Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Official Trailer

Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you:

No adverts like this in the forums anymore.
Times and dates in your local timezone.
Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance.
Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely.
Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net.

If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

**Overread**

Like a fair few films it was more a series of scenes that were strung together to form a film. Which likely means that a lot of those scenes got adjusted after being written and then being acted out; and then a lot of inbetween scenes were either cut from the final version of the film or were never made.

The result of which is that you end up with a film that has good individual scenes, but when strung together it has huge plot holes, issues with story pacing, issues with the story itself and more.
Throw in comical things like Indie surviving a nuclear blast in a fridge and being comically catapulted inside it (which should in theory have broken every single bone in his body) and you've a film that kind of falls flat.

And its not alone. I think we've a whole generation of writers/directors who can't pace a film out. They produce vastly too much material which gets cut down and cut down so much that in the end there's a sort of plot but the viewer has to fill in a looooot of the gaps to make it make sense .

**Voss**

Weird trailer. Not because it was the usual disjointed action scenes for hollywood trailers, but because so many elements don't really fit together (flashbacks, etc).

Observations
When it first started, I 100% heard Gimli on the voice-over, not Salah. Rhys-Davis' accent work was just on the wrong character.

Indy's 'pithy' ramble on magic and believing real hard was gibberish (and probably the biggest warning flag for the film). If that's their through line, I don't want to see how this movie turns out. Strength of belief isn't a philosophy I find appealing at all, and given Indy's personal experiences (in front of we, the audience), not believing in magic and strength of belief as something _positive_ is absolute donkey droppings. So many villains in his movies were hard core true believers- it was part and parcel of what made them awful people.

Back to Fun - the bomber cockpit at 1:09. I can't unseen the Millennium Falcon. Kind of makes the WW2 influences on SW painfully obvious, but its neat.

**BobtheInquisitor**

Strength-of-belief is how woo-woo quacks convince customers it’s their fault the scam crystals didn’t work.

**Lord Damocles**

I find it hard to believe that a man who literally watched his mortally wounded father be healed by the HOLY GRAIL wouldn't think magic exists.

**Overread**

Lord Damocles wrote:
I find it hard to believe that a man who literally watched his mortally wounded father be healed by the HOLY GRAIL wouldn't think magic exists.

See this is a big point. Indy has heard, seen and experienced amazing things. Things that defy normal reality - the Ark, the Holy Grail, a huge Alien Space ship and those are just the stories we've seen. If anything he'd be akin to a madman by now believing in powres and things that most people don't consider remotely possible.

**AegisGrimm**

Yeah, freaking ghosts leaving the Ark and melting Nazi faces while you desperately try to keep your eyes shut, followed by the healing of his father AFTER personally speaking to a centuries-old knight who was guarding it seems like it would leave someone a believer in the supernatural.

**ccs**

AegisGrimm wrote:
Yeah, freaking ghosts leaving the Ark and melting Nazi faces while you desperately try to keep your eyes shut, followed by the healing of his father AFTER personally speaking to a centuries-old knight who was guarding it seems like it would leave someone a believer in the supernatural.

And let's not forget witnessing (& very nearly experiencing) an evil priest literally pulling living hearts out victems....

I hope this is a better movie than Crystal Skull was.
But even if it is, I'm still expecting to be disappointed. And the trailer hasn't changed that expectation any.

**Voss**

ccs wrote:
AegisGrimm wrote:
Yeah, freaking ghosts leaving the Ark and melting Nazi faces while you desperately try to keep your eyes shut, followed by the healing of his father AFTER personally speaking to a centuries-old knight who was guarding it seems like it would leave someone a believer in the supernatural.

And let's not forget witnessing (& very nearly experiencing) an evil priest literally pulling living hearts out victems....
.

And personally intoning prayers/incantations so sacred rocks burst into flames. Not just magic exists and he's seen it, but he has literally done it himself.
He doesn't need to believe real hard, its part of his objective reality, like tables, or dog food.

**Azreal13**

It's just the Arthur C Clarke quote, Indy has seen things he can't explain, but because they're beyond his understanding he doesn't just accept that they're magical.

**Voss**

That he ends with the 'believing real hard' bit makes it very much NOT the Arthur C Clarke quote. If he talked about trying to understand how the things he saw worked, then sure.

But depth of belief makes it very much New Age-y nonsense that doesn't make a lick of sense coming out of Indy's mouth.

