leght field with the thing. They should have targeted something with more weight. Like the Armor of Achilles. Or Excalibur. Or Solomon's Lost Mines. Things that are widely known myths just about anyone will recognize and some Nazi stand-in douchebag would seek to appropriate both for its cultural and it's supernatural value.

Or, you know, the Fate of Atlantis (why yes, I'm still sore about that, all these years after)

Absolutely love Fate of Atlantis. Its a shame LucasFilm didn't strike when the iron was hot and made that into a 90s Indy movie.

An animated mini-series would be smashing.

SamusDrake wrote:
Absolutely love Fate of Atlantis. Its a shame LucasFilm didn't strike when the iron was hot and made that into a 90s Indy movie.

An animated mini-series would be smashing.

Fate of Atlantis is still one of my favorite computer adventure games from the 90s, perhaps even more so than The Dig (which also might have made an interesting movie). Doesn't quite top Myst, but it's a different genre really.

As for the movie, I'm hoping to go see it soonish. Thanks for putting everything under spoiler tags guys, y'all are champs!

 Gert wrote:

Spoiler:

The leap from "The Dial can track eclipses and the Olympic cycle" to "The Dial can track rifts in time" is just too much. It doesn't matter that the Nazi guy believed that it was a mystical artefact because, unlike the Grail or Ark, it doesn't have a real-world story basis to work off.
The justification for its time-traveling shenanigans was that it was an advanced piece of technology for its time and that because the Nazi physicist was good at maths he is suddenly able to find rifts in time with an ancient clock.

The artifact doesn’t have myths about it. The inventor did. Indy even goes over his mythical inventions in his lecture, building up the man and the purpose of his most mythologized inventions. The dial fits well as the payoff.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
The artifact doesn’t have myths about it. The inventor did. Indy even goes over his mythical inventions in his lecture, building up the man and the purpose of his most mythologized inventions. The dial fits well as the payoff.

Spoiler:

And when Archimedes reveals that it was intended as a last-ditch Hail Mary to rescue his besieged city, it adds some nice emotional weight.

Even that argument is flawed IMO. Barring one exception, Archimedes' inventions are entirely reasonable and possible even with the means of his time.

I don’t see it being any sillier than the Shankara stones or the Ark or the Grail. They all require that fundamental suspension of disbelief that one artifact/person is supernatural, and the rest follows. Temple of Doom has the heart-ripping and Voodoo dolls, both supernatural abilities learned by mortal humans, even if they are imbued with a bit of thaumaturgy. Archimedes could work the same way.


Besides, this kind of pulp fiction has a long history of giving inventors outlandish nonsense machines, from Archimedes to Da Vinci to Tesla. Heck, I could see Indiana Jones race against the Nazis to find the Da Vinci gold machine from Hudson Hawk. That kind of thing makes sense in his universe, where every tomb and temple is a Rube Goldberg mousetrap the equal of any historic marvel of engineering.

The macguffin didn’t work for you, I get it, but it is not objectively a bad fit for Indiana Jones.

I guess the ancient Greeks just knew about all of the time portals in the sky which nobody with access to airplanes had ever noticed...
Huh.

The difference mainly is that Archimedes was real, while the Grail or Ark has a good chance of never even existing in the first place purely because they're from religious and mythological backgrounds.
If the Israelites in the Biblical sense existed and ever had the Ark of the Covenant if it really existed, it probably didn't shoot lighting or have ghosts that melt faces.

 Lord Damocles wrote:
I guess the ancient Greeks just knew about all of the time portals in the sky which nobody with access to airplanes had ever noticed...
Huh.

They knew the Earth was round and roughly how big it was without the means for direct observation. Having a mythologized man in a supernatural setting, known for his seemingly supernatural inventions, detect supernatural forces without the means to exploit them directly…doesn’t bother me. The IJ universe recognizes the existence of multiple pantheons, each capable of creating supernatural artifacts or abilities. And if Atlantis is allowed in the setting, then all kinds of ancient technological ingenuity must be granted.



