INDIANA JONES & THE DIAL OF DESTINY opens during the dying days of World War II, with the title character still in his prime. Because that’s how we like to remember our heroes: in their best of times, in the exhilaration of the fortune and glory that made them legendary, perfectly preserved like amber. Once upon a time, only memory and imagination were required for this, but modern technology — and our modern reluctance to let things go — have made it possible to revive our heroes just as we remembered them. So despite being released 42 years after RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, this fifth outing initially unfolds less than a decade after the events of that film, allowing incoming director James Mangold to perform a cinematic excavation of Steven Spielberg’s iconic hero. Here he is, doing the most Indiana Jones things imaginable: hopping aboard a Nazi train teeming with plundered artifacts, most notably Lance of Longinus, yet another Judeo-Christian relic coveted by Hitler.
We’ve seen this movie quite literally before, so this prologue feels like a cover band performing a greatest hits routine, adding some embellishments here and there in the form of new characters. Indy has a new sidekick in fellow archeologist Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) and a new nemesis in Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), a Nazi scientist who quickly realizes the lance aboard the train is a replica. He does, however, have something even more powerful in his possession: half of Archimedes’s Dial, a fabled relic that will grant godlike powers over time to those who possess it. It’s not his for long, of course: by the end of the prologue, Jones and Shaw have blown up the Nazi train and presumably left Voller for dead as they stroll off with the dial, tidily wrapping up a neat little Indiana Jones short film that almost works.
Almost. While this is the most impressive deployment of digital de-aging to date, the technology still isn’t quite there. Maybe it’ll never get there because I think our eyes and mind know when they’re seeing something that they shouldn’t. The glimmer of life — that twinkle in Harrison Ford’s eye that’s so vital to the character — isn’t quite there. We’re a long way from the dead-eyed husks in THE POLAR EXPRESS, but it’s still an unconvincing illusion all the same. What’s more, the entire premise of the prologue feels like a bout of arrested development: after 15 years of waiting for a sequel to KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL, they seemingly dug up Indiana Jones just to put him back in his proper place, like a collector insistent on keeping his action figures in their packaging, carefully arranged in a menagerie where nothing bad can happen to them.
Mostly, the whole thing feels like an elaborate tech demo, complete with the sort of weightless, prefabricated action filmmaking that’s plagued blockbusters for the past decade. Underlit and murky (no doubt to help conceal the effects work), it lacks the sense of geography and the impish pluckiness that Spielberg brought to the first three entries, back when filmmakers would insist on having a stunt double hop aboard a train instead of using an obvious digital silhouette. It’s all very neat, yes, but it’s also just that: a novelty, and I hope Lucasfilm has the good sense to confine it to this nostalgia-gazing on display here. It’s functional enough, but it’s vaguely apocryphal in the same way a theme park ride or a video game cutscene might be: fun but not at all vital.
It’s no wonder, then, that DIAL OF DESTINY springs to life when it moves ahead to 1969, ironically when Indy no longer has a spring in his step. When we meet him, he’s jolted awake from an afternoon nap by rock music blaring from a nearby apartment, prompting him to yell at the neighbors — and not for the first time. In his notably empty apartment, he goes about his morning routine but can’t ignore his wife’s official request for separation on the counter. At work, his once attentive students have blown off the reading and are tuning out of his lectures despite his obvious enthusiasm for the material. A far cry from his ultimate triumph in CRYSTAL SKULL, Jones is a shell of the digital ghost we just witnessed, perhaps illuminating the prologue’s ultimate purpose beyond wistful nostalgia because the contrast makes one thing very clear: the good times can’t last forever. One day, even our most legendary heroes will be past their prime, lost in a world that has passed them by.
Ford effortlessly conveys this, not by playing Indy as a doddering old fool but as a vulnerable, lonely man who has resigned himself to a life of solitude and alienation as he enters retirement. It’s some of the finest work of Ford’s career that finds him masterfully underplaying the central tension between the specters of Indy’s former glory and the new, perhaps final adventure that awaits him when Basil’s daughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) arrives with the offer of a final triumph by helping her find the other half of Archimedes’s Dial. Unbeknownst to her, sinister agents are in pursuit, headed by Voller himself, who has spent the past 25 years creating rockets for the American government, who have returned the favor by lending him a CIA outfit to help him retrieve the dial he believes can turn back time and right history’s wrongs.
