He chose... poorly
If anything makes me happy about the existence of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a bloated and dour attempt at nostalgia-scraping that primarily demonstrates that there really probably wasn't any artistically valid reason to give the swashbuckling archaeologist his third consecutive "grand farewell tour" in a series that only runs to five films, it's that I have to assume that in the wake of this cinematic pile of mouldering sweat socks, people might finally start cutting some slack to 2008's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I liked that movie quite a bit when it was new, have persisted in liking quite a bit throughout the intervening years, and will continue to defend to all comers as a perfect serviceable extension of the series that is, if nothing else, not significantly worse than either 1984's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and 1989's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (I would, of course, destroy all trace of all four Indiana Jones sequels without a moment's hesitation to preserve the original 1981 Raiders of the Lost Ark, since you can't do much better than being the best popcorn movie of all time). Dial of Destiny feels in certain ways like a deliberate and pointed repudiation of Crystal Skull, in something of the inverse way that Last Crusade pointedly repudiated Temple of Doom. In that case, we had a lighthearted sequel purposefully trying to reverse course on a nasty, violent predecessor by sanding of all the edges. Here, Dial of Destiny seems to be taking stock of the criticisms from 2008 and onwards, and concluding, "hey, so I guess you don't like it when Indiana Jones films are silly and goofy and unrealistic? Okay, then here's an Indiana Jones film that isn't silly or goofy at all. It's absolutely the most morbid, defeated thing you could imagine. It's like trying to stage a popcorn movie during a funeral. Sound good? Good!"
It justifies this in a way that a wearying number of the "all of culture is now various forms of nostalgia" throwbacks of the last several years have done: by presenting itself as a referendum on how old people are less physically and mentally flexible than young people. Which Crystal Skull also did, taking roughly 25 seconds out of its 122-minute running time to genuflect at that idea before going about the business of making an Indiana Jones film. I cannot say exactly how much of Dial of Destiny is built around thesis "fuck me, Harrison Ford sure is old, kind of amazing he's not dead yet, wild how many years it's been since Raiders, doncha think?"; I'm sure I'd be wrong in my estimate that it's approximately three hours, since the whole film is only 154 minutes long, and may God strike me down dead for using the phrase "only 154 minutes long". And honestly, there's quite a bit of the film that's not really so morbidly obsessed with the decrepitude of the ancient Dr. Henry Jones, Jr. as all that. That material is very definitely frontloaded, though, so by the time the movie starts having Indy running and swimming with eels and getting shot in the chest and walking it off and all, it has worked very hard to make us buy into the idea that he can barely maneuver stairs. It's a very weird mixed message.
Anyway, the really glum and dismal part of Dial of Destiny isn't about how Indiana Jones is old, it's about how Indiana Jones is a miserable failure. I don't know what the hell has gotten into Lucasfilm since Disney bought, but this has been their strategy literally 100% of the time with their legacy characters. Remember how Return of the Jedi ended with the triumph over evil and the dawn of a new galactic republic? Haha no, they fucked that all up somehow and Leia's back to being a guerilla fighter of no special importance. And Han Solo is a wretched divorcée and total catastrophe of a father. And Luke is just a warped, bitter old freak. Same with Indy, who gets Han's exact same "you screwed it all up backstory": washed up and alone, his wife having left him because his bad parenting led to the death of their son. It's real punitive what they do do Shia LaBeouf's character from Crystal Skull: at presumably the age of 30 or so, he enlisted to fight in Vietnam and died. I get that people don't like that movie and really don't like that character, but it's still a desperately gloomy way to write him out of the series. Anyway, Indy now lives alone, nursing his alcoholism, in a crappy Manhattan apartment, having traded down his tenured professorship at fake Yale for a CUNY job that he is retiring from on this day in the summer of 1969, with the film hoping that it can contrast the bold new future of a world where men have walked on the moon (Indy's last lecture is interrupted by news footage of the arrival of the Apollo 11 astronauts in New York for their celebratory parade), which also appears to be square in the middle of a semester, but I get that whoever wrote this part of the script (four people broken down into three writing teams get credit, but this was in development for a long time, so who knows where ideas came from) just wanted to hit the "show Indy giving a lecture" beat that most of the other films have hit, so we can further identify what a miserable, used-up shell of a man he is by demonstrating his total inability to connect with his students on any level.
