Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny aspires to be a satisfying final chapter for Indiana Jones character.  You may remember that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull basically did the exact same thing back in 2008.  That entry introduced a son of Indiana Jones who presumably would take over the series for his father.  Unfortunately, even though that movie was financially successful, it was not well received by the fans.  Alas, the torch was not passed and fifteen years later Harrison Ford is back one last time to close the book on Indiana Jones for good.

In order to provide backstory for the events that take place in this movie, Ford’s face was de-aged for a lengthy sequence at the beginning of the movie.  The computer graphics are convincing for the most part, although Indiana’s voice doesn’t sound like a (younger) man in his forties.  In 1945, Indiana once again dons a Nazi uniform, this time intent on stealing the Lance of Longinus from Nazis treasure hunters on a train bound for Berlin.  The Nazis stole it from a French castle, and If you’ve watched the trailer, you already know that the movie features a line  about how this is the essence of capitalism.  (It’s too cute to be clever, or whatever the writers had intended.)  Indiana is accompanied by Basil (Toby Jones), a desk-riding colleague who looks and acts like a stereotypical archaeologist–short, rumpled, bald, easily frightened, can’t throw a punch, etc.  Basil would prefer to explore the world from a library, but when you make friends with Indiana Jones, you better be prepared to get your hands dirty.

After quickly deducing that the Lance is a fake, Indiana rescues Basil from the clutches of a Nazi general who loves to beat up helpless English types.  Basil tells Indiana that they can’t leave because a German scientist named Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) has found half of an ancient device known as the Dial of Archimedes.  Basil knows that if the Nazis were to get their hands on the other half of the device, it would enable them to travel through time and be unstoppable.  (Don’t worry, the movie eventually explains what the Dial is all about.)  Of course, Indiana won’t let that happen, and at the sound of the horns on the soundtrack he manages to steal the Dial before the train crashes.  Silly Nazis. They never learn, do they?

Twenty-five years later, a much older Indiana Jones is set to retire as a professor.  His students are bored with his dusty lectures and astronaut fever has swept the nation.  (The jokes on them, because in seven years landing on the moon will be old hat and everyone will be lining up to see Tutankhamun.)  Basil’s daughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) appears and wants to know what Indiana knows about the Dial.  Given that she’s Indiana’s goddaughter, he’s willing to oblige.  To his surprise, she’s only interested in the Dial for what she can sell it for.  Helena doesn’t know that she’s being tailed by Voller, the very same German scientist who Indiana took the Dial from all those years ago.   When Helena grabs the dial and dashes off, Indiana is left to deal with Voller’s henchmen and I think the CIA.  (The US government allows Voller to do whatever he wants because he helped them win the Space Race.  He can kill innocent civilians with impunity, which is a nice perk.)

Indiana avoids capture and makes his way to Tangier, where Helena has plans to sell the Dial to a group of unsavory types who buy ancient artifacts to put them on their mantle.  Indiana disrupts the proceedings and he, Helena, her young thief Teddy (Ethann Isidore) and Helena’s ex-fiance (!) proceed to go on a merry chase after Voller and the Dial.  (Teddy comes from the Short Round school of young sidekicks, except he has zero charisma.)  From there, the group heads to the Aegean Sea to find a tablet that identifies the location of Archemedes’ tomb.  The tomb contains the other half of the dial.  (All of this reminded me of Raiders of the Lost Ark, an exponentially better movie than this one.)  When the two halves of the Dial are united, the device provides the coordinates to “fissures in time”.  What this means exactly is eventually revealed in the movie’s last act, which repeatedly surprised me because every time I thought I knew what the Dial did, I was wrong.  The end of the movie includes a welcome cameo that I won’t spoil for you here.  Suffice to say that it went a long way towards making me like the movie a lot more than it deserved.

