OFFICIAL SELECTION. OUT OF COMPETITION
Long ovation and waves of human warmth for octogenarian Harrison Ford who received a Palme d’honneur, at the Grand Théâtre Lumière, full as an egg Thursday, May 19 at 7 p.m. The recipient, like most of those subjected to this ordeal, did not resist it. We were of course at the world premiere of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which will be released on June 28 in France. Fifth element of a saga inaugurated in 1981, it is also the first to be neither directed by Steven Spielberg nor co-written by George Lucas. The two old comrades of a new Hollywood drawing towards prehistory will have hitherto enjoyed themselves there at great expense, between two Star Wars and one AND.
The retirement of Steven Spielberg from directing, the sidelining of George Lucas since the takeover of Lucas Films by Disney, and the canonical age of Harrison Ford prepared us to welcome what will undoubtedly be the final salvo of the saga. With her, a page is definitively turned on what embodied the adventurous legend: on the one hand, the spirit of childhood and adventure, on the other hand, a serial imagination of the history of the XX.e century.
This ultimate offspring born of the legend of the past century completes the mutation which saw Disney grab hold of the Lost Ark of Hollywood, launch the teenage monoculture of superhero films, and thus contribute to the impoverishment of American auteur cinema. as no Golden Age mogul had dreamed of.
Mangold walks away with honors
So we asked James Mangold – a specialist in the swan song of the great American myths (the western with 3:10 for Yuma (2007), the superhero movie starring Logan (2017), the Formula 1 film starring Le Mans 66 (2019) – to nail as neatly as possible the four boards of Indiana Jones, a hero obviously too human for the superhero era. At three hundred million dollars (against eighteen for the first episode), Mangold could have afforded to miss the funeral, but he gets away with it with honors.
A little reminder here for the road and newcomers. Indiana Jones, whose original idea came fully armed from George Lucas’s brain before he even embarked on his Star Wars, is a professor of archeology whose taste for adventure leads him to collect artefacts and other magical relics of distant civilizations, this against the background of the great wars that mark the first part of the XXe century. The character happens to have the features of Harrison Ford, a young actor then recently propelled into the stratosphere by his role as Han Solo in the first Star Wars (1977). It is the unexpected success of this space opera which encourages Lucas, on this occasion associated with his friend Steven Spielberg, to go further with his Indiana Jones, like the other strongly inspired by the TV soaps of his childhood.
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