The whole opening of the film, 45 minutes or so I'd guess, is just a constant stream of sour notes. Even before we arrive in 1969, the film gives us a scene-setting prologue in late 1944, when Indy and his archaeologist buddy Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) infiltrate a Nazi train full of looted antiquities, in the chaos accompanying the final stages of the German loss of WWII. Here, they find a brilliant, evil polymath named Dr. Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen, the guy you hire to play a Nazi in a contemporary Hollywood movie when you absolutely do not want to spend even five seconds thinking of a second option), who has part of a marvelous artifact, a mechanical dial called the Antikythera, designed and built in the 3rd Century BCE by the legendary mathematician Archimedes. Long story short, Basil ends up with the Antikythera and Voller ends up dead-or-is-he? And in 1969, we find that he is very definitely not, and in fact has been Operation Paperclipped into the U.S., where under the name "Schmidt" he was one of the key figures in helping NASA win the moon race, but he wants that half-dial back, so he can find the other half, so he can (he thinks) control time itself, to go back to 1939 and prevent Nazi Germany from losing the war. Doesn't really matter, 85% of the film is the usual MacGuffin Hunt (and if I may, it's a lousy MacGuffin: the historical Antikythera, which the movie correctly notes was discovered by fishermen in 1902 (and notes nothing else correct about it), is a scientific curiosity that isn't even a lost relic, and has no meaningful lore attached to it. These films thrive when the object of the quest has an instant sense of mystical awe attached to it: the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, and the lost city of El Dorado were all names to conjure with long before these movies got their hands on them).
Anyway, the WWII prologue already got the film on my bad side: first, because Indiana Jones films don't really have prologues (only Last Crusade, and that one filled a completely different narrative function than this one), and second, becauseYoung Middle-Aged Indiana Jones is being played by Harrison Ford himself, via one of the most unacceptably horrible examples of the AI-driven CGI de-aging technique that all Disney-owned properties have gotten addicted to in the last several years. In stills, it doesn't look wrong, though there would always be the thing that this is only 25 years before the main action - only 13 years before the grizzled and wrinkled Indy of Crystal Skull - but they seem to have used 1980s reference footage of Ford, so Indy looks more like 40 years younger. That's a nitpick. The bigger problem is that in motion, the effect... "hangs", I guess is the word, like his body and head move at a certain pace, his face moves at a marginally but noticeably different pace, and the dialogue is out of sync with the mouth movements by just a tiny enough amount that it's more profoundly uncanny than actually distraction. The biggest problem is that for all the time and money they've spent de-aging Ford's face, they're just having the 80-year-old Ford of today record the dialogue, so this creepily young Indy opens his mouth and out comes the slurry, gravelly sounds of an extremely old, worn-out man, and it's absolute nightmare shit. Meanwhile, this sequence showcases what will prove to be one of the biggest bummers about Dial of Destiny which is that cinematographer Phedon Papamichael has wholeheartedly joined the modern "why bother using lights, it's supposed to look like night!" club, so the whole sequence is impenetrably dark. And there will be lots more where that came from, including an underwater eel attack sequence that's so gloomy - and, for added fun, so messily pieced together by the three-person editing team - that I basically gave up on trying to figure out what was going on, and assume that if the eels killed anybody, they'd reference it in dialogue later.
It would be incredibly difficult for me to put into words what an entirely foul mood the first 45-ish minutes of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny put me in - there's more to it than I've said, I might add. The CGI 1969 New York, light with CGI golden hour, is completely hideous, the action setpieces are very clumsily staged and, again, horrifically edited. And the film racks up a bizarrely inflated body count, making this I think the first time any Indiana Jones film has gone out of its way to kill off side characters that we've been introduced to in a way that makes us like them. It's only a handful of shots out of the whole soggy mess, but it's maybe the specific thing that made me hate this the most: this has always been a sandbox of a franchise, a place for giddy matinee fun, and that's not at all a good with the actual cruelty of the bloodletting here. Anyway, it's a staggeringly unpleasant opening first act, one that only ends up providing about three minutes' worth of exposition (this is a movie that could have very easily started at around the one-hour mark and hit the ground running, or at least walking briskly), and I will concede that the film does get better. I do not think it ever gets good, at least not for more than a couple of lines, or maybe a decently-executed scene. It's a very heavy film throughout, which probably isn't a surprise: the director, James Mangold, has done much I admire, but he's never had the effervescent visual imagination of Steven Spielberg, the best guy to ever do it; frankly, his strength lies pretty squarely in "how well are you copying Sergio Leone right now?", and that's not a good fit (though it does explain why everything is so yellow. His best film, I'd say, is 2017's Logan, which springs from the question "what if we take something as frivolous as a superhero movie and treat it as a mournful tragedy?", which isn't an approach that can keep working or has always worked, but given the superhero film as a genre, I think that level of self-conscious heaviness and morbid iconography is certainly in bounds. Indiana Jones has only ever been fun: even in Temple of Doom, when it's vicious and vile, it has a kind of sneering adolescent gleefulness. Dial of Destiny is petrified of being seen as "silly", I think, which means that no matter how much it goes in for wacky globetrotting shenanigans - to say nothing of its out-and-out zany concept for the climax, which I think would have worked much better if it was zany concept for the last two-thirds - it never wants to be playful. The closest thing I can come up with to an exception is this film's "creepy-crawly" moment, involving foot-long CGI centipedes (among its many sins, Dial of Destiny is the first Indiana Jones film without a single snake, though I think they thought the eels counted), which has the same "ew ew ew!" energy of the bug scenes in Temple of Doom.