The loaded premise — which only grows more complicated as we learn about Helena’s shifting motives — gives DIAL OF DESTINY an uneasy vibe. It’s not that this series hasn’t had its fair share of duplicitous characters, but acknowledging America’s history of employing former Nazi scientists for the Space Race and the shady mechanisms of the CIA is a bold progression from the shifty government agents in RAIDERS or even the Red Scare theatrics of CRYSTAL SKULL. In a movie where Indy is unsure of his place in the world, audiences are similarly unmoored from the less complicated dynamics of previous entries. When Indy stumbles into this adventure, the action — highlighted by a cool chase that finds him riding a horse through the NYC subway — is fast, furious, and even a little disorienting because Jones is besieged from all sides. Pursued by mysterious government agents and a police force who thinks he’s responsible for the murders of his colleagues, Jones also has to reckon with Helena’s mercenary mentality as he hops on a plane, finally ushering in a traditional globe-trotting adventure.
A specter of faded glory still looms even over this, however. Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) returns, now a New York City taxi driver who can only offer Indy a lift to the airport. Before seeing his friend off, he offers to tag along because he also misses the glory days, when Indy would unexpectedly whisk him off on some adventure. This time, though, it’s no adventure — Indy insists those days are over, and he’s only following Helena to clear his name. But Sallah has packed his trusty whip and fedora — just in case. DIAL OF DESTINY isn’t the first long-running franchise to reckon with its protagonist’s old age, but it’s one of the most poignant to do so because shedding this wistful, melancholy longing for the past becomes crucial to the storytelling. Indiana Jones isn’t just racing against Nazis this time out — he’s racing against the only things that can diminish his larger-than-life stature: time, mortality, and his regrets.
Mangold patiently builds anticipation for the moment Indy finally embraces this new adventure by undercutting rousing moments and teasing snippets of John Williams’s iconic score. But when he finally lets loose, there’s no question: if adventure has a name, it’s still Indiana Jones. Look, I’m not going to try and convince you that Mangold is a perfect replacement for Steven Spielberg. I’m sure Mangold himself would acknowledge that nobody can truly replace The Beard, who would have likely injected DIAL OF DESTINY’s action sequences with a little more pop and pizazz because he’s made an entire career out of his preternatural ability to do things with a camera that no one else dares dreams. But for his part, Mangold crafts some wonderful sequences, including a vehicle chase through the streets of Tangier that recapture the tactile, rough-and-tumble quality of the early films. More importantly, there’s a breathless quality to DIAL OF DESTINY once it gets going. Like the previous films, it sweeps you up in its adventure, flinging you from one corner of the globe to the other, with new perils awaiting around every turn or every plunge into the ocean.
Obviously, the nostalgic pull of Ford donning the fedora to those iconic Williams scores is doing a lot of the legwork, but those two — and everyone around them — are also putting in the work. Ford becomes more lively as Jones embraces his destiny, while Williams conjures up new themes and motifs that feel right at home alongside the old numbers. Except for a few distracting deployments of ILM’s Volume environments, DIAL OF DESTINY looks and feels like an Indiana Jones movie. Unlike other franchise meditations on time and mortality, it never crumbles under that weight: it’s as free-wheeling as pulpy as it’s ever been, thanks in large part to the abundance of new supporting characters. Waller-Bridge brings a spark to the screen as Helena, a character who’s much more interesting and roguish than the marketing suggests.
Far from simply being Indy’s goddaughter and latest sidekick, she drives the action, keeping both Indy and the audience on their toes as we learn more about her, and Waller-Bridge embraces Helena’s shiftiness with aplomb. In the Indy tradition, she even has a street urchin sidekick in Teddy (Ethann Isidore), a boy who once tried to steal from her and now does the pickpocketing for her. Antonio Banderas also drops in as Renaldo, a long-time Indy ally who owns a boat in the Aegean Sea, and his appearance is just as delightful as you expect. It’s a small but crucial role that does what previous entries did by filling out this lived-in universe and suggesting several adventures these two had that we didn’t see. It would have been nice to see a recurring character — like, say, Short Round — in this (or some other) role, but DIAL OF DESTINY isn’t trying to lean exclusively on nostalgia and callbacks.
