On the menu today: Elon Musk pledges to the Chinese government that he and his companies will enhance “core socialist values,” and tells an artificial-intelligence conference in Shanghai, “I think China will have very strong AI capability — [that] is my prediction.” And, for almost certainly the last time, a review and thoughts about a new Indiana Jones movie.
Elon Musk Pledges to Beijing That His Company Will Enhance ‘Core Socialist Values’
The Financial Times, yesterday:
Elon Musk’s Tesla has joined Chinese automakers in pledging to enhance “core socialist values” and compete fairly in the country’s car market after Beijing directed the industry to rein in a months-long price war.
Tesla and its biggest Chinese rival BYD were among 16 manufacturers to make the commitment in a letter signed at a motor industry conference in Shanghai on Thursday. . . .
The letter — which uses language popular with Chinese president Xi Jinping and the ruling Communist party — also highlights how Tesla is navigating an increasingly fraught US-China business landscape and rising competitiveness in the world’s biggest EV market. Tesla was the only foreign carmaker to sign.
Now, if the CEO of some other U.S. electric-car company — let’s say Newark–California-based Lucid Motors — had signed a pledge to enhance “core socialist values,” it would be disappointing but not particularly big news. We’re used to seeing American corporate executives bend over backward to make nice with the government in Beijing and maintain access to the Chinese market and supply chains.
But Elon Musk is the guy who calls himself a “free-speech absolutist.” There’s always been a contradiction or tension between Musk’s rhetoric regarding free speech on social media and his warm-and-fuzzy relationship with the Chinese government. But it appears that the interests of Tesla and the interests of Twitter are diverging to an absurd extent.
What does Musk actually think of socialism? In 2018, he tweeted, “I am actually a socialist. Just not the kind that shifts resources from most productive to least productive, pretending to do good, while actually causing harm. True socialism seeks greatest good for all.” But Musk has also pointed to socialist Venezuela as a textbook example of a government ruining the lives of its people. And you don’t find that many socialists who encourage people to vote for Republicans, chat with Fox News hosts, and help launch Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign.
How can you denounce a “woke mind virus” one day and then turn around and pledge to the Chinese government that you will uphold “core socialist values”?
Last month, Musk went to China for a trip that attracted surprisingly little attention in the crowded U.S. news cycle. You have to look to Le Monde in France to find some hard hits on Musk’s on-again, off-again commitment to freedom of expression:
These reminders highlight the businessman’s double standards, both in Beijing and Shanghai, whenever his interests are at stake. During a visit worthy of that of a head of state, “Comrade Elon,” as he was celebrated by some, refrained from making the slightest remark about the authoritarian Chinese model which, for example, means that Twitter is blocked there. It’s clear that he had not come to be an uncompromising defender of grand principles. But then again, half of the electric car production from which he still derives most of his fortune comes from Shanghai factories.
Also yesterday, Musk appeared by video at an artificial-intelligence conference in Shanghai, and said, “I think China will have very strong AI capability — [that] is my prediction.” After last month’s visit, Musk said, “Something that is worth noting is that on my recent trip to China, with the senior leadership there, we had, I think, some very productive discussions on artificial-intelligence risks, and the need for some oversight or regulation. And my understanding from those conversations is that China will be initiating AI regulation in China.” For a long while now, Musk has described artificial intelligence as a threat serious enough to destroy human civilization.
“AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production,” Musk told Tucker Carlson in April. “In the sense that it has the potential, however small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial, it has the potential of civilization destruction.”
But Musk is running around, expressing confidence in how China will regulate the development of artificial intelligence.
Now I don’t know about you, but when it comes to entities whom I can trust to responsibly and safely handle potentially dangerous materials and experimental technologies, my first thought is the Chinese government! If there’s anything this decade has taught us, it’s that Beijing knows how to make its most daring and boundary-breaking developments go viral!