Dial of Destiny feels like a course-correction after the carefree and goofy atmosphere that pervaded Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.  While this movie doesn’t make the same mistakes as the last one, it makes new ones that nearly sabotage the entire thing.  The movie adopts a grim tone that the series never had, at times pretending to be a spy thriller instead of a rousing, family-friendly adventure.  The action sequences, one of the hallmarks of the series, are suitably chaotic but filmed and edited to the point where they are impossible to follow.  Director James Mangold had a much better grasp of the action in Ford versus Ferrari and Logan than this movie.  I was annoyed by Waller-Bridge’s character, not because her acting is different from what she’s done before, but because it didn’t work in the context of this movie.  She’s more of a gadfly than girl Friday, and her performance was an irritant until the movie decided it’s time for her to be nice.  The purpose of the Dial confused me even though the movie stops to explain it repeatedly.  Fortunately, DoD has Harrison Ford and all of the nostalgia that comes along with him playing Indiana Jones.  I’ve always enjoyed seeing him in this role, and no amount of criticism would have dissuaded me from seeing this movie.  There are times when the movie’s action sequences captured the chaotic fun that was Spielberg’s trademark, and I wish Mangold had relied more on practical effects.  The movie wasn’t as good as I had hoped it would be, but I enjoyed it anyway.  The only compelling reason to see it is if you are a completest.  Otherwise, feel free to keep believing that the series ended with The Last Crusade.  Mildly recommended.

Analysis

I had very modest expectations for Dial of Destiny.  Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull remains the only movie in the series I’ve seen only once.  I can watch the first three entries anytime, but the last entry bored me.  Not even seeing a Nazified Cate Blanchett tempted me to watch it again before seeing Dial of Destiny.  I hoped that the transition of the franchise from Spielberg and Lucas to director James Mangold would give the movie an infusion of energy.  It has, albeit in ways that make this final entry unwatchable at times.  The best I can say about DoD is that it doesn’t suffer from the kookiness and lackadaisical air that sank Crystal Skull.  Instead, DoD makes different mistakes that feel out-of-place with the previous entries of the series.  That those mistakes don’t completely sabotage the movie is a testament to the two things this movie has going for it: nostalgia and Harrison Ford.  Without those ingredients, I would not have enjoyed this movie at all.

I don’t consider myself to be an obsessive fan of the first three Indiana Jones movies.  I’ve seen them many times and enjoy them as much today as when I first saw them in a movie theater.  I’ve never felt the urge to nit-pick them.  DoD, like Crystal Skull, feels ready-made to be torn apart by professional and amateur critics alike.  I suppose this can be expected when you make another sequel to three of the most successful blockbuster movies of all time.  Those movies set the bar so high that any follow-up would be seen as lacking.  Even Spielberg couldn’t pull it off with Crystal Skull, and wisely chose to make The Fabelmans instead of another mediocre sequel.

As I mentioned above, I enjoyed this movie, even though it is far from perfect.  There are many aspects of it that just didn’t work for me.  However, the sentimentality I felt while watching Ford as Indiana Jones for the last time made me more forgiving of the experience than I would have been otherwise.  There are moments in this film where the nostalgia of it all won me over in spite of what was going on in the movie.  Nostalgia isn’t the sole reason why I recommended seeing this movie, but I can’t deny that it was a significant factor in my decision.  As such, I thought it best to break up my analysis into two categories: what worked and what didn’t.  Some elements fall into both categories, a reflection of how I wish the movie had done certain things differently or made different choices.  If you’re looking for reasons to see the movie, I suggest stopping after the first part.  If you’re looking for reasons to not see the movie, read until the end.

Pros

Harrison Ford

I wanted to see him in this role one more time even though I was disappointed with the last entry.  His performance in DoD is his swansong with this character, and I wanted to see the movie on that basis alone.  Ford actually is very good in this movie.  The scene where he explains to Helena why his marriage to Marian fell apart was incredibly moving and touching.  I wish Ford had more moments in his career like that one, where he could show his range.  That he’s able to imbue a scene with so much sadness speaks to how great an actor he is.

Aside from that scene, he plays a grumpy old man well enough.  As Professor Jones, he gets several moments to exude his genuine excitement about history, particularly Archimedes.  At the end of the film, when Indiana says he wants to stay and watch Syracuse get sacked by the Romans because he would finally get a chance to witness history being made with his own eyes, I believed him.  

