Making another Indiana Jones movie is one of those ideas that everyone, on some level, knows is a bad idea but seems to be powerless to stop, like signing a free-agent deal with the Oakland Athletics at the end of your career or returning to the WWE at 50 for one last championship run: It’s just one of those things that you have to do when you have few options left with your time and a surplus of hope. Retirement isn’t an option, nor is recasting (strangely enough, no one seemed to have much of a problem with the Young Indiana Jones series), so the only choice is to stay the course and hope for the best. Keep in mind these facts: It’s been nearly a decade since Disney purchased Lucasfilm and all of its assets, nearly fifteen since how poorly Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was received upon its release (even if it didn’t necessarily deserve to be so thoroughly hated, as it’s really not that bad), its star is nearly 80 years old, and the primary creative forces behind it have the least amount of input they’ve ever had on one of these films. There was no real universe in which James Mangold, Steven Spielberg’s replacement here, could pull it off, and if anything, the fact that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is even hitting theaters is a testament to how hope springs eternal, regardless of its ultimate quality. Its time has passed, yet its appeal remains eternal: We will suffer through hundreds of Jones-inspired adventures in the years to come, estranged from their pulpy roots, with all of their knowledge of this tribute to ’30s serials and adventure novels coming from their second-hand interpretation by Spielberg and George Lucas. They made entertainment so potent and compelling that they singlehandedly knee-capped their metaphorical descendants’ ability to make similar art.
One can kind of understand Spielberg’s reluctance to continue: He’s already stated his desire for the franchise to move past its Nazi-punching roots, given his inability to have fun making cartoonish Germans his baddies following his experiences making Schindler’s List, but the series’ newest setting — 1969 — fits within the period in which he began his career. He was a direct witness to the events name-checked in this film (the Apollo 11 mission, the Vietnam War protests) and there’s not a ton of nostalgiac fun in doing that, given that Spielberg was imagining the adventures of his parents’ (and grandparents’) generations. So it’s understandable that his exhaustion echoes through Henry Jones, Jr. (Ford) as he settles into another day at Hunter College, teaching students who don’t give a shit, only looking forward to a lonely apartment to return to. He’s a museum piece, only forced out of retirement when Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), his goddaughter and the child of one of his wartime buddies, shows up trying to crack a mystery — the origins and purpose of the Antikythera, a mysterious dial invented by the great Archemedies — that her dad spent the remainder his life puzzling over. However, she’s not all that she seems: she’s a treasure hunter looking for a big payday, and is being chased by the CIA, as well as the private security hired by Jurgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), one of the US’s leading rocket scientists and a still-ardent Nazi. So, it’s off around the world to try and keep Voller from getting his hands on the Dial, while the odd couple try to figure out exactly how the device works, and what its true purpose is.
Mangold may have seemed like an odd choice at the time — he’s not exactly a major collaborator or protege of Spielberg’s, at least from his production credits — but there’s one attribute he’s particularly good at, one that’s even more useful for a project like this than his ability to make quality middlebrow films intended for an adult audience (the 3:10 to Yuma remake, Ford v. Ferrari) or the fact that he’s a Fox company man through and through, merger notwithstanding. He’s long specialized in the I’m Getting Too Old For This Shit subgenre of action, with films like Cop Land and Logan providing action stars nearing the end of their once-assumed age-limited commercial viability with a solid parting shot. Of course, all of his work there is frequently undone by the nature of the business — there’s always a Creed or a Deadpool III around the corner — but that doesn’t negate their qualities as individual works. Yet Mangold functions best as a revisionist, his best work being Oater-stylized reinterpretations of established characters and related screen iconography. Cop Land is mobster High Noon in the Jersey suburbs; Logan is Shane with a toy deal. The revisionism comes in their application to these narratives, and what little subtext can creep in on the edges (there’s something almost dope about Indiana Jones going up against Werner Von Braun and the legacy of Operation Paperclip, yet Mangold is limited to the briefest suggestion of American malfeasance, and that even comes with an excuse: our problem was not that we welcomed in ex-Nazi scientists, but that we were fooled by one was a different Nazi than he said he was). But beyond that, his fantasies are dark tributes mourning a lost American past, defined in some part by the collapse of their mythology through the slow creep of time.
Applying that ethos to an Indiana Jones story isn’t necessarily a terrible idea but rather a hideously boring one, retreading paths firmly ground down by Spielberg himself in the parts of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that people liked, fridge moment notwithstanding (I read somewhere on Reddit recently that that scene — a holdover from those mythically better Frank Darabont drafts — would have played better had he not be catapulted across the desert inside the icebox, and I would genuinely agree). Indy has already had his I’m Getting Too Old For This Shit movie, directed and conceived by the people who brought him to life. There’s a moment in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that has always stuck with me, in which Jim Broadbent, upon reflecting on the losses that Jones has suffered — his dad, his friend Marcus — and the national malaise and paranoia that has cost both of them their jobs, remarks that they’ve “reached the point where life stops giving us things and has started taking them away,” and the strange potency of the way Spielberg shoots that scene gives it a mournful quality that feels appropriately genuine, given the closeness that the brain trust behind the series shares with their creations. By Dial of Destiny, even Spielberg’s attempts to plug the cracks in the slowly-collapsing foundations — Shia LaBeouf, Jim Broadbent, John Hurt — are all gone from the film’s 1969. Aside from Ford and a few other established figures from the franchise, we’re mainly introduced to new and soon-to-be-forgotten replacements.