As I wrote back in April 2022, “Musk is also way too friendly with the Chinese government, his businesses are built in part on government contracts and subsidies, and he can be erratic in his decision-making at times. He’s a really intriguing, bold, and imaginative guy, but he’s not Tech Jesus.”
The Just-Barely-Adequate Dial of Destiny
If you had told nine-year-old or even 14-year-old me that there would be five Indiana Jones movies, I probably would have been ecstatic and brimming with anticipation. I love the movies, I love the early ’90s television series about young Indy, and I love the old spinoff novels. Indiana Jones is indisputably an element of the DNA of the Dangerous Clique series.
But the approach of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny mostly filled me with dread. The last Indiana Jones sequel, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, was at best a mess and at worst one of those works that fans decree must be erased from history, like the alleged third Godfather movie. The South Park guys memorably portrayed Steven Spielberg and George Lucas as perpetrating a sadistic violation of the character.
I hadn’t seen many Indiana Jones fans who were clamoring for another film featuring a geriatric Harrison Ford. For years, I have argued that if Disney and Lucasfilm wanted to continue the series, the best options were to make a Raiders of the Lost Ark-style film about another character who’s a rival of Indy’s, or reboot the franchise with a film about some modern-day archeology student who finds Indiana Jones’s diaries and sets off on a hunt for some long-lost treasure that always eluded Indy.
I’ll say this for Dial of Destiny: I think director James Mangold made the best movie he could make with an 80-year-old Harrison Ford. I found it surprisingly adequate, though that is perhaps a reflection of my expectations, which were so low they were subterranean. It’s hard to say it’s a particularly good or deeply satisfying movie, but it assembles the right parts and makes the most of what it has to work with, adding up to a sequel that is a well-meaning and non-embarrassing farewell to the character.
What works:
- Harrison Ford is old, but the character still fits him like a well-worn shoe.
- The first 15 minutes or so, featuring the digitally de-aged Harrison Ford, are probably the best use of that technology yet and feel very much like an Indiana Jones movie we would have gotten in the 1980s. For years, fans wondered what the fictional archeologist who killed more Nazis than Patton had done during World War II; this sequence provides a satisfying answer — sneaking behind enemy lines, trying to recover stolen art, antiquities, and relics from the Nazis who had looted Europe. (From where I sit, few movies have done less with a spectacular real-life idea than The Monuments Men.)
- It’s a nice surprise to see Indy’s old sidekick Sallah again; now an immigrant living in New York City, he gets a delightful little scene in which he boasts that his grandchildren are proud to be Americans and Egyptians. There are certain actors who hit it out of the park every time they show up on set, and John Rhys-Davies is one of them.
- The settings and chases are the right combination of familiar and new — the chase through Tangiers, a deep-sea encounter with underwater eels, creeping through caves and ancient ruins in Greece.
- Indy is finally up against Nazis again. No offense to the Thugee Cult of India or the Soviets, but when people think of Indiana Jones, they think of him punching Nazis. Mads Mikkelson’s Voller and Boyd Holbrook’s Klaber aren’t as memorable as Belloq or Toht from Raiders, but that’s a tough threshold to beat, as no Indiana Jones villain has equaled those initial iconic antagonists.
(One stretch of the film has some very weird parallels to The Fugitive. Harrison Ford is framed for a murder he didn’t commit, goes on the run, has his face plastered across the news, and escapes his pursuers by losing them in a parade.)
What doesn’t work:
The character of Helena Shaw just doesn’t work at any level, and the idea of building a spinoff series around her is spectacularly ill-advised. In far too many scenes, the character is smug and insufferable, and we, the audience, can’t understand why this now-very-old Indy keeps risking his neck to rescue Helena from danger that she has brought upon herself by dumb decisions. Her motives aren’t mysterious or intriguing, they’re confusing and contradictory. She’s not a charming rogue or a smooth-talking con artist, she’s just dislikeable and dishonest. Perhaps the worst moment of the character is when Indy has to remind her that he just witnessed an old friend being suddenly and brutally murdered. Earlier in the movie, she leaves Indy in mortal danger, and she apparently was perfectly happy to auction off the movie’s magic MacGuffin to the highest bidder, with no care about the consequences. If she doesn’t cross the moral event horizon in those moments, she comes unacceptably close. As written, it’s a mess of a character, and perhaps no actress could have saved it, but Phoebe Waller-Bridge was certainly not the right choice.
