Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny - is faith a relic of the past?

Pre-Review:

I love the original Indiana Jones trilogy (lets forget about the fourth addition). Jones is probably my favourite on screen hero - intelligent and heroic, with so much charm it’s hard not to resist smiling. This film is not the optimistic, heroic, fun-filled adventure you might be expecting. I’ve been shaken since seeing it - there’s something haunting about the whole affair but I think that was the intention and thus it succeeded.

What you liked:

The film opens with a flash-back to the Second World War and Indiana has got himself into trouble again. It was nice to see a younger Indy again (even if at some points the VFX were a bit wobbly) and, maybe because of the on and off visual effects, I really hope we get a good Indiana Jones video game in the near future…

Whilst the action sequences weren’t as practical as the originals, there were a couple of great moments - a chase through Morocco in a tuk tuk was a particular highlight.

There were some really lovely callbacks to the original films which I really appreciated and all in all, for the final final instalment of the franchise I think it was a good ending.

What you didn’t like:

Spielberg is unmatched in his directing. So I pity anyone trying to direct Indiana Jones that isn’t Spielberg. James Mangold didn’t try and be Spielberg and maybe that was a good thing but I missed some of the Spielberg nuance to shots, the film grain and the use of shadows in particular.

It was slower than I expected, and it was hard to watch my hero not be his heroic self. In fact, he was deeply depressed and now I feel depressed as a result. I’m not sure whether this is an actual dislike as it shows the film was powerful in producing emotion, but I dislike feeling like this none-the-less.