«Indiana Jones», the melancholy smile of a stainless archaeologist (score 7 and 1/2) – Corriere.it

“I hear you’re back, Indiana.” The joke comes at the end of the two and a half hour film but perfectly sums up the spirit of this fifth adventure of cinema’s most popular archaeologist. It’s been fifteen years since we’ve seen him on screen (“Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”, 2008) and the astonishment at the news of the return is also justified by chronological reasons: Harrison Ford, its irreplaceable protagonist, is 80 years old and certain breathtaking races seem rather complicated to repeat. Right then to wonder if he really is back, but perfectly right to answer: “Yes, he really is back” and this Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny worth the ticket price.

At the beginning, as in the best tradition of adventure blockbusters (starting with the 007) the super-spectacular prologue, between bombs, motorbike chases and fights on the roof of a train, raises fears of an excessive invasion of digital technology: set in 1945, at the end of the Second World War, we see a forty-year-old Indiana fighting against the Nazis who are taking away the fruits of their raids, starting with half of a mechanism invented by Archimedes (the «antikytera machine», the quadrant of the title) which seems to be very dear to Dr. Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), commissioned by the Reich to hoarding antiques. Together with the trusty Basil Shaw (Toby Jones), Jones naturally manages to get the better of: the Nazis and the credibility because for these scenes the procedure of de-aging which we had seen at work in “The Irishman”. No, scenes with Ford in the previous films have been recovered, then the body and expressions have been “pasted” onto the new frames, thus obtaining a surprising rejuvenation because it is “real” (capable of justifying runs, jumps and tumbles).

Then after the opening minutes (and a brief explanatory parenthesis with Basil), Indiana no longer hides his age. Indeed, it almost seems that Harrison Ford, well beyond the numerous underlinings of the inexorable passing of time, is pleased to show signs of it: we are in New York, in 1969, on the day when the moon landing is celebrated with a large parade his alarm clock is absolutely far from that of a modern super-hero. But precisely that parade will become the backdrop for the first of the many “quotes” from the previous films.

To unleash an astonishing ride among majorettes and allegorical floats are the men of the revived Dr Voller (who is mentioned in passing as one of the fathers of the rocket that took astronauts to the moon, to recall the use of German scientists – and former Nazis – in the American post-war period). His thugs, who are very quick, want to take possession of the antikytera machine, which we discover is half of a kind of clock invented by Archimedes capable of identifying temporal holes and which Voller wants to reconstruct in its entirety. But before them came Shaw’s daughter, Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who is also interested in the same “dial” but with far more base purposes: she wants to sell it at an illegal auction in Morocco. And Indiana is forced to pursue her.

At this point, the film picks up pace tradition of the previous ones, jumping from Morocco to the Aegean Sea (with an appearance by Antonio Banderas) to Archimede’s Sicily, with the inevitable presence of a boy co-star, Teddy (Erhann Isidore), Helena’s business partner, with whom we hope to conquer that slice of the public too young to already be fans of Indiana Jones.

Chases, fistfights, sudden reversals up to an ending that is really the twist you don’t expect (the screenplay is by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth with David Koepp) while the direction of James Mangold is concerned not to make Spielberg regret the absence. And he more or less succeeds, above all thanks to the slightly melancholy but still irresistible smile of a truly stainless Harrison Ford.