I admire that Ford chose to give an honest picture of himself in this movie.  After initially appearing with his face de-aged by several decades, he’s shown as his present-day self with his shirt off.  Even though Ford’s body looks just like I’d expect an eighty year-old man’s body to look, the image shocked me because I keep forgetting that Ford is an old man.  That notion didn’t cross my mind when he appeared as Han Solo in the Star Wars sequels because his face has aged gently.  Ford would probably shrug off how the movie uses a practical and efficient way of conveying his character’s age.  I found it courageous.  Until artificial intelligence gives us an AI-driven Indiana Jones movie, I’m glad Ford was able to close the book on another of his iconic characters on his terms.

Indiana Jones

The fedora.  The bullwhip.  The leather jacket.  The John Williams score.  When the character and the music come together in a movie, it’s magic that few blockbusters can touch.  Even in a muddled movie like this one, every time Indiana Jones jumped into action and the trumpets blared I felt an adrenaline rush.

A De-Aged Hero

Harrison Ford was de-aged for over twenty minutes of his screen time in the movie.  The effect works for the most part, except for those moments when he’s shown in profile.  (In those shots I thought it looked like he was wearing a mask.)  I admit that I got a kick out of seeing Ford as Indiana Jones was forty years ago.

The First Action Sequence

The beginning of the movie is devoted to an event that had not been mentioned in Indiana Jones lore.  At the tail-end of WWII, Indiana Jones and his friend Basil attempt to rescue the Lance of Longinus from the Nazis.  Of all the action sequences in the movie, this is the only one that conjures the thrill of the original trilogy.  Indiana runs around in a Nazi uniform, benefits from rogue machinery (an anti-aircraft gun) that accidentally takes out the Nazi troops, and concludes with a fistfight on the roof of the train between Indiana and the Nazi.  The train not falling into the water below was a nice touch, leaving hope that some of the antiquities survived.  As opening sequences go, this one was competently made and rousing fun.

The Second Action Sequence

Watching Indiana Jones elude capture on horseback, especially when he rides into and through the subway, was great.  I laughed when he told the lady, “Hold my horse.”  She probably rode it home.

Humorous Moments

I’m not sure if the filmmakers intended it to be funny, but I laughed at seeing a traditionalist like Indiana Jones making himself a cup of instant coffee.  The preceding scene where he bangs a baseball bat on his neighbor’s door and tells him to turn the music down was a classic old man grumpy move.  The first act of the movie is the funniest by far and worked the best in my opinion.

The Dial

After Crystal Skull’s weird departure into UFO and alien lore, I liked that the plot focused on an historical device that was not rooted in Christian mythology for a change.  I had never heard of the Dial before and appreciated learning about it.

Effective Callbacks

A movie like DoD was going to have some callbacks; the only question was how many there would be.  Fortunately, there were far less than I thought there would be, and they all worked.  I liked how Professor Jones was shown having moved on from the chalkboard to transparencies and a projector.  I was genuinely happy to see Sallah and Marian again.  I was also surprised that the movie chose to acknowledge The Temple of Doom several times, including a scene with too many bugs.  

Toby Jones

I always look forward to seeing Jones in a movie, because I never know what to expect from him.  His role as Basil is similar to Denholm Elliott’s in The Last Crusade in that he’s another desk-bound character who is completely helpless as he leaves his office.  Unlike Elliott’s Brody, Basil isn’t on hand to provide comic relief.  Instead, he gives the story meaning through his obsession with the Dial.  That he’s able to do this in just a handful of scenes speaks to how great an actor Jones is.  I wish he had been in the movie more.

Popular music

The marketing department made a strange choice when they mixed The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” with the Indiana Jones theme.  How did Indiana Jones become associated with the Devil?  It came off as someone trying to pull off a Scorsese needle drop with a song they didn’t understand.

Thankfully, the movie used The Beatles “Magical Mystery Tour” instead, which fits the movie in spirit if not in tone.  Hearing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” in the background was also a nice touch, given that there was a parade for the Apollo astronauts happening that day.  I’m guessing that paying for the rights to use these songs wasn’t cheap, so to the producers and Disney I say,  “Thanks!”

The Ending

At one point Indiana Jones tells Helena that he’s seen things she wouldn’t believe.  Well, how about traveling through a fissure in time and arriving at 212 BC to witness the siege of Syracuse?  Some have described this turn of events as a Hail Mary or an out of left field turn of events, but I thought it made sense in terms of the history of the Dial, and how it gave Indiana a chance to meet a historical figure he admired.  Of all the decisions in the movie to do things differently than before, this one worked.

