This time it’s the years, not the mileage which weigh heavily on Henry Jones Jr
For a film whose main – perhaps even sole – selling point is nostalgia, it’s an odd choice that it chooses not to dissolve from the still-present Paramount Logo into a diegetic mountain, instead substituting a Lucasfilm to locking mechanism cross-fade. Odd because there’s plenty of opportunity in the setting to have done it and odder because it fritters away a little bit of goodwill at the beginning of something which needs all the goodwill it can get if it’s going to succeed.
Of course, before INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY begins in earnest, we have the supporting feature INDIANA JONES AND THE UNCANNY VALLEY where a digitally de-aged Ford mixes it up with some end-of-the-war Nazis who are trying to flee with Hitler’s horde of supernatural loot. The digital de-ageing is something of a mixed bag, occasionally looking amazing but more often teetering like an out-of-control Pankot minecart on the edge of falling into POLAR EXPRESS depths of unreality. Of course, the illusion is hard to maintain for long because no matter the digitally enhanced physicality, there’s no denying something in the voice has gone. Like Patrick Stewart’s current Picard, there’s an unmistakable (and perfectly understandable) frailty in the vocal cords that strikes a discordant note with the youthful artifice.
The inclusion of the Spear of Destiny in this pre-adventure is a sly nod to its oft-mooted potential as an Indiana Jones MacGuffin in the past but apart from showing us an in-his-prime Indiana Jones, there’s little it adds to the film that couldn’t have been included later. The similar preamble in INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE at least served to introduce Indy’s father who would go on to play a major part in the plot of the movie. Here, it does nothing but start things with a bang, albeit a murky and occasionally hard-to-follow one.
It’s once we return to the 1969 “present” that you start to get a sense of what probably attracted Harrison Ford to pull on his fedora once again as we’re introduced to an Indiana Jones whose passions are spent. Fortune and glory are far behind him, he’s estranged (again) from Marion and even teaching offers him little joy. There are no flirty eyelid-messaging students in Doctor Jones classes now, just bored, disengaged students marking time while their professor goes through the motions. Thematically, INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY gives us a much stronger and more authentic character arc for its hero than its immediate predecessor did, even if it’s not altogether successful at keeping that arc front and centre during all the swashbuckling, globetrotting shenanigans. The early inclusion of references to the space race displacing interest in history as futurism usurps antiquity is a neat parallel of Jones’ own life stage while his resentment of it works as a sly rebuke of INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL’s egregiously extra-terrestrial exposition. There’s also something darkly timely in exploring characters who believe the Nazis deserve a do-over.
Famously, Spielberg originally came on board to direct RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK because he figured it would be the closest he would ever get to directing a James Bond movie. Ironic, then, that the one Indiana Jones film he doesn’t direct is the most James Bond adventure of them all. Lifting directly from OCTOPUSSY and FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, director James Mangold certainly has an eye for action but what’s conspicuously missing is the playful wit that were the hallmark of Spielberg’s set-pieces. There’s a haphazard approach to comedic moments that sits awkwardly against one of the most brutal, if not the most brutal Indiana Jones films of all. While Jones is no stranger to death, the death of innocent bystanders is vanishingly rare in earlier films, yet INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY leaves a trail of murdered narrative NPCs in its wake, a jarringly unpleasant intrusion of contemporary cinematic amorality into the quaint adventure serial spirit that defines the series. The sixties setting feels perilously proximate, and echoing Jones himself there’s a sense he works better in antiquity than he does in modernity (or at least modernity adjacent).
Beyond the character of Jones, though, DIAL OF DESTINY does a much better job of giving him a foil/ action surrogate with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Helena than CRYSTAL SKULL did with Mutt Williams (whose off-screen ending smacks of the same craven fan capitulation that also blighted Harrison Ford’s last STAR WARS movie). Where Mutt Williams was a past that Indiana Jones was keen to distance himself from and run away from, goddaughter Helena’s purpose is to rescue Jones from a prison of his own making, bringing him back from the brink of self-imposed surrender. Elsewhere, there’s a plucky (and likeable) kid (Ethan Isidore) to round out the team and occasionally help save the day and even Sallah pops in for bookending cameos.
On the villainous side, there are a couple of henchmen, played with requisite menace by Boyd Holbrook and Olivier Richters who are effective if a little underbaked while Mads Mikkelsen’s Doctor Voller is a villain perhaps more suited to facing off against Doctor Who than Doctor Jones, being a few scant degrees away from Scaroth (played by previous Indiana Jones antagonist Julian Glover) in his ultimate design. There’s a throwaway cameo by Antonio Banderas as another erstwhile old friend of Indiana Jones that feels like it might have been originally written for George Harris to reprise Captain Katanga before availability forced a change in plans.
In the end, though, INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY hits more right notes than wrong, helped enormously by John Williams’ peerless ability to embody the essence of a character in music and while Indy’s clothes have never felt more like a costume than they do here, Harrison Ford still wears it well. The eventual denouement of the adventure may be as bonkers as it is bombastic but it’s in the quiet coda that concludes the film that it really hits its mark, an emotionally rich and resonant redemption of the character that’s a world away from snatching his fedora from the feet of Shia LaBeouf.
