The first four installments of the Indiana Jones series, which has now been running for an astonishing 42 years, were the result of an accomplished quartet of collaborators: George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, and John Williams.
Of that quartet, Lucas and Spielberg were undeniably the architects, and the Indy series was accordingly fashioned in their image. Raiders of the Lost Ark enabled Lucas and Spielberg to render their childhood fantasies with the scale and thrill that had only, until then, existed in their imagination. It was the adult fulfillment of a childhood dream. The shock of newfound bachelorhood gave birth to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, a manic, savage rollercoaster of a movie that was the product of a Lucas and Spielberg who were reeling from divorce and needed a creative outlet for their confused emotions. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the series and its creators repented of excess and took an introspective turn, navigating family trauma with a lighthearted touch. By the time the duo were ready to film Kingdom, almost two decades later, they were older, wiser, slightly jaded family men, and the resulting film is a somewhat lackadaisical, largely comic adventure about growing old and discovering that you’re turning into your parents.
Still, the series couldn’t have possibly worked without Ford, whose iconic visage and effortless blend of comedy and gravitas made the character an enduring icon. Indeed, Ford seemed to love the character more than all others, never letting Lucas and Spielberg forget the character for too long. Indiana Jones was, after all, the role that propelled Ford into true mega-stardom.
In a way, each of the last three films, including the just-released Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, represent an attempt on the part of one of the core trio of Lucas, Spielberg, and Ford to send the character off on their own terms. Spielberg always envisioned Crusade as his last Indy adventure, and continues to cite it as the Indy film to which he has the strongest personal attachment. Kingdom was culmination of a vision Lucas had fought for since the early 90s; he was eager to see Indiana Jones graduate from the territory of classic adventure serials and find himself stranded in the territory of 1950s B-movie cinema (for Lucas, the character was always essentially genre pastiche). Then we have Dial, which Ford almost single-handedly willed into existence, stubbornly pushing ahead with it after Lucas and Spielberg stepped back into advisory roles.
Looking at Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, it’s easy to see why Ford wanted another turn at bat. Kingdom gestures towards an Indiana Jones who is dealing with loss and the march of time, but it bounces along with detached amusement, purposefully undercutting the sense of danger or urgency that motivated prior films. Ford, whose visage and gesticulations were the focal point of all three prior adventures, is occasionally given new shades to play (one of Kingdom‘s more successful threads is the way this older Indy increasingly mimics his late father’s mannerisms), but Kingdom plays things so lightly and broadly that Ford has little to dig into as a performer.
When Spielberg stepped back from the director’s chair for what would become Dial of Destiny, director James Mangold was handpicked by Ford to rework the Spielberg-supervised scripts and bring the film to life. Mangold put Ford right back at the center.
Following an “old man confronting a new era” pitch, Dial loosely replays some of the narrative angles from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but where Kingdom softballed them, Dial leans into the melancholy, using a broken, lonely Indy as its starting point. This gives Ford something to bring to the character that he hadn’t brought before: a sense of fragility, mortality, and regret. Ford doesn’t waste the opportunity and leaves everything on the table. It’s a great performance that would probably hit harder if Dial hadn’t come at the end of a long run of “legacy sequels” that has given us scores of heroic icons filled with trauma and bitterness (including two such turns by Ford himself in The Force Awakens and Blade Runner 2049).
If we continue an autobiographical reading of the Indiana Jones series, we could see this crankier Dr. Jones as an analogue for Ford himself. Certainly, Jones’ contempt for his own time in Dial mirrors Ford’s own amusingly naked contempt and befuddlement at modern blockbuster culture. When, early in Dial, Dr. Jones looks at a kid dressed as an astronaut (to celebrate the moon landing), it might as well be Ford looking at a cosplayer at Comic Con. Dial of Destiny is Ford’s attempt to conjure up a Hollywood that gave birth to his own stardom. It’s a film about reliving the glories of the past and then, finally, bidding them farewell.