The Indiana Jones series has always had a Poochie problem, and I’m referring to the ill-timed, Homer-voiced addition to the Itchy and Scratchy cartoon that was meant to draw the kids of Springfield back to The Krusty the Klown Show on The Simpsons. This is somewhat due to inherent serialization issues, where the central figure at the heart of a given long-running franchise remains its bedrock, but Spielberg made a deliberate pivot to try and get away from that by the time Last Crusade rolled around. It wasn’t necessarily his fault that it took decades for each subsequent installment to make it to the screen. Still, one gets the feeling that potentially permanent and ongoing additions to the canon were all undone simply because they couldn’t make the movies fast enough anymore. As such, they’re dealt with off-screen, with viewers meant to accept their substitutes as bracingly modern-yet-traditional equivalents, fitting with the new eras that the film goes to temporally. Mutt Williams controversially took on the sidekick role in Crystal Skull. Still, LaBeouf’s estrangement from Spielberg (and Hollywood at large) rendered him to an off-screen fate that’s as handled as bizarrely as it is perfunctorily — a mid-film reveal that, with apologies to Noel Coward, lacks all of that “potency” that the “cheap music” had under Spielberg. Waller-Bridge, his replacement, isn’t terrible, and she’s got the tenor of the franchise right, even if she’s a bit too current for the film’s style, but she appears out of nowhere, lacking even the slightest relation to the previous events. It might have been too easy to have her be Marcus Brody’s daughter, but it would have been an appropriate solution to the narrative problem she poses.
Then again, without her retconned appearance — Toby Jones essentially cameos as her father, who was Jones’ wartime buddy in lieu of Brody — we wouldn’t have the film’s WWII-set opening action sequence, which is a testament to both the quality of de-aging technology and a demonstration of its genuine horror. The Imagineered de-aging tech is astonishing in stills, as one would assume it would be. Yet, its application in sequential frames is about as hideous as your average Robert Zemeckis fetish project. The young Indiana Jones, chronicled here on a mission to stop a Nazi plunder train, looks and moves like a Raiders-era Harrison Ford for whole seconds, and the problem is that the sequence goes on for nearly twenty minutes. He has the same problem that De Niro did in The Irishman, without the bona fides behind the camera: His younger self moves like old Harrison Ford, sounds like Old Harrison Ford, and is, aside from the odd blurriness around his face, old Harrison Ford. Mikkelsen fares even worse with the de-aging treatment, which is bizarre given his near-perfect digital enhancements in something like Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding, with his entire face smoothed over in computer-generated concealer. This reliance on new-fangled tech sticks out like a sore thumb to the practically-realized work done in the previous films, with its application even in Crystal Skull being pretty alright until that jungle-set action sequence. Worse, the movie is shot digitally, which wouldn’t be such an issue if not because every other film in the series looks better in comparison. The light feels wrong, the color correction looks strange, and the film is, like most of its digital ilk, too dark, meant to obscure the CGI’s stitching.
So what is Dial of Destiny if not an ill-fitting coda to a series that has, for some segment of the Raiders audience with each release, had most of its luster polished off? It is, on some level, a tribute to Harrison Ford’s resilience, given that some disaster inevitably plagues his franchise work with the Lucasfilm brain trust (a plane crash here, a broken limb there), and, in all seriousness, his presence as a grade-A capital-letter Movie Star in an era where they’ve become an endangered species. His age is the movie’s defining concern and its most obvious trait — he is, like Mangold’s protagonists, Too Old For This Shit — but his charisma is undimmed. In the film’s best moments, he channels that pathos into something real and genuinely reflective (that Mutt moment almost works with his teary-eyed sincerity) or, through sheer will, defies age-bound expectations with a solid bon mot and a right cross. Roger Moore never quite had it this good. Through Ford’s approach — a kind of combination of the inherent pluck of Moore’s Bond and his relationships in the back half of his career, where 007’s girls essentially became his tenderly drawn friends and companions rather than love interests — one can see where Dial of Destiny might have gone right. But, as Mangold takes great pains to point out, we exist in an era incompatible with Indiana Jones, even as he remains, but not because he’s a relic. It’s because modernity has made his stories’ aesthetic pleasures inert as we progress further into whatever digital future awaits us. In a way, this is his final warning: The qualities that made his adventures so enticing don’t have to be hidden away in secure government facilities or limited to those with the means. They can be continuously enjoyed by all, though one doesn’t necessarily need them to belong in a museum.