When you introduce a major character — effectively a co-protagonist — to an established series, that character must quickly demonstrate that they’ve earned that key role in the story. When Sean Connery stepped in as Henry Jones Sr. in Last Crusade, we were instantly entertained by the complicated bickering dynamic between father and son. There’s nothing like that chemistry between Indy and Helena. By contrast, Antonio Banderas has a small role as an old friend of Indy’s who is an expert deep-sea diver, and he just feels like someone who would fit in naturally in the world of Indiana Jones.
Helena is the daughter of a new character, yet another fussy, in-over-his-head British archeology professor, Basil Shaw. I wonder if in some earlier draft of the screenplay, she was the daughter of Marcus Brody; that little change might have made the whole story feel different. We, the Indy fans, already know and like Marcus, and would feel invested in the fate of his daughter. Alas, Denholm Elliott passed away in 1992.
There is this extraordinarily frustrating cliché in every reboot of a beloved series of the past: The heroes that we once cheered for, and sometimes wanted to be, are now bitter, defeated old men. Han Solo is divorced from Leia and still in debt to the galaxy’s underworld. Luke Skywalker is a sour old hermit, hiding from his friends and the rest of the galaxy. Jean-Luc Picard is a retired admiral, alienated from the Starfleet he once served.
And now Indiana Jones is a past-his-prime professor ignored by his students, divorced from Marion, mourning a lost son, and seemingly becoming a friendless alcoholic.
More than a few fans who loved Star Wars and Indiana Jones point the finger at Kathleen Kennedy, the former secretary and associate of Steven Spielberg who steadily climbed the Hollywood ladder and who now is president of Lucasfilm. There are a few anecdotes that indicate Spielberg and George Lucas were not always the warmest or most appreciative of bosses or mentors:
“I remember Kathy came into the room with her steno pad and her pencil, and she was horrible at taking notes,” Spielberg recalls. “She was terrible, and didn’t know how to do it very well. But what she did know how to do was interrupt somebody in midsentence. We’d be pitching ideas back and forth, and Kathy — who was supposed to be writing these ideas down — suddenly put her pencil down and would say something like, ‘And what if he didn’t get the girl, but instead he got the dog?’”
Since she became president, Lucasfilm has offered the world the Star Wars sequel trilogy, Rogue One, and now Dial of Destiny. In each of those stories, a young brunette woman who is remarkably gifted and independent, and who doesn’t experience much of a character arc (Rey Skywalker, Jyn Erso, Helena Shaw) proves she has nothing to learn from an older male mentor who is now old, bitter, and defeated (Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, Saw Gerrera and the leaders of the Rebel Alliance, Indiana Jones). She saves the day and defeats an old order (the First Order, the Empire, the Nazis). It’s probably overstating it to contend that Kathleen Kennedy has rewritten the stories to make a woman that reminds her of herself the hero. But it seems reasonable to conclude that Kennedy instinctively gravitates to stories featuring one type of protagonist.
ADDENDA: Over in that other Washington publication I write for, I look at how Attorney General Merrick Garland hasn’t quite lived up to his promise to “show the American people by word and deed that the Department of Justice pursues equal justice and adheres to the rule of law.”
Thanks to the good folks at Meet the Press Now and NBC News for having me on to discuss some recent ads in the Republican presidential primary. They seemed to like the observation about former vice president Mike Pence, “Well, a mob trying to kill you can really change your perspective on things.”