Cons

Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Helena (a.k.a. Wombat)

I really liked Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag.  I have no doubt that she was cast as Helena in DoD as a result of her hot streak in the preceding years, which included her work on the critically acclaimed Killing Eve.  The filmmakers probably considered her as being a perfect fit for the role as the feisty female sidekick, bringing a much-needed modern edge to a movie led by an eighty year-old actor.  Not only would she keep Indiana Jones on his toes with every pointed barb she’d lob at him, but the audience as well.  Regardless of the intent, Waller-Bridge’s performance just didn’t work for me.

Waller-Bridge plays Helena as a family-friendly version of Fleabag, which severely limits what she can do beyond being a smirking irritant.  Calling Indiana a graverobber may technically be true, but isn’t funny.  Helena has some choice words for capitalism and the patriarchy throughout the movie, which effectively puts her at cross-purposes with the material.  The machinery she rages against is the Indiana Jones legend itself.  Perhaps there is a way for a character like Helena to lob criticisms at Indiana Jones and sell them as comedy, but Waller-Bridge isn’t that actress.  She’s all sharp elbows where a softer touch was needed.  Felicity Jones could have pulled it off, or maybe Alicia Vikander.  Waller-Bridge is at her best when she draws blood, but DoD only gives her a dull knife to work with.

Waller-Bridge’s performance aside, I had a difficult time understanding Helena’s motivation.  She has to steal the Dial from Indiana so that she can take it to Tangier and sell it to pay off her debt to someone she was engaged to?  If Indiana had actually destroyed the dial, what was she going to do then?  Why must she sell the dial at a hotel connected to the man she jilted?  How did she go from being a distraught daughter watching her father go insane over the Dial to a cynical adult selling antiquities to support her lifestyle?  Why does she have so much animosity towards Indiana Jones when he actually tried to help her father?

Instead of having Helena be motivated purely by greed, the filmmakers could have had her reach out to Indiana to restore her father’s name.  Instead of wanting to sell the Dial, she wanted to find it, use it and to prove to the world that he wasn’t crazy.  This would have eliminated the need for the ex-fiance and the plot would have worked exactly the same.

Amazingly, Helena becomes much more likable at roughly the midpoint of the movie, when she goes from being contemptible of Indiana Jones to helping him.  The movie implies that her about-face was due to Indiana’s personal confession about his failed marriage.  While I understand how that revelation would change her feelings towards Indiana, it conveniently came at a point when the character was becoming a drag on the story and needed to become likable.  To paraphrase Professor Jones Sr., saddling Indiana Jones with someone neither he nor the audience likes for two and a half hours would have been intolerable.  Helena’s abrupt change of heart achieves that goal, even though I didn’t buy her change of heart.

Age is Just a Number

I mentioned above that I give Ford a lot of credit for letting the audience see him as an eighty year-old man.  However, after acknowledging how he physically has aged, the rest of the movie pretends that Indiana Jones can do everything as if he were in his forties.  Even though he’s been a professor for thirty-five years, he can still ride a horse, throw a punch and run around like he did in his heyday.  At one point he backhanded a bad guy, which should have broken every bone in his hand.  I hate to say it, but Indiana Jones would definitely have had osteoporosis and wouldn’t have been able to do 5% of what he does in this movie.  Of course, nobody would see DoD if it turned out to be a live-action version of Pixar’s Up, but for the movie to make a point of showing us how Indiana has aged and then ignore it from that point on was a glaring problem for me.

Body Count

The casual bloodshed in DoD was completely unnecessary and left a bad taste in my mouth.  I don’t remember how many innocent bystanders were killed in the previous movies, or if any were killed at all.  Regardless, when Voller’s henchmen shot and killed two university employees, it struck me as cold and uncaring.  Having a character casually kill people because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time is an efficient way to tell us that this guy is a bad guy, but its something I would expect from a spy movie and not an Indiana Jones movie.  In the previous four movies, Spielberg had made a point of showing many bad guys being killed but rarely the good guys.  The notion of collateral damage was rarely broached, if at all.  The murder of CIA agent Mason shocked me because when the series finally introduced an African American character, it promptly killed her off before she could play a role in the story.  Too bad the writers didn’t have the guts to let her be Indiana’s side and kill off Wombat instead.  

