Tag: Mads Mikkelsen

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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

(L-R): Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) and Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) in Lucasfilm's INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY. ©2023 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.

The film that has had the most lasting influence on action cinema is Buster Keaton’s 1926 masterpiece The General. Inspired by an actual Civil War train chase across Tennessee and Georgia, The General contains some of the most incredible stunts ever performed for film — all of them done by Keaton himself. 

There’s a straight line between The General and Raiders of the Lost Ark, the 1981 Steven Spielberg/George Lucas collaboration that perfected the kinetic filmmaking style the two friends had been groping towards with Star Wars, Jaws, and 1941. Their not-so-secret weapon was Harrison Ford, who didn’t quite do all of his own stunts like Keaton, but who still did a lot more stuff than Lucasfilm’s insurers were comfortable with. 

When Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012, the rights to Indiana Jones came with it, and soon after the House of Mouse pointed out that Spielberg, Lucas, and Ford had signed a five-film deal in 1979. That meant that even after the classic 80s run of Raiders, Temple of Doom, and The Last Crusade, and 2008’s much-maligned Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, they were owed one more. Thus was born Indiana Jones and the Contractual Obligation, aka Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. 

 Spielberg and Lucas fulfilled their contractual obligations by executive producing this go-round, handing off directorial duties to James Mangold, and a script cobbled together from years of false starts. 

But without Ford, there’s no Indy. Any doubts that the 80-year-old Ford could still wear the fedora are quickly dispelled in The Dial of Destiny. When the action opens, Ford gets ILM’s patented de-aging treatment. It’s 1945, and the Third Reich is falling. Indy and his Oxford archeologist colleague Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) try to sneak into a German castle where Nazis are hoarding looted treasures. They’re looking for the Lance of Longious, the Roman spear that pierced Christ’s side, but in the ensuing fracas, Indy half-accidentally comes into possession of the Antikythera, half of a mysterious clockwork artifact from ancient Greece allegedly created by Archimedes. 

Mangold’s assignment is to imitate the master, and the opening chase sequence, which pays homage to The General, is prime Spielbergian thrill-ride cinema. Then we flash forward to 1969, where a depressed, aging Indy is just trying to get some peace and quiet in his Brooklyn apartment. The script gets the old man jokes out of the way early, when Indy takes a baseball bat to hush up the hippies downstairs, who were blasting “Magical Mystery Tour” way too loud. The hippies are in a celebratory mood, because it’s the day of the ticker-tape parade for the Apollo 11 astronauts. It’s also retirement day for Indy, who has fallen from Princeton to a tiny liberal arts college. I guess it’s hard to get tenure when you’re a globe-trotting adventurer. His son with Marion, Mutt, has died in Vietnam, and the couple have split, leaving Indy with memories and whiskey. 

Ford, who has phoned in performances in his time, comes alive in a scene where Indy tries to teach his class of bored, stoned co-eds about Archimedes. One student who is listening is Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who reveals herself to Indy as the daughter of Basil, and his goddaughter. Helena is in the family business, but her brand of archeology is closer to Indy’s mercenary Temple of Doom approach than the guy who exclaimed “It belongs in a museum!” She wants to know what happened to the Antikythera all those years ago. Also interested in the subject is Jurgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), a former Nazi turned NASA rocket scientist, who believes the Antikythera holds the key to time travel. Indy’s retirement is upended by a three-way chase through the streets and subways of New York, as the ticker-tape parade is in progress.

Mangold takes a lot of big swings, and most of them connect. Waller-Bridge proves a much better foil for Ford than Shia LaBeouf was in Crystal Skull. There are some great sentimental cameos, but they’re handled deftly enough that it doesn’t become a nonstop nostalgia party. 

Best of all is Ford, who doesn’t treat this as a victory lap. His joints are stiffer, but when he says he’s been shot nine times, you believe him. It’s a great joy to see anti-fascist icon Indiana Jones still out there punching Nazis. We need him now more than ever.

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Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

“It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet.”

Those are the opening words of the famous opening crawl from the original 1977 Star Wars. The entire plot of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is contained in those three sentences. A lot has changed in the almost four decades (!) since George Lucas’ space opera debuted, transforming filmmaking in its own image. In the early days, part of the mystique of Star Wars was the feeling that the galaxy was a huge, real, and lived-in place. The spaceships were not gleaming, shiny, and white, but grungy, dirty, and falling apart. The crawl, and subsequent hints in the dialog, hinted at an extensive and complex backstory. When Lucas revisited his universe, beginning in 1999, he focused on the big questions: How did the Old Republic become the Galactic Empire? How did Jedi Knight Obi Wan Kenobi’s apprentice Aanakin Skywalker become Darth Vader? True, there was much fertile ground for imagination there, but the results speak for themselves. The prequels consistently looked amazing, but the stories, written by Lucas himself, were bloated, confusing messes.

