But there’s something jarring about seeing Ford’s face turned, even briefly, into a special effect - an amalgam of images yanked from deep within the Lucasfilm vault, in the latest example of artificial intelligence’s incursion into big-budget moviemaking. It’s still a beautiful mug, of course, and it’s one of the reasons this well-worn series, originally conceived by director Steven Spielberg and creator George Lucas as a kind of parodic homage to the weekend action-adventure serials they loved as children, is still chugging along in its fourth decade. Who or what exactly are we looking at here and why? As Indy hurls himself into a familiar round of death-defying high jinks, you may find yourself scanning the lightly scruffed but artificially smoothed contours of Ford’s mug and wondering precisely that question. If this is movie magic, it strikes me as magic of a decidedly dark vintage, and not just because of the dim haze that seems to cloud the finer details of cinematographer Phedon Papamichael’s images. The effects are fairly astonishing, and all the more spookily disorienting for it (why does this Indy look so young but sound so gravelly?). It’s 1944, and Indy, captured while trying to plunder a Nazi stronghold, doesn’t look a day over 46, an illusion that director James Mangold and his 80-year-old star have fostered with the latest and uncanniest in digital de-aging technology. The first time Harrison Ford appears in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” you can’t take your eyes off him, and not really in a good way.
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