In a universe where drug-crazed cultists can build functional voodoo dolls, I will grant a legendary inventor with access to the legendary Library of Alexandria and spoilered conditions the ability to build a more impressive supernatural device.


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My big problem with the device wasn’t that it existed, but that it used longitude and latitude coordinates.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

My big problem with the device wasn’t that it existed, but that it used longitude and latitude coordinates.

It's magic. Don't think about it.

BobtheInquisitor wrote:They knew the Earth was round and roughly how big it was without the means for direct observation.

Fun fact;

From most places on Earth, you can figure out and calculate the world's circumference by measuring and comparing the shadows of standing pole and the angles of the sun year-round in two different locations at separate latitudes.

Guess what ancient priests had a habit of doing; watching the sun.

Guess what that led to; using shadows to measure time and angles.

And that ultimately ends with; noticing that the angle of the sun slightly shifts as you go north and south, leading to the realization that the Earth's surface is curved and not flat.

Automatically Appended Next Post:
My big problem with the device wasn’t that it existed, but that it used longitude and latitude coordinates.

Technically speaking, this actually isn't that much of a problem.

Eratosthenes is the first recorded human to have proposed using longitude and latitude in map making, alongside the first man for whom we have a recorded calculation of the Earth's circumference. He also provided the first concrete definition of prime numbers, a calculation for pi, and was the big boss of the Library of Alexandria. The guy was a legend in the Hellenic world.

Another fun fact; a young Archemedes was pen pals with the head librarian at Alexandria and he inquired to Eratosthenes early in his life about circles and pi (both of which are works Archemedes is famous for, but were first explored and defined by Eratosthenes). Hilarious. It's honestly not entirely implausible that Archemedes would have used longitude and latitude and had a functional understanding of them.

 Lord Damocles wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

My big problem with the device wasn’t that it existed, but that it used longitude and latitude coordinates.

It's magic. Don't think about it.

Lol good point. (“Big problem” being more a tongue in cheek statement, but still, that’s a hell of a rejoinder.)




Automatically Appended Next Post:
Re: Longitude, I thought there was no practical way to calculate it, and that’s why 1700’s England was offering huge cash prizes to anyone who could come up with a reliable way to find longitude coordinates.

To be fair, the fun thing about science is it can be lost and rediscovered and still turn out the same.

I do get the criticism (we’ve nothing to suggest Archimedes knew of Longtitide and Latitude, or how to properly calculate). But, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

Spesh where it comes to maths and scientific principals and that.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

Re: Longitude, I thought there was no practical way to calculate it, and that’s why 1700’s England was offering huge cash prizes to anyone who could come up with a reliable way to find longitude coordinates.

It's tricky mostly at sea where there are no landmarks.

To a Greek in the ancient world, you generally stuck to the coast so having a rough idea that you were X units of time/measure from Syracuse wasn't that complicated so long as you could keep yourself going in a straight line (which you can do with latitude).

You're right that finding good reliable ways to calculate longitude took a long time to figure out, but the idea that 'longitude' existed is as ancient as latitude. Erastoshenes was one of the world's first geographers (though that word didn't exist yet) and map makers. I don't think he ever managed to implement his idea, but he did propose it and probably had a better understanding of it by virtue his work in circumference and calculating spheres.

His inability to reliably calculate longitude is different from being able to conceptualize it. Hipparchus (also a pen pal of Archemedes, eh, continuer of Archemedes' pen pal Conon of Samos' work fun fact!) built on Erastoshenes work in this area and did propose a grid system for a spherical Earth with a Prime Meridian and calculation for longitude that would have used measurements of lunar eclipses to try and create an accurate calibration (a complex equation based on then known measurements of the angles and positions of the Earth, the Sun, and the Moon).