Felicity Jones as Jyn in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Lucas originally wanted to create a playground universe for other directors to work in. With the prequels, he abandoned that vision and tried to do it all himself. Now that Lucas is retired, and Lucasfilm sold to Disney, Executive Producer Kathleen Kennedy is trying to follow Lucas’ original vision. Last year, The Force Awakens continued the story of Luke, Leia, and Han with Lucas/Spielberg acolyte J.J. Abrams at the helm, proving that there was plenty of life left in the old formula.

Of course, the ultimate reason why Disney bought Lucasfilm for $4 billion is to replicate the success of the Marvel franchise, which pumps out a couple of loosely connected movies a year based on the enormous stable of comic book superheroes Stan Lee and company built up over the years. In Star Wars, Disney saw another ATM to make annual withdrawals from moviegoers pockets, and that means the once-every-three-years schedule Lucas operated on had to be accelerated. If The Force Awakens was the Star Wars equivalent of The Avengers, then Rogue One is Doctor Strange—except it’s much better than Doctor Strange.

In all of the almost seven hours of the prequels, Lucas never touched on the epic story he (with the help of Brian De Palma) wrote into the 1977 opening crawl. John Knoll, who worked as the special effects supervisor for the prequels, pointed that out a decade ago, but Lucas, stung by the lukewarm reception to his prequel trilogy, didn’t want to listen. Fortunately, Kennedy did. Rogue One is a prequel done right, and it succeeds by focusing on the details. For the first time, there is no opening crawl text, because it’s not an installment of the Skywalker family saga, it’s about little people getting caught up in the sweep of war.

Diego Luna as Cassian Andor

And “war” is the operative word. The Star Wars formula can be boiled down to three elements: Kurosawa samurai film, Flash Gordon, and World War II movies. All three elements are present, but Rogue One shifts the balance toward the third—call it Saving Private Leia. Instead of an opening crawl, director Gareth Edwards kicks off with a flashback. Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), is a scientist who has fled the grip of the Emperor, hiding on a backwater planet with his daughter Jyn (Felicity Jones). But Orsen Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), director of weapons research for the Imperial Navy, is not one to take no for an answer. He and his squad of black-clad Death Troopers kidnap Galen, but Jyn manages to get away with the help of Saw Gerra (Forrest Whittaker), a revolutionary waging a one-man war against the Empire separate from the Alliance to Restore The Republic.

The flashback is revealed to be the dream of Jyn while she’s stewing in an Imperial prison years later. The Rebel Alliance has gotten word that Imperial defector Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed) has a message from Galen warning of a planet killing ultimate weapon. Bodhi is in the custody of Saw’s rogue cell, so Rebel intelligence officer Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) is dispatched to spring Jyn from Imperial custody, make contact with Saw and get to the bottom of the situation. Along the way, Jyn and Andor collect a Seven Samurai-style ragtag team of misfits and hard cases for the desperate raid to steal the Death Star blueprints that Luke Skywalker will use to save the galaxy.

At times, Rogue One doesn’t feel like a Star Wars movie. For one thing, the films have always soft-pedaled the violence. In The Phantom Menace, war atrocities are alluded to but never seen. In A New Hope, the planetary genocide of Alderaan is seen from orbit, its doomed inhabitants are abstract. Rogue One foregrounds Imperial brutality, and the dire measures the rebels have to take to combat them. The pacing is different, too. J. J. Abrams has spent much of his career trying to recreate the rhythms editor Marcia Lucas developed in 1977. The first hour of Rogue One is paced more like Edwards’ 2010’s shoestring indie Monsters. But if it stayed at that pace, it would have ended up like his turgid 2014 Godzilla reboot. Instead, it carefully accelerates into one of the most thrilling climaxes in recent memory. The blowout third act is a staple of Marvel movies; they have become almost interchangeable blurs of brightly costumed heroes beating up on dull villains. Rogue One’s climax features not only thrilling heroics on the ground, but also the best space battle since Return Of The Jedi. The visuals are unlike anything Star Wars has ever attempted before, and they represent the pinnacle of the photorealistic style Industrial Light & Magic has been pursuing since 1977.

But none of that would matter without characters you can love and root for. Diego Luna’s performance makes Captain Andor one of the best characters in the Star Wars canon. Jones’ performance put me in mind of Furiosa from Mad Max: Fury Road. Other standouts are Donnie Yen as a Jedi Temple guardian inspired by Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman, Alan Tudyk as the wisecracking droid K-2SO, and Whitaker as the bitter warrior Saw. Among the film’s many outstanding technical achievements is the uncanny digital reconstruction of Grand Moff Tarkin, even though the original actor Peter Cushing passed away in 1994. There are more digitally reconstructed cameos, but I won’t spoil them here.

