Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

In James Mangold’s film the real gamble is the opening: for roughly 25 minutes you watch a young Indiana Jones. Harrison Ford played it in the original costume and ILM’s FaceSwap toolset laid a young face, built from archive footage of the earlier films, over his performance, machine learning working beside older methods rather than replacing them. Effects supervisor Andrew Whitehurst calls the sack coming off the head the critical shot. A stunt performer wore a young Ford mask for the motorcycle chase; the film carries 2,350 effects shots. New York in 1969 was built in central Glasgow over two weeks: an Apollo 11 ticker tape parade, a thousand extras, anti Vietnam protesters among them. India was dropped for Morocco after a Covid surge. Spielberg stepped aside in February 2020, leaving the series in other hands for the first time. After two David Koepp drafts were rejected, Mangold rebuilt it with Jez and John-Henry Butterworth over six to eight months. John Williams, then 91, took a score nomination at the 96th Academy Awards, where Oppenheimer won. A good fit if you treat that opening as the real show and accept the digital face deciding the rest. Not for anyone wanting the old cast given room rather than brief salutes, like Karen Allen’s, shot in a day and a half.