"Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" is Good. We Deserve Better.
James Mangold directs a competent fifth installment of the swashbuckling series. But who asked for this?
You may have heard that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the fifth and (supposedly) final entry into the forty-year-old action-adventure series, was a box office bomb. This is true: it hasn’t even begun to scrape profitability on its insane $300 million production budget (it is one of the most expensive films ever made), and this is without even factoring in an advertising budget that surely reaches into nine figures. The crazy thing is that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny has made over $250 million worldwide, and—pardon my French—that’s a lot of fucking money. It’s the kind of money that should be considered a success under anyone’s metrics, but in a year in which Fast X struggles to recoup its absurd $340 million production budget and The Flash can’t generate more than a hint of audience interest, it’s next to impossible to call a pretty-good blockbuster a pretty-good success.
Dial of Destiny is exactly that: pretty good. It’s the first film in the series not to be directed by Steven Spielberg, who last tried to resurrect the series with 2008’s Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which itself failed to reignite the adventurous spark that began with 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the years since, Disney bought Lucasfilm and with it transferred directorship from Spielberg to James Mangold. Mangold, a tried-and-true filmmaker with decades of competence on display, is here trying to do the same thing that he did with 2017’s gravitas-infused superhero film Logan: send off a multi-decade franchise with equal amounts of dignity and fun.
The film begins in a flashback. The year is 1944, and the war is coming to a close. A fortysomething Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford, duh) is scrambling to escape a Nazi military encampment in the French Alps. He and his colleague Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) are intent on plucking the Lance of Longinus—the spear alleged to have pierced Jesus on the cross—from its fascist plunderers in a sequence that involves an exploding church, Nazis being kicked out of speeding cars, and impersonations of would-be Nazi captors. (One of these Nazis is played by Thomas Kretschmann, the great German actor who seems to have been forever pigeonholed into playing villanous archetypes.) This scene, as with the rest of the film’s setpieces, is both entertaining and overlong, rendering swashbuckling entertainment with a too-heavy dollop of CGI.
Because, oh right: Dial of Destiny employs digital de-aging effects that try to make Harrison Ford, an eighty-year-old man, look four decades younger. They don’t work. It isn’t because these computer images can’t convincingly render Ford as a forty-year-old man (though some sequences do seriously struggle in this regard). The problem is rather that no amount of digitization can change the fact that Ford still walks and talks like the old man that he is. It’s the same problem that Martin Scorsese faced in The Irishman: Even if you can make Robert De Niro appear like a middle-aged gangster, nothing can change the physicality of an octogenarian struggling to kick in a store owner’s teeth.
Fortunately, Dial of Destiny departs from this technique after its opening sequence. It trades 1944 for 1969, with as a grumpy old man frustrated at the hippies next door blasting Magical Mystery Tour. Neil Armstrong has just landed on the moon, and though the city is alight with celebration, Indy could care less. He’s about to retire from his professorship at Hunter College, a school where his students aren’t fawning over him as they did in Raiders—they are falling asleep.
Dial of Destiny doesn’t work unless it approaches the franchise with a recognition of its own outdatedness, and Mangold never shies away from making Indy into the scrooge that he would be at his age. Age, in fact, is the very theme of the film: the plot revolves around the Antikythera, an ancient Dial that has the capacity to affect time itself. As with the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders and the Holy Grail in The Last Crusade, so too does the Antikythera find itself at the crossroads of archeologists and Nazis, the latter of whom are this time led by Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), an astrophysicist with a megalomaniacal interest in succeeding Hitler’s vision of a Thousand-Year Reich. Mikkelsen lends unwavering competence (and his epically villainous face) to an enjoyably cartoonish role.
The film bounces from setpiece to exotic setpiece in a manner that is somewhat removed from contemporary dependence on CGI blobs exploding against each other. Yes, there are conventional car chases and Nazi-punchings, but there are also slower-paced sequences inside of dilapidated temples, dark caverns, underwater crypts—sequences meant to evoke fear and wonder, rather than sugar-rushed exhilaration. Credit goes to Mangold for bringing out the kind of otherworldly thrills that we don’t often get in contemporary blockbusters, a sentiment that he collectively builds to an ending that leaves you both astounded and utterly enthralled, if not simply for how batsh*t crazy it all is. (And if you’re one of the people complaining about just how ridiculous it all is, just remember that this is the same series in which a thousand-year-old British knight gives Indy the power of immortality and Nazi heads are exploded by a Biblical artifact.)
A well-rounded cast of characters including Antonio Banderas and Ethann Isidore round out the film’s cast, as does Phoebe Waller-Bridge, here playing Indy’s goddaughter Helena Shaw. Her character—competent, witty, and effortlessly entertaining—brings all the right notes to a series in desperate need of a shake-up. A game Waller-Bridge has the kind of screwball charm of a Rosalind Russell or Katharine Hepburn—she frankly deserves a swashbuckling series of her own.
Ford meanwhile imbues Indy with his typical leading man charisma, a cowboy exterior that has curdled slightly with age. Over the past decade, Ford has resurrected Han Solo, Rick Deckard, and now Indiana Jones to the screen, a feat that might be considered exploitative if the films didn’t treat him with intimacy and care. Thankfully, they do, and Dial of Destiny is no exception, thrusting him into situations that don’t just test his age, but thematize it.
But then we see Waller-Bridge alongside him, carrying the same amount of scenery-chewing presence our leading man, and an obvious question comes to the fore: Did we really need to bring back this old man for another movie?
I’ll return once again to those box office receipts. $250 million over two weeks is a lot of money, which just isn’t enough to justify a $300 million budget required to de-age Ford down to his Raiders of the Lost Ark-enshrined memory. Disney seems to think that audiences are going to turn out in droves for yet another trip down memory lane—they are evidently wrong. With superhero movies struggling amid a tumultuous summer movie season, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is proving that these halfway-decent legacyquels aren’t enough to save cinema. Dial of Destiny is a good movie—but we deserve better.