Rogue One has the same dark tone as The Empire Strikes Back, which should be expected from a story that takes place in what Obi Wan Kenobi called The Dark Times. Its swashbuckling is more desperate, and its plot twists more unpredictable, even as it moves towards the inevitable conclusion. It may not be a traditional Star Wars movie, but it is the Star Wars movie we need as we stare into our own version of the Dark Times—a story of courage in the face of seemingly overwhelming evil.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

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Doctor Strange

I sometimes think it’s strange when people talk about a comic book character’s “true” identity. These characters were, and are, always changing to meet the commercial needs of the publishers. I mean, She-Hulk was briefly a member of the Fantastic Four! The only rules are a complete lack of rules.

Benedict Cumberbatch is Doctor Strange

And yet, there is something about the way Doctor Strange is drawn in the latest Marvel blockbuster that bugs me. I’m not a deep expert on comics. The number of comic book superheroes I have an emotional attachment to is not very large: Spider Man, Batman (90s animated series version), Rom The Spaceknight (that one’s never getting a $100 million movie), Dr. Manhattan, The Tick, and Doctor Strange.

Hiring Benedict Cumberbatch to play the Sorcerer Supreme was the perfect casting choice, which is keeping with the generally good decisions Marvel Studios has made under Producer Supreme Kevin Feige. And, as I’ll get to in a minute, Doctor Strange delivers big time on the visual front, and holds together reasonably well on the writing front. It’s the characterization that left me cold, which is surprising, because the promise of getting the characterization exactly right is what mustered the tiny bit of excitement I have left for Marvel-branded, extruded movie-type product.

After a perfunctory, McGuffin-establishing battle between reality bending mystics, we meet Dr. Stephen Strange, a brilliant neurosurgeon whose massive intellect is outstripped only by his outsized self-regard. And how do the trio of screenwriters and director Scott Derrickson choose to demonstrate his extraordinary brainpower? Turns out he’s a master of 70s pop music trivia. Sure, they reveal this character beat while Strange is in the midst of delicate brain surgery, but wouldn’t a complete mastery of classical music history be more consistent with the character than a fondness for Chuck Mangionie? From the first introduction, they have changed Doctor Strange into Buckaroo Banzai.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Buckaroo Banzai! Far from it. (Where’s my $100 million version of Buckaroo Banzai Against The World Crime League, Hollywood?) But I can’t help but get the feeling that the real reason Doctor Strange listens to dad rock is because everybody loved Starlord’s mom’s mix tape in Guardians Of The Galaxy. Just as Batman and Superman are essentially the same character in Batman vs Superman, so too are members of Marvel’s much more varied hero stable morphing into marketing driven sameness.

Tilda Swinton as The Ancient One shows Stephen Strange what’s up.

But at least Cumberbatch looks the part, and, as appropriate for an origin story, he gains gravitas as the story proceeds. Strange injures his hands in a car accident (don’t text and drive your Lamborghini, people!), ending his neurosurgery career. Medicine fails, so he heads of to Nepal (don’t want to piss off the Chinese market by using the original Tibet) in search of a magical way to restore the full use of his hands. Once there he finds Kamar-Taj, a monastery full of sorcerers led by The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton, hitting her marks with crisp perfection), who teaches Strange the arts of conjuring and inter-dimensional travel. When the magic starts flying, Doctor Strange’s real strength is revealed. There are clear visual references, like the wall- and ceiling-walking martial arts moves taken from The Matrix and the recursive, bending cityscapes from Inception. But like an original beat built out of samples, the visual synthesis feels fresh, even while it pays tribute to artist Steve Ditko’s psychedelic 60s phantasmagoria.

Strange’s journey from adept to master is hastened by the attack of Kaecillius (Mads Mikkelsen), a rogue student of the Ancient One who wants to summon a god of the Dark Dimension to Earth, offering the planet in exchange for everlasting life. Pretty standard stuff for a superhero flick, really, but at least it’s a coherent vehicle to keep the eye-popping visuals flowing.

Doctor Strange is the best superhero movie of the year, but it doesn’t do much to change my hypothesis that we reached Peak Comics with The Avengers: Age Of Ultron. The film’s sturdy competence offers a sharp contrast with the flailing nonsense of the DC filmic universe, which says to me that Disney and Marvel are the only studio today that has an actual good creative process in place. But there’s a thin line between “process” and “formula”, and despite all of its visual bravado, Doctor Strange’s reality bends too strongly towards formula.

Doctor Strange