Imagine a scenario for a moment- you have a table and a glass of water. With a real table, if you put the glass down, you're going to have a glass of water on a table, no matter what you believe about the table. If you imagine and believe real hard about another table three feet to the left of the actual table, it doesn't matter how much or fervently you believe, if you put the glass of water on it, you're gonna have a wet floor. Indy is, rather inexplicably, inferring that with enough belief, you're going to have a glass of water floating at table height. But somehow this isn't also magic.

**Lance845**

It is very likely that Lucas Film, unlike Marvel, don't pay much attention to the trailers being made.

And they especially are not taking a personal interest in an Indiana Jones.

The company that made the trailer was sent some clips and some dialog and were told to cut it into something with no actual understanding of the story or film. Someone probably thought the line sounded dramatic and pieced it together and got sign off. We have no idea if that dialog is even in the movie. Or it is spliced together from 2 different pieces of dialog.

I wouldn't think too hard about it.

**Tannhauser42**

IIRC, with the exception of Temple of Doom, all of the magic Indy witnesses comes from artifacts created by gods and/or aliens. There is no human generated magic.

But Temple of Doom does throw a bit of a kink in that, with the voodoo doll and other things, unless the stones powered all of that, too.

**Ghaz**

What happened to Mutt? James Mangold says 'Dial of Destiny' will tell us what happened to Indy's son - SYFY Wire

So, where is Mutt now? Speaking to Entertainment Weekly about Dial of Destiny, director James Mangold confirmed that LaBeouf and Mutt will not make any major appearance in the film, but we will "find out what happened" to Indy's son after all these years.

I'm glad they'll be answering a question which could otherwise be a distraction to the story.

**Lord Damocles**

I thought that he'd been spending his time yelling about french fries and getting his flags stollen by frogs...

**Easy E**

Ghaz wrote:
What happened to Mutt? James Mangold says 'Dial of Destiny' will tell us what happened to Indy's son - SYFY Wire

So, where is Mutt now? Speaking to Entertainment Weekly about Dial of Destiny, director James Mangold confirmed that LaBeouf and Mutt will not make any major appearance in the film, but we will "find out what happened" to Indy's son after all these years.

I'm glad they'll be answering a question which could otherwise be a distraction to the story.

Expect a throw away line at best in the movie.

**BobtheInquisitor**

“It’s a shame he’s stuck in that Mexican prison. He really would have enjoyed these gratuitous monkeys.”

**Lance845**

They really could have said nothing and ignored the characters existence and it would have been fine. Its not like most people will ever watch that awful movie again.

**greenskin lynn**

short flashback to indy at a funeral
bam, problem solved

**AduroT**

“I can’t believe he was an actual cannibal, thankfully people are no longer threatened by his presence.”

**cuda1179**

Much like the last Matrix movie, Ghostbusters 2016, and SpiceWorld, I refuse to admit that Crystal Skull ever existed.

**Overread**

Ghostbusters 2016 was fine, it just suffered from being over a decade late and hit a wall of people wanting a classic continuation of the original films instead of a reboot

**Geifer**

Ghostbusters 2016 is trash. I like Kate McKinnon's parts, but something like half an hour out of a two and a half hour movie being good isn't enough. See also Pearl Harbor and Titanic for similarly skewed movies.

By comparison Crystal Skull at least has a decent first half that totally goes off the rails in the second half. At least there's an Indy movie in there, it just gets replaced halfway through with... something.

For that reason it doesn't bother me if Mutt gets addressed in the new movie, even if it's just a throwaway line. The character wasn't terrible or responsible for Crystal Skull's failings, really.

**Overread**

I dunno Crystal Skull starts with Indie surviving a direct nuclear strike

**Geifer**

Overread wrote:
I dunno Crystal Skull starts with Indie surviving a direct nuclear strike

Kid in Temple of Doom survived having his beating heart pulled out of his chest. People give it a pass because there is mysticism at work. Therefore I conclude we should give the fridge a pass as it's clearly a mystical fridge.

More seriously, it's been a while since I watched so I can't really go into greater detail, but the fridge scene is just a single scene in an otherwise sound context while anything after the Russian jungle camp is just bogus stuff heaped on bogus stuff. I wasn't saying the first half is great, certainly not in every single scene. But I found it to be true to other Indy movies and that is simply not the case for the rest of the movie.

Edit: I did some digging for my comment on the movie from the last time this came up, right after watching it and the others. It may illustrate my take a little better.