His equation was wrong and even if it wasn't it's wildly impractical to wait for lunar eclipses to measure longitude, especially at sea with no landmarks to base distance on.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I do get the criticism (we’ve nothing to suggest Archimedes knew of Longtitide and Latitude, or how to properly calculate). But, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

Honestly I'd make that jump.

While longitude, latitude, maps, and geography aren't what Archimedes is famous for, he absolutely knew and spoke with men who are famous for it. His work in spheres and circles is absolutely related to theirs. All that math ultimately originally derives from work in astronomy and calculating the positions of celestial bodies for which understanding the circumference of the Earth (and therefore being able to calculate curves, circles, and spheres) is pivotal.

It's incredibly unlikely that Archimedes was unaware of longitude and latitude in concept,even if his actual area of interest lay elsewhere. That knowledge all derives from the same ancient sources and is interconnected in how the men who worked on it understood each other's work.

Yeah, my niggle isn’t that he shouldn’t know about longitude so much as his machine gave exact longitude coordinates. Again, not really a big deal, just amusing.

Is this a bigger bomb than The Flash? High $80 millions on a budget of $300+ million.

For the sake of brevity and to cause no offence to anyone who enjoyed this, I’ll say I largely agree with ccs’s review above, but I take a dimmer view. It’s a bad movie and makes me almost ready for AI written entertainment.

Everyone involved can and has done better.

I don’t think the writing is as much to blame as the editing, and to a lesser degree the directing. The script has a lot of good set-ups and payoffs. Some of the character choices, like sad sack Indiana Jones and d-bag Helena Shaw, were written to set up character arcs. Unfortunately, the way they were handled made the movie a lot less lighthearted and fun than the OT. I found the real barrier to enjoyment was the pacing, especially the lackluster action scenes, and the generally less fun tone.* The beginning, parade chase, and end of the movie have some IJ magic, but the middle of the film just drags.



All in all, it was far superior to Crystal Skull while not being as fun as the rest of the IJ movies.


*Also, John Williams was not even phoning it in. The music was about as exciting as a 7th season TNG score.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I will say this for the movie: Mads Mikkelson was a fantastic villain. I wouldn’t cut any of his performance from the film.

Tsagualsa wrote:
This review is not made by some weird right-wing outlet, but by the BBC:

Harrison Ford and Phoebe Waller-Bridge can't lift a film that is "a depressing reminder of how much livelier his past adventures were", writes Nicholas Barber.

This... does not sound great. But go on:

The good news is that it isn't a disaster. It's a respectable, competent addition to the series. The bad news is that a disaster might have been more worthwhile. The Dial of Destiny takes a sudden, bold and sure-to-be divisive swerve into wacky uncharted territory in its last half-hour, but otherwise it's like fan fiction, a tie-in video game, or a branded theme-park ride, in that it's content to tick off everything you've seen in other Indiana Jones films already, but with little of Spielberg's sparkle.

No. Oh no.

Like another of Ford's so-called "legacy sequels", Star Wars: The Force Awakens, this one brings back old characters (John Rhys-Davies's Sallah has a pointless cameo), introduces new ones who are strangely similar to the old characters (Ethann Isidore plays a substandard copy of Short Round from Temple of Doom), and has the air of a film passing the torch (or whip) to the next generation. But it does all this in an even gloomier fashion than The Force Awakens did. I'm not sure how many fans want to see Indiana Jones as a broken, helpless old man who cowers in the corner while his patronising goddaughter takes the lead, but that's what we're given, and it's as bleak as it sounds.


Besides, everything is smaller and cheaper than it was in the original trilogy. Indy up against the military might of the Third Reich in 1936? We could all get behind that. But Indy up against one scientist and his silent, interchangeable henchmen in 1969? It's just not such a big deal. Mangold and his team dutifully crank out the action sequences, but it's often hard to tell what's happening or why, and there is a shortage of surprising, rip-roaring moments to make you stand up and cheer, despite the best efforts of John Williams' rousing classic theme. Take an early chase in New York, for instance. It's set during a ticker-tape parade for the three astronauts who were on the Apollo 11 moon mission, so you can imagine the high jinks that Spielberg might have cooked up: some slapstick with Buzz Aldrin, perhaps, or a giant papier-maché moon rolling down Fifth Avenue like the boulder in Raiders of The Lost Ark. But Mangold and his team do so little with the parade that you wonder why they bothered staging it.

