The times, they are a-changin’. Way back in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Henry Jones’s archaeology students batted their lashes at him so that he could read the messages inked on their eyelids. In Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the undergrads can barely keep their eyes open during his lectures. The former heartthrob has become just another boring old academic, droning his notes into the void. The year is 1969, and, having parlayed his decades of death-defying adventures into a tenured position at a small New York City college, our hero seems resigned—if not content—to drift into retirement and, with it, obsolescence. To paraphrase the man himself: With this many miles on his odometer, Dr. Jones belongs in a museum. Or at least a nice, quiet place where he doesn’t have to listen to his downstairs neighbors blasting Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Indiana Jones, Meet the Beatles—and while you’re at it, how about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin? The kids are partying to celebrate the return of the Apollo 11 astronauts from the moon, a giant leap forward for American alpha masculinity. Sable fedoras and whips are out, and helmets are in. Cue David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on the soundtrack as the subtext gets heavy and the music licensing budget goes through the roof. For most of its first act, The Dial of Destiny lays on the man-out-of-time shtick pretty thick, emphasizing its hero’s frustration and frailty in a moment he probably never thought he’d live to see. It’s the same idea that was already developed in 2008’s Steven Spielberg–directed, Cold War–set Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: that Indiana Jones will always be as much of a relic as the fantastic objects he’s spent a lifetime trying (and failing) to possess.
The Ringer’s Streaming Guide
There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV.
Crystal Skull had one unforgettable image—Indy silhouetted against a billowing mushroom cloud—and a lot of Erich von Daniken–flavored goofiness about our civilization’s debt to a sect of ancient extraterrestrials. Whether Crystal Skull is better or worse than its abject reputation, Dial director James Mangold has a mandate to erase any memories of it, neuralyzer-style. For example: Anybody hoping for a reunion between Indy and his illegitimate son, Mutt, will be disappointed to learn that the poor bastard died on his way back to his home planet. (More accurately, he died fighting in Vietnam, breaking his mother’s heart in the process and therefore writing Marion out of the proceedings as well.) The Indiana Jones franchise’s tendency to hit reset after unleashing torrents of swirling, near-apocalyptic magic on the world has become a running joke, dating back to Raiders’ creepy, Wellesian coda, when a weapon of mass destruction is boxed up for future consideration by the U.S. military. Still, considering Dial’s space-race subplot, which draws on real-world collaborations between ex-Nazis and NASA officials, it’s odd that none of the characters even mention aliens this time around—an indication, perhaps, that Crystal Skull’s explicitly Spielbergian iconography was one close encounter too many.
Conquering space is easy, as Dial’s villain, the repatriated but not rehabilitated German genius Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), explains. His diabolical plan has something to do with time, specifically an ancient contraption called the Antikythera, which was supposedly designed by Archimedes and reputedly possesses powers bordering on the supernatural. An extended pre-credits sequence set during the fall of Berlin in 1945 introduces the device as a vintage MacGuffin, slipping and sliding around on the roof of a moving train as a de-aged Harrison Ford tries to get a grip, aided by his bumbling British pal Basil Shaw (Toby Jones, knowingly channeling Denholm Elliott’s plummy sidekick Marcus Brody).
The de-aging CGI is convincing enough, and yet the entire prologue, which runs close to 20 breathless minutes before exhaling, has a sweaty, try-hard quality. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it doesn’t bring out the best in Mangold, a director who’s already proved himself a solid, muscular genre director on his own terms with films as varied as 3:10 to Yuma, Logan, and Ford v Ferrari. There’s something to be said for having respect for one’s source material—“I always thought if I were second or third best to one of the greatest films of all time, I’d be good,” Mangold said, effectively admitting the daunting height of the bar before him—and the problem isn’t that Dial’s trying to honor Spielberg’s example. It’s that it seems determined to copy it.
The train sequence plays like a sophisticated but literal-minded AI program’s attempt to remake the best parts of Raiders and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, except with those films’ palpably tactile, flesh-and-blood stunts supplanted by airbrushed virtual choreography. The weightlessness of the whole affair is part of the problem. When Spielberg assembled an all-star crew of old-school stuntpeople to pull off Raiders’ greatest—and most brutal—bit of slapstick craziness, it was meant as a loving homage to Hollywood’s ancient past, and that romance was heightened by a sense of bone-breaking risk. Now, blood and sweat mix with pixels, and no matter how loud the soundtrack gets, there’s less at stake. Even the brief burst of John Williams’s triumphal theme at a key moment feels ersatz: an echo of glory days that Mangold and his army of skilled, detail-oriented craftspeople can only chase.