Still, even if Mangold is keeping the lid clamped down on how frothy and bright any of this is going to be, the film isn't without its compensations. Harrison Ford is chief among these: it has been decades since he seemed this happy to be in front of a movie camera (it might literally be his best performance since The Fugitive, 30 years ago - at a minimum, he's bringing a lot more life and enthusiasm to the table than he did in Crystal Skull). And John Williams, writing what will almost certainly be the last score of his medium-defining career, has put more effort to this than any of his other legacy sequels. There's nothing here that stands out as specifically good at the level of "Rey's Theme" from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but this otherwise blows away all of his scores for the Sequel Trilogy, and it's a much better farewell to Indiana Jones than the bland literalism of the Crystal Skull score, which feels like it's about 50% remixes of existing cues. The music is simultaneously aware that the legacy of this series is bouncy Saturday fun, but also that this particular film is a little more reserved and reflective than that, and it provides a much stronger, consistent tone and personality than anything in the visuals or story. And the sparing use of the iconic "Marion's Theme" from Raiders hits really hard, including the one scene in the whole movie that I think 100% unambiguously works well as a celebration of this franchise and as enjoyable cinema in its own right. It has the decency to be the very last scene of the film.
And then there's plenty of the film that's just kind of there. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, as Basil's daughter and Indy's goddaughter, now a con artist selling relics on the black market, is relying on her Fleabag shtick like a crutch, and I think her willingness to reduce the character to a pose of acerbic comic cynicism makes it extremely hard for her to sell the character's somewhat unlikely arc towards being sympathetic, which needs a much more careful performance than just "here are gags, I am happy to deliver them as either Very Sarcastic or All The Way Sarcastic". But at least she's a light, funny presence in a film that needs it. Ethann Isidore, as this film's snotty kid sidekick (another thing this franchise doesn't actually need and has historically not benefited from having), is much closer to actually bad, which has a lot to do with a what a complete pill the kid is as written. Mikkelsen is extremely adequate in a role that offered him precisely zero challenges. Once we take away the directing, the cinematography, and the editing, there's not really much in the way of "craftsmanship" to talk about, but I do like the sets and props a lot, and I think this film has an especially fine "lost catacombs full of improbably mechanical traps" location, probably the next moment after the last scene that I think comes perilously close to actually working. But these are all very attentuated, unexciting strengths, and the weaknesses are just overpowering. In terms of Lucasfilm just full-on shitting its pants when trying to complete a Long-Awaited Grand Finale to a series that already had its protagonist literally ride off into the sunset 34 years ago, I would absolutely rather re-watch this than Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. But what a fucking horrible choice to have to make.
Reviews in this series
Raiders of the Lost Ark (Spielberg, 1981)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Spielberg, 1984)
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Spielberg, 1989)
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Spielberg, 2008)
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (Mangold, 2023)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
It justifies this in a way that a wearying number of the "all of culture is now various forms of nostalgia" throwbacks of the last several years have done: by presenting itself as a referendum on how old people are less physically and mentally flexible than young people. Which Crystal Skull also did, taking roughly 25 seconds out of its 122-minute running time to genuflect at that idea before going about the business of making an Indiana Jones film. I cannot say exactly how much of Dial of Destiny is built around thesis "fuck me, Harrison Ford sure is old, kind of amazing he's not dead yet, wild how many years it's been since Raiders, doncha think?"; I'm sure I'd be wrong in my estimate that it's approximately three hours, since the whole film is only 154 minutes long, and may God strike me down dead for using the phrase "only 154 minutes long". And honestly, there's quite a bit of the film that's not really so morbidly obsessed with the decrepitude of the ancient Dr. Henry Jones, Jr. as all that. That material is very definitely frontloaded, though, so by the time the movie starts having Indy running and swimming with eels and getting shot in the chest and walking it off and all, it has worked very hard to make us buy into the idea that he can barely maneuver stairs. It's a very weird mixed message.
