After scoring box-office bullseyes with Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Steven Spielberg blotted his Hollywood wunderkind copybook with 1941 (1979). A “comedy spectacular” set in the wake of the Pearl Harbor bombing (yes, really), 1941 cost nearly twice as much as Spielberg’s previous outing yet took less than a third of its box office. Chastised, the director teamed up with George Lucas on a project inspired by the serial cheapies of the 1930s and 40s. The result was the moderately priced Raiders of the Lost Ark, which promptly became the highest-grossing film of 1981, and which Spielberg later told me helped him get back to his crowd-pleasing roots.
Four decades and as many sequels/prequels later, the Indiana Jones franchise is still a money-spinner, although exponentially soaring budgets (this latest instalment cost close to $300m) have put paid to the original’s comparatively cheap and cheerful ethos. In its place we have a strange combination of cutting-edge, computer-enhanced nostalgia (Harrison Ford is digitally de-aged for flashbacks to second world war-era Europe) mixed with a string of old-but-new action set pieces involving big trains, small cars and nippy bikes – sequences that weirdly mirror this summer’s other massively expensive action franchise release, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. The difference is that while MI7 looks machine-tooled to keep you on the edge of your seat, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny just wants you to sit back and wallow in it.
