That little red line that zooms all over the globe when Indiana Jones is off on one of his adventures just stopped in the south of France, where Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny made its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.
You can’t just assume the movie is great purely because it was selected to play at the world’s most prestigious film festival; Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull premiered at Cannes too, and we all recall how that turned out. 15 years later, Indy is back in what is being billed as his final film — at least with Harrison Ford in the title role — and a story about the beloved archaeologist nearing retirement and having to do battle yet again with Nazis while on the trail of some all-important artifact.
While Ford is back, along with longtime series composer John Williams, this is the first Indiana Jones not directed by Steven Spielberg, who decided to only produce this one while he worked on other projects. In his absence, the movie was helmed by Logan and Ford v Ferrari director James Mangold.
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Those are some pretty big shoes to fill. So how did Mangold do as a replacement for Spielberg? Well, according to the critics at Cannes who were the first to see Dial of Destiny, the movie is a fitting farewell to the character. Some of the early reviews call it a “thrilling” ride, and others says it’s “a highly satisfying blend of action, humor and emotion.”
There aren’t a ton of reviews yet, so we’ll have to wait until more people see it for a fuller picture, but the response so far has been pretty positive. If nothing else, it’s getting better reviews than Kingdom of the Crystal Skull got. Here’s a selection of the Dial of Destiny reactions from Cannes…
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is scheduled to open in theaters on June 30.
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