Anyway, the really glum and dismal part of Dial of Destiny isn't about how Indiana Jones is old, it's about how Indiana Jones is a miserable failure. I don't know what the hell has gotten into Lucasfilm since Disney bought, but this has been their strategy literally 100% of the time with their legacy characters. Remember how Return of the Jedi ended with the triumph over evil and the dawn of a new galactic republic? Haha no, they fucked that all up somehow and Leia's back to being a guerilla fighter of no special importance. And Han Solo is a wretched divorcée and total catastrophe of a father. And Luke is just a warped, bitter old freak. Same with Indy, who gets Han's exact same "you screwed it all up backstory": washed up and alone, his wife having left him because his bad parenting led to the death of their son. It's real punitive what they do do Shia LaBeouf's character from Crystal Skull: at presumably the age of 30 or so, he enlisted to fight in Vietnam and died. I get that people don't like that movie and really don't like that character, but it's still a desperately gloomy way to write him out of the series. Anyway, Indy now lives alone, nursing his alcoholism, in a crappy Manhattan apartment, having traded down his tenured professorship at fake Yale for a CUNY job that he is retiring from on this day in the summer of 1969, with the film hoping that it can contrast the bold new future of a world where men have walked on the moon (Indy's last lecture is interrupted by news footage of the arrival of the Apollo 11 astronauts in New York for their celebratory parade), which also appears to be square in the middle of a semester, but I get that whoever wrote this part of the script (four people broken down into three writing teams get credit, but this was in development for a long time, so who knows where ideas came from) just wanted to hit the "show Indy giving a lecture" beat that most of the other films have hit, so we can further identify what a miserable, used-up shell of a man he is by demonstrating his total inability to connect with his students on any level.
The whole opening of the film, 45 minutes or so I'd guess, is just a constant stream of sour notes. Even before we arrive in 1969, the film gives us a scene-setting prologue in late 1944, when Indy and his archaeologist buddy Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) infiltrate a Nazi train full of looted antiquities, in the chaos accompanying the final stages of the German loss of WWII. Here, they find a brilliant, evil polymath named Dr. Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen, the guy you hire to play a Nazi in a contemporary Hollywood movie when you absolutely do not want to spend even five seconds thinking of a second option), who has part of a marvelous artifact, a mechanical dial called the Antikythera, designed and built in the 3rd Century BCE by the legendary mathematician Archimedes. Long story short, Basil ends up with the Antikythera and Voller ends up dead-or-is-he? And in 1969, we find that he is very definitely not, and in fact has been Operation Paperclipped into the U.S., where under the name "Schmidt" he was one of the key figures in helping NASA win the moon race, but he wants that half-dial back, so he can find the other half, so he can (he thinks) control time itself, to go back to 1939 and prevent Nazi Germany from losing the war. Doesn't really matter, 85% of the film is the usual MacGuffin Hunt (and if I may, it's a lousy MacGuffin: the historical Antikythera, which the movie correctly notes was discovered by fishermen in 1902 (and notes nothing else correct about it), is a scientific curiosity that isn't even a lost relic, and has no meaningful lore attached to it. These films thrive when the object of the quest has an instant sense of mystical awe attached to it: the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, and the lost city of El Dorado were all names to conjure with long before these movies got their hands on them).