Dial of Destiny opens with a sequence set in 1944, where Ford, donning a CGI mask as his younger self, gleefully play-acts as Ford-in-his-prime, confronting Nazis in an old castle ala Last Crusade. All in all, it’s a fairly strong sequence, despite the uncanny valley aspects of abundant CGI and the murky nighttime setting (as with any modern blockbuster, the look of Dial of Destiny seems calibrated to look its best on 4K TVs, where detail pops in a way it doesn’t when projected on a screen). There’s a snappy rhythm to the hijinks that mostly eluded the more lethargic Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It’s an unabashed pastiche of a classic Indiana Jones film, and John Williams goes full-on in quoting his scores from Raiders and Crusade to ensure the feeling of deja vu hits home.
The leap forward to 1969 is purposefully jarring, yanking us out of the world of classic Indy adventures into a more urban world where Indy is a joyless, cranky dinosaur, a once-again bachelor on the verge of retirement. In the shadows, the Nazi threat has survived. The US government made a deal with the devil by relying on Nazi brainpower to enable it to win the space race. This resurgent Nazi cell, led by Mads Mikkelsen’s Voller, wishes to rewrite history and restore the Third Reich’s former glory (and this initiative has gathered some support in post-civil rights America, as indicated by the support of Voller’s white supremacist henchman).
The adventure kicks off when Indy’s goddaughter Helena, played with enthusiasm and panache by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, strolls into Indy’s life and brings him, briefly, into the realm of early 1970s paranoid thrillers, where he’s hunted by the CIA and framed for murder. This angle is conceptually clever (a nice extension of Lucas’ genre mix-and-match ethos), but it’s tragically underplayed. The simmering tensions of 1960s America are mostly window-dressing here. Dial of Destiny is too eager to shift to more classic Indy trappings as soon as it possibly can.
In this way, Dial of Destiny falls into the same trap that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull did. Kingdom was at its most exciting when it leaned into the 1950s-era trappings, with the specter of the Red Scare coming to Indy’s doorstep. But it quickly dispensed with the 1950s trappings for more familiar (and less interesting) jungle- and tomb-trekking. Dial similarly brushes aside the late 1960s to venture into classic Indy territory.
That said, Dial‘s version of stereotypical Indy stuff is more fun and energetic than Kingdom‘s, and a lively sequence set in Tangiers at a black market for artifacts conjures up more than a little of that “classic Indy” magic in atmosphere and energy. What everyone there is after is the Antikythera, an Archimedes-authored mechanical wonder that can enable the owner to find fissures in time.
This mechanical device is Mangold’s invention (in a nod to the hand-off between Spielberg and Mangold, the opening of Dial tosses aside the core McGuffin of Spielberg’s drafts, the Lance of Longinus, and shifts focus to the Antikythera), and it’s a clever one that unites the puzzle-solving aspects of Crusade‘s grail quest with Kingdom‘s shift from supernatural intrigue to the territory of science fiction. The Antikythera’s payoff, which involves time travel gone wrong, is Dial‘s most interesting and eccentric sequence, enabling Indy to finally confront the history that has obsessed him for so long.
That gonzo climax is more conceptually bold than visually dazzling, and might make you wish someone with a little more showmanship was behind the camera. Mangold does a more than competent job helming Dial, but he’s clearly more comfortable when he’s directly focused on actors and their interactions than when he’s delivering big, effects-driven spectacle.
Outside of the opening 1944 teaser, Mangold’s set-pieces have a percussive forcefulness, but lack the outlandish wit and fluid pacing of Indy setpieces from years past (a vehicular chase through Tangiers, in particular, overstays its welcome). Still, holding Mangold to the standard of Spielberg seems unfair, and even Spielberg himself struggled to conjure up his gift for rollercoaster rhythms in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Overall, there’s a sense in which Dial of Destiny serves up both a bit too much and a bit too little when it comes to its antics, but what helps buoy the film through its languors is the natural chemistry between Ford and Waller-Bridge. If the film never quite solidifies their relationship as surrogate father and daughter to the extent one might wish, they’re a pleasant pair to watch on screen from the moment they first sit down for drinks together, and their characters’ affection for one another feels appropriately lived-in.
When Dial of Destiny finally draws to a close, it does so with a moment of tender, resonant nostalgia that suggests what we look for in the past is here in the present. After all, what is the present moment but the product of history? If Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is not a full-on return to the glory days of the series, it’s a more than respectable nod towards them. Farewell, Dr. Jones, and thanks for letting us tag along on so many adventures.