Geifer wrote:
So, inspired by this thread I watched the movies again. With regard to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, watching the movies so close to each other it struck me that the first half of the movie very much felt like the Indiana Jones movies of old, with the exception of the gophers or whatever. Cute animals for the sake of having cute animals hasn't been a thing before. Aside from that, proper and familiar Indy feel. But starting with the jungle chase it just turned into sequence after sequence of stuff that seemed to have been mindlessly thrown together without much purpose or meaning to the actual story.

I went into this liking the thought put forward earlier that the core issue is that Indy stopped being a driving force and was only along for the ride from a certain point onward, but it turns out that while I wouldn't call this idea wrong, it's not what bothered me from the point of the aforementioned chase onward. It felt more like it was down to how modern movies need to one up preceding entries and inevitably discard verisimilitude for spectacle along the way. The sword fight on the moving cars, for instance, bothered me. We've had fights on moving vehicles before. Both on a single vehicle and going back and forth between two vehicles. And they all accounted for the movement of the vehicles, terrain and other factors that would interrupt fights only to get picked up again after the obstacle was passed. Indy 4 doesn't do that. Commie lady and teenage delinquent happily fight on top of cars speeding over rough ground like they're in a training session on campus. When the cars get separated, teenage delinquent precariously balances between both cars but merrily continues the fight. I think it's this kind of escalation that sets the movie apart from the earlier ones. It doesn't respect the world rules and expectations introduced by the earlier movies and as a consequence stands out negatively.

Or Marian driving off a cliff against the advice of everyone else, knowing for whatever reason that there's a tree below to break the car's fall, knowing that driving at a specific speed will land her safely on the tree, bend the tree down to where she want's to go, and then to top it off the tree conveniently whips back afterwards to throw some commies down the cliff. Actually, what tops it off is Marian looking incredibly pleased with herself like she had it all planned out. That's not just a lot of disbelief that needs to be suspended, I can't think of any scene in the previous movies where dumb choices were presented as fully planned with maximum pay off. Even bailing out of a plane in a rubber boat was presented as a solution that nobody was happy with and whose great achievement it was that everyone survived after a harrowing trip down the mountain.

What's interesting to me is that the way the first half of the movie is made suggests that someone was well enough aware what it takes to make an Indy movie in the vein of the old ones, only to fail at showing any such awareness through the other half of the movie.

It doesn't hit on the fridge, but like I said, to me there's a notable difference between one detail or a short scene embedded in an otherwise sound sequence and scene upon scene revolving around an array of unlikely events with no meaning to the overall story.

With all of the above in mind, I just don't think Mutt as a character was a problem. You don't have to like the character. You don't have to like the actor. You don't have to like the 50s greaser thing. You can keep the list going, I'm sure. But in my opinion he's not a contributing factor in what made Kingdom of the Crystal Skull a failure. The movie has way, way more fundamental issues than one character.

And that's kind of the thing about the new movie. I don't need him to return, but his absence isn't a fix to anything either. If Dial of Destiny turns out to be good, it's because the creators remember what makes a good Indy movie.

**Voss**

The Mutt thing reminds me of a webcomic artist I mostly like. Its generally fine, but the author obsessively feels the need to bog down in connecting scenes (walking between rooms, showing (or describing) room layouts to justify where characters sit, and so on). He seems to genuinely think the audience will be lost without explicit explanations for all the trivial things that most people will just assume.

Mutt was a young 20-something. He went to college, job, his own life. Whatever. It doesn't need explanation any more than the movie needs explanations for what characters ate on different days.

It definitely doesn't need a 'Hey, my good friend, did you know that my son (that you may have heard me mention before) has gotten a job with XX corporation, university or government agency? I am pleased/disappointed with this result.'

**BobtheInquisitor**

Titanic may have had two hours of dross, but I was a teenager when it came out, and me and my friends found two good reasons to sit through it*.

*And those reasons are exactly what you think they are.**

**1. Billy Zane.
2. Destruction porn.

**Easy E**

The guy hitting the propeller and Leonardo DiCaprio dying?

**BobtheInquisitor**

Easy E wrote:
The guy hitting the propeller and Leonardo DiCaprio dying?

Another spectacular pair.

**ZergSmasher**

Dying was the best thing DiCaprio ever did in a movie.

**Vulcan**

Overread wrote:
I dunno Crystal Skull starts with Indie surviving a direct nuclear strike

It's amazing what the attention of an actual deity can do...