That's not damning with faint praise, it's just damning.

The jokes, the zest and the exuberance just aren't there, so instead of a joyous send-off for our beloved hero, we get a depressing reminder of how much livelier his past adventures were. Considering that the screenplay is credited to four writers – Mangold, David Koepp and Jez and John-Henry Butterworth – couldn't they at least have thought of something cool for Indy to do with his whip?

All quotes from: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230519-indiana-jones-and-the-dial-of-destiny-review-gloomy-and-depressing-final-act

It gives the movie a desastrous 2/5 stars.

Yep, the new Indiana Jones movie is a hot dumpster fire.

 LordofHats wrote:

BobtheInquisitor wrote:They knew the Earth was round and roughly how big it was without the means for direct observation.

Fun fact;

From most places on Earth, you can figure out and calculate the world's circumference by measuring and comparing the shadows of standing pole and the angles of the sun year-round in two different locations at separate latitudes.

Guess what ancient priests had a habit of doing; watching the sun.

Guess what that led to; using shadows to measure time and angles.

And that ultimately ends with; noticing that the angle of the sun slightly shifts as you go north and south, leading to the realization that the Earth's surface is curved and not flat.

Automatically Appended Next Post:
My big problem with the device wasn’t that it existed, but that it used longitude and latitude coordinates.

Technically speaking, this actually isn't that much of a problem.

Eratosthenes is the first recorded human to have proposed using longitude and latitude in map making, alongside the first man for whom we have a recorded calculation of the Earth's circumference. He also provided the first concrete definition of prime numbers, a calculation for pi, and was the big boss of the Library of Alexandria. The guy was a legend in the Hellenic world.

Another fun fact; a young Archemedes was pen pals with the head librarian at Alexandria and he inquired to Eratosthenes early in his life about circles and pi (both of which are works Archemedes is famous for, but were first explored and defined by Eratosthenes). Hilarious. It's honestly not entirely implausible that Archemedes would have used longitude and latitude and had a functional understanding of them.

None of which explains why either of those notable ancient Greek geniuses would have put 0 longitude at a town that didn't yet exist instead of, say, Syracuse, or Alexandria, or Mt. Olympus...

Nitpicking, of course. But when the movie fails to entertain on it's own merits, the audience starts entertaining itself by nitpicking.

Dumpster fire seems hyperbolic but considering the place the series holds I'm not really surprised. I think the general consensus of it being better than Crystal Skull but not as good as the originals is pretty spot on. outside the opening sequence the rest of the film just feels a bit....flat. Not terrible but it just seems to be playing to safe. Mikkelson is good as always but he isn't given much to do; the villain just didn't have a memorable personality. Much of the film was like that in that it did what was needed but felt like they hald back from really going for it. Maybe a better description was that everything is 'serviceable'?

The kid was in it way to much for a non-entity and even having seen it yesterday I couldn't tell you his name. I haven't watched Temple of Doom in years and I can still tell know the name of his sidekick and can even do some quotes. I'm not sure why they made a point of creating so many parallels between Indy and Shaw were when that really didn't come into play beyond "oh hey that is sort of like what Indy went through". Like the rest it seems like they started down an idea but didn't want to fully commit.

Serviceable works when you're Avatar and that is all you've ever been, but when you go from some of the greatest adventure films ever made to serviceable it will be noticed. I makes a 3/5 feel like much worse.



I'm glad they actually didn't do to much with time travel. I thought they would have them traveling through different eras so just having it be the one instance kept it from getting to crazy.

One of the only good things to come out of bad movies like the new Indy film.