Frenetic Action

The Indiana Jones movies are known for their elaborate action sequences.  DoD begins with three, the first two I liked even though they were shot and edited more frantically than in the  previous movies.  Spielberg was a master at staging action sequences, and one of the joys of his Indiana Jones movies was being able to marvel at how well they were designed and how realistic they looked.  DoD doesn’t have any of that.  The action sequences in this movie felt like they were entirely constructed with CGI, making them look fake like most blockbusters that have come out in the last twenty years..

The third action sequence set in Tangier is unnecessarily complex and left me exhausted.  Indiana and Helena pursuing Voller’s car in separate tuk-tuk’s, while Helena’s ex-fiance (or the son of her ex-fiance?) follows her.  Mangold frames the action so claustrophobically that I never got a good sense where the participants were at any point in time.  I suspect this was due to Ford not being able to do more of his own stunts as he had in the past.  The result is that I never believed for a second that Indiana and Helena were actually driving through a busy street.  Instead, they looked like they were filmed against green screens the entire time, with the background achieving a Flintstones-level of blurry sameness.  Even worse, the sequence includes an ongoing argument between Indiana and Helena.  The intent was to give Helena a way to explain her motivation, but all her bickering with Indiana does is make a chaotic sequence even harder to follow.

No Joy of Discovery

DoD often feels rushed to the point of restlessness.  The previous movies always had a moment or two when Indiana Jones (and the audience) were able to take a moment or two to revel in his discovery.  There are no such moments In DoD.  The scene where Indiana locates the graphikos tablet is shot in a murky darkness that quickly becomes filled with CGI eels.  Later, when Indiana and Helena discover Archimedes tomb, he doesn’t get the chance to appreciate the moment.  Instead, the focus immediately shifts to the anachronistic items in the tomb itself.  

The Dial

While I like how the movie built the story around an actual historical item, the purpose of the item is so complex that I wasn’t sure what it did until after the end of the movie.  First I thought it was a device that enabled time-travel.  Then it’s described as a device that predicts when fissures in time appear that make it possible to travel through time.  In the end, it’s revealed to be a “return to sender” device that always takes someone from the future back to the time when Syracuse was under siege.  This was a far cry when the object of desire was the arc or the grail.

Miscellaneous things that didn’t make sense

I could probably go as insane as Basil pointing out everything in the movie that didn’t add up to me, but here’s a short list:

• What power did the Nazis believe the Lance of Longinus would give them?
• Why does Basil try to save the Lance of Longinus after Indiana tells him that it’s a fake?
• How does Voller survive his collision and fall from the train without a limp or a scratch?
• If Basil was so concerned with the Dial getting into the wrong hands, why didn’t he smash it himself?
• Why was the US government allowing Voller to search for the Dial in the first place?  Doesn’t the government have all of the leverage in their relationship?
• Why did Voller tell the African American man who delivers the room service that the US didn’t win the war?  Was he implying that he would fix that once he has the dial?  Or was he saying this to be cryptic?
• Why bring John Rhys-Davies back to recreate his role of Sallah when he’s only in two scenes?
• Why does Indiana say Sallah is too old to go on an adventure when that is exactly what he’s doing and he’s eighty?
• Why does Helena need to go to a hotel owned by the fiance she jilted to sell the dial?  Is that really the only place she can sell an expensive stolen artifact?
• Was the son Jones mentions to Helena the character Shia LeBeuf played in Crystal Skull?
• Why introduce Antonio Banderas, only to kill him off so quickly?
• When Teddy causes Hauke to drown, why does nobody notice?
• Why does Voller take Indiana, the only person around who could feasibly stop him, onto the plane and into the fissure?  (It’s a Dr. Evil level of hubris, for sure.)
• Why does Klaber (the normal-sized henchman) shoot at the Romans while the plane is crashing?
• Why does Voller’s plane have only one spare parachute?
• Is the only reason for Teddy’s existence is to provide Helena and Indiana a way back into the fissure?
• Does Indiana really want to watch Syracuse eventually get sacked and Archimedes die?