Anyway, the WWII prologue already got the film on my bad side: first, because Indiana Jones films don't really have prologues (only Last Crusade, and that one filled a completely different narrative function than this one), and second, because
It would be incredibly difficult for me to put into words what an entirely foul mood the first 45-ish minutes of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny put me in - there's more to it than I've said, I might add. The CGI 1969 New York, light with CGI golden hour, is completely hideous, the action setpieces are very clumsily staged and, again, horrifically edited. And the film racks up a bizarrely inflated body count, making this I think the first time any Indiana Jones film has gone out of its way to kill off side characters that we've been introduced to in a way that makes us like them. It's only a handful of shots out of the whole soggy mess, but it's maybe the specific thing that made me hate this the most: this has always been a sandbox of a franchise, a place for giddy matinee fun, and that's not at all a good with the actual cruelty of the bloodletting here. Anyway, it's a staggeringly unpleasant opening first act, one that only ends up providing about three minutes' worth of exposition (this is a movie that could have very easily started at around the one-hour mark and hit the ground running, or at least walking briskly), and I will concede that the film does get better. I do not think it ever gets good, at least not for more than a couple of lines, or maybe a decently-executed scene. It's a very heavy film throughout, which probably isn't a surprise: the director, James Mangold, has done much I admire, but he's never had the effervescent visual imagination of Steven Spielberg, the best guy to ever do it; frankly, his strength lies pretty squarely in "how well are you copying Sergio Leone right now?", and that's not a good fit (though it does explain why everything is so yellow. His best film, I'd say, is 2017's Logan, which springs from the question "what if we take something as frivolous as a superhero movie and treat it as a mournful tragedy?", which isn't an approach that can keep working or has always worked, but given the superhero film as a genre, I think that level of self-conscious heaviness and morbid iconography is certainly in bounds. Indiana Jones has only ever been fun: even in Temple of Doom, when it's vicious and vile, it has a kind of sneering adolescent gleefulness. Dial of Destiny is petrified of being seen as "silly", I think, which means that no matter how much it goes in for wacky globetrotting shenanigans - to say nothing of its out-and-out zany concept for the climax, which I think would have worked much better if it was zany concept for the last two-thirds - it never wants to be playful. The closest thing I can come up with to an exception is this film's "creepy-crawly" moment, involving foot-long CGI centipedes (among its many sins, Dial of Destiny is the first Indiana Jones film without a single snake, though I think they thought the eels counted), which has the same "ew ew ew!" energy of the bug scenes in Temple of Doom.
Still, even if Mangold is keeping the lid clamped down on how frothy and bright any of this is going to be, the film isn't without its compensations. Harrison Ford is chief among these: it has been decades since he seemed this happy to be in front of a movie camera (it might literally be his best performance since The Fugitive, 30 years ago - at a minimum, he's bringing a lot more life and enthusiasm to the table than he did in Crystal Skull). And John Williams, writing what will almost certainly be the last score of his medium-defining career, has put more effort to this than any of his other legacy sequels. There's nothing here that stands out as specifically good at the level of "Rey's Theme" from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but this otherwise blows away all of his scores for the Sequel Trilogy, and it's a much better farewell to Indiana Jones than the bland literalism of the Crystal Skull score, which feels like it's about 50% remixes of existing cues. The music is simultaneously aware that the legacy of this series is bouncy Saturday fun, but also that this particular film is a little more reserved and reflective than that, and it provides a much stronger, consistent tone and personality than anything in the visuals or story. And the sparing use of the iconic "Marion's Theme" from Raiders hits really hard, including the one scene in the whole movie that I think 100% unambiguously works well as a celebration of this franchise and as enjoyable cinema in its own right. It has the decency to be the very last scene of the film.
And then there's plenty of the film that's just kind of there. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, as Basil's daughter and Indy's goddaughter, now a con artist selling relics on the black market, is relying on her Fleabag shtick like a crutch, and I think her willingness to reduce the character to a pose of acerbic comic cynicism makes it extremely hard for her to sell the character's somewhat unlikely arc towards being sympathetic, which needs a much more careful performance than just "here are gags, I am happy to deliver them as either Very Sarcastic or All The Way Sarcastic". But at least she's a light, funny presence in a film that needs it. Ethann Isidore, as this film's snotty kid sidekick (another thing this franchise doesn't actually need and has historically not benefited from having), is much closer to actually bad, which has a lot to do with a what a complete pill the kid is as written. Mikkelsen is extremely adequate in a role that offered him precisely zero challenges. Once we take away the directing, the cinematography, and the editing, there's not really much in the way of "craftsmanship" to talk about, but I do like the sets and props a lot, and I think this film has an especially fine "lost catacombs full of improbably mechanical traps" location, probably the next moment after the last scene that I think comes perilously close to actually working. But these are all very attentuated, unexciting strengths, and the weaknesses are just overpowering. In terms of Lucasfilm just full-on shitting its pants when trying to complete a Long-Awaited Grand Finale to a series that already had its protagonist literally ride off into the sunset 34 years ago, I would absolutely rather re-watch this than Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. But what a fucking horrible choice to have to make.
Reviews in this series
Raiders of the Lost Ark (Spielberg, 1981)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Spielberg, 1984)
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Spielberg, 1989)
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Spielberg, 2008)
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (Mangold, 2023)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