That said, Jones is facing a familiar foe in the Nazi brigade that’s chasing him around the globe. I’ll admit to having some trepidation about this: it seems like both times the franchise has digressed from this particular milieu — in both TEMPLE OF DOOM and KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL — Nazis dutifully return to provide a sense of familiarity, a sort of unspoken insistence that the filmmakers know this is the winning formula for an Indiana Jones movie, and perhaps even a reassurance that things won’t go too far afield like in those other (unfairly) maligned entries. To an extent, that still feels like the case in THE LAST CRUSADE, if only because its Nazis could easily be swapped out for any other villainous group seeking the Holy Grail. But in DIAL OF DESTINY, the presence of Nazis 25 years after their defeat feels pointed, and Voller’s desire to turn back time to ensure a German victory in World War II dovetails nicely with the film’s musing on time and mortality. Mikkelsen relishes the chance to play yet another conniving villain, and Voller is particularly unrepentant scum whose smugness swells each time he manages to outwit his foe. You really can’t wait to see him and his henchmen (led by a rabid lapdog in Boyd Holbrook and a hulking brute in Olivier Richters, who’d better show up in a future Bond film someday) get what’s coming to them.
And in typical Indiana Jones fashion, they get just that. As always, the Nazis underestimate the powers they’re trying to harness, and it blows up in their face in spectacular fashion during a weird, wild climax that’s arguably the most fantastical turn this franchise has taken. For all its talk of finding rifts in time and Voller’s quest to literally turn back time, you’re not quite sure if they’re going to go all the way—and then they do. And then some. It’s such a big swing that I’m sure it’s going to get DIAL OF DESTINY lumped in with the other two enfants terribles in this franchise simply because it’s daring to fully embrace the wild pulp possibilities of a series inspired by old serials. More than that, the finale also confronts the film’s lingering preoccupation with the past and the passage of time by forcing a moment of existential crisis for Indy himself, who must decide between forever pursuing fortune and glory or accepting that his story still isn’t as finished as he thinks. It’s a choice that seems to be aimed at the audience, too: do we really want to see Indiana Jones become a relic in the past, or is there something more vital to be found in him reckoning with his tragic past and embracing the future?
Mangold answers this question with a surprising, stark, and quite funny smash cut that transitions to the film’s coda and leaves no doubt that the latter is far more interesting. Sure, technology has granted us the ability to make endless Indiana Jones adventures that would preserve him as he once was; however, that’s not nearly as compelling as seeing him as he is, now in the twilight of his life, his glory days behind him. By the end of the film, the nostalgic prologue feels like a pointed contrast between what our nostalgic impulses think we want and what our human longing actually wants. Remembering our heroes and preserving the memory of their extraordinary feats is easy; having them confront the profundity of life and death is more challenging. But, as DIAL OF DESTINY reminds us, it’s also much more rewarding: only an 80-year-old Harrison Ford can capture the gravitas of an older Indiana Jones grappling with his own mortality — it’s something a digital, de-aged stunt double simply cannot.
Watching heroes grow old and withered is nothing new — even the Anglo-Saxons’ most famous tale ends with Beowulf as a greybeard king fighting his last battle — and DIAL OF DESTINY’s best moments come not when Indy is donning a whip or punching Nazis. Instead, they come during moments of introspection and quiet poignancy, such as the film’s gutting revelation about why Indy and Marion are once again estranged, a turn of events that initially feels like a cruel course correction from CRYSTAL SKULL but quickly becomes the film’s emotional bedrock. I’m sure they could have pulled Indy away from the content existence suggested by the end of the previous film, granting him one more adventure that would have been more like a victory lap, but I’m not sure what the drama is there. DIAL OF DESTINY might be valedictory, but it’s not just a final ride off into the sunset. If anything, the touching ending — which earns the obvious fan service it can’t resist indulging — is more concerned with giving Indiana Jones a chance to make peace with the sunset before embracing the sunrise in a way he hasn’t for years. The film’s muted, subtle script doesn’t make it clear until its final moments that DIAL OF DESTINY’s biggest conflict is between its hero and his reluctance to realize that life still has plenty to offer even if his best days are behind him. And, if the final, perfect shot is any indication, those glory days might not be completely over anyway, even if they’re just left to our imagination — right where they should be.
Tags: Action Film, Andrew Buckland, Antonio Banderas, Boyd Holbrook, David Koepp, Dirk Westervelt, Ethann Isidore, George Lucas, Greece, History, indiana jones, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, James Mangold, Jez Butterworth, John Rhys-Davies, John Williams, John-Henry Butterworth, Karen Allen, Ke Huy Quan, Mads Mikkelsen, Michael McCusker, New York, New York City, Olivier Richters, Phedon Papamichael, Philip Kaufman, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Science, Shaunette Renée Wilson, shia labeouf, Steven Spielberg, Tangier, The 1930s, The 1960s, The Beatles, Thomas Kretschmann, Toby Jones, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, World War II
No Comments