Things do improve in the 1969 scenes, partly because Mangold is able to relax and work up a nice comic rhythm, and partly because Ford finds a way to channel his trademark ambivalence into the role without souring the proceedings completely. Of the three legacy characters the now-octogenarian star has resurrected over the past half decade plus—a list that includes Han Solo and Blade Runner’s Rick Deckard—Indiana Jones is probably the one who’s squirreled away the most goodwill. He isn’t a member of an intergalactic ensemble or an antihero, and—again, with the possible exception of Crystal Skull—he’s never shown up in a movie that alienated its core fan base. Fittingly for a man obsessed with posterity, he endures, and you get the feeling that even the famously spoilsporty Ford loves having him as an alter ego. The reticence he displays in Dial as the character swings—slowly, with grumpy vibes and creaky knees—into action is in keeping with Ford’s performances over the years. The fact is that Indiana Jones has never wanted to fight, and the movies are typically at their best when he’s reluctantly peeling himself off the canvas or running in the opposite direction.
At this point, there are only so many different ways to get Indiana Jones from point A to point B—planes, trains, automobiles, horses—and only so many different dramatic configurations for his character. Where Crystal Skull tried to replicate the dynamic of Last Crusade by playing the protagonist off a younger, more modern action-hero model—the same way Ford once bounced off Sean Connery—the creators behind Dial of Destiny have given Indy a different kind of foil. During one of his classes, he’s approached by a younger woman who can recite his lecture word for word: Basil’s adult daughter, Helena Shaw, played with a springy, thoroughly modern energy by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. We’re told that the pair haven’t seen each other since Helena was 12, when Indy was trying to comfort her mentally deteriorating dad, and also that she has her own reasons for wanting to retrieve the Antikythera—mercenary ones that override her scholarly background and affection and respect for her godfather, whom she’s not above using (and gently abusing) en route to her goal.
If we don’t count her voice-only role in Solo: A Star Wars Story, the film is Waller-Bridge’s blockbuster debut, and she acquits herself well: She has some of the same intrepid screwball momentum as Karen Allen in Raiders, except tricked out with bursts of brainiac academese. Helena is a fast-talking know-it-all with no scruples or off switch, and her spontaneity goes a long way toward greasing the gears of Dial’s almost parodically mechanical plot, which keeps her (and a resourceful street-urchin kid) on the run with Indy, with Voller and his motley crew of CIA turncoats in hot pursuit. Considering that the erstwhile creator of Fleabag was brought in to punch up the repartee of the last James Bond movie, it’s a bit surprising that Waller-Bridge didn’t get a screenwriting credit on Dial. It’s also a bit disappointing: There aren’t exactly a lot of great lines here.
“It’s called capitalism,” Helena sighs at one point after both Voller and Indy accuse her of stealing what was already stolen property—that’s about as good as the dialogue gets. (Anyone looking for deeper sociology amid all the requisite mumbo jumbo about fate and predestination will be disappointed.) It’s arguable that there are maybe one too many tricky hot-potato artifact exchanges in Dial and not enough downtime to make Mikkelsen a truly memorable villain, the way he was in Casino Royale, where he made the most of “having the face of a gentleman child strangler.” But then, a certain relentlessness is the hallmark of the series, and most of Dial’s set pieces are memorable instead of just functional. That includes Indy’s first extended underwater excursion, which, among other things, dredges up a pretty good running joke: Why’d it have to be eels?
There’s no doubt that, at two hours and 34 minutes, Dial is too long, and yet without its inflated running time, it probably couldn’t justify its genuinely epic—and preposterously satisfying—final act, which succeeds in evoking the earlier films’ sense of awe by committing to the science-as-magic conceit and taking it all the way back to the primal scene. That it’s all a little silly is a compliment: More movies could stand to take this sort of big swing, which brings the series closer to the edge of The Twilight Zone than ever before. With greatness squarely in his sights, however, Mangold blinks, blowing past a potentially great—and sobering—end point for a sentimental coda that also reeks, however faintly, of it-ain’t-over-till-it’s-over cynicism. It’s ultimately a dodge of the gravitas Mangold brought to Logan, with its mournful, Shane-ish ending, and the wrong kind of affirmation of Indy’s durability. Depending on how you take it, the final image of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny suggests a series that’s either hanging things up for good or just keeping it all within arm’s reach for the next inevitable cash in. Let the guy rest already. He’s earned it.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.