OPINION: BURKHART: A movie review for 'Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny'

Janie Slaven, The Sentinel Echo, London, Ky.
·2 min read

Jul. 26—With an immutable Gibraltar presence of Harrison Ford amalgamating this movie from its beginning to its end, this movie's travesty is disguised.

Convoluted confusion is my overall impression of this movie. With a strained effort to utilize every new filming technique in alarming sound and lighting, the movie viewer for the first 30 minutes experience a bombastic barrage of penetrating lights and sounds. This rampant confusion is enhanced by the movie transgressing centuries and continents; all homogenized in the attributes of war — danger, death, and darkness. Ninety percent of the movie is filmed in severely subdued lighting. This deliberate compilation of impediments is a severe limitation to following and understanding the narrative sequence of the movie.

This conscious enhancement of blurred and distorted sound and vision creates the obvious objective of placing the viewer in a state of perplexity — efforts to enshroud the movie in mystery. For some of us it is an overall disgust in mind and emotion.

However, the outrageous scenarios of the "bad guys" chasing the "good guys" via go karts, motorcycles, a horse, and autos — are all intriguing and a thrill.

Riding on the laurels of Harrison Ford's outstanding filming victories, this film is introduced as a climatic crescendo to his long film career. It is difficult to imagine it being not much more than the opposite. For me the profundity of this movie's disappointment is beyond measure.

Accentuating a 90-year-old's assessment of this film, might legitimately generate the comment "What else can be expected from someone so steeped in geriatrics and with an obvious degree of dementia." I must assent to that truth of my identity and perhaps the unavoidable distance of myself from the leading edge of today's thought and instruments of communication.

However, the resounding authenticity of my perspectives serves as a genuine counterbalance to the dubious hoopla anticipated from this movie.

This might be an appropriate setting to vent my 30-year experience as a senior. There is a prevailing pre-judgment of we old folks that identifies us, across the board, with impeding mental-physical impairments. Such geriatric limitations are valid for some but not all.

I might add, with a grandiose praise of God, that despite seniors' progressive geriatric attributes "the older we get the better we get"- at living and understanding life.