Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a fun, three-star summer blockbuster that at the very least plays to the strengths of both Harrison Ford and his younger co-star Phoebe Waller Bridge.
I’m old enough to remember seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) on television before catching Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom in theaters when it was first released in 1984.
I enjoyed both of them a great deal, but by the time Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade was released in 1989 I was into other things, writing about music and listening to My Bloody Valentine, so I only saw it years later, and then mostly for Sean Connery as Indy’s dad.
When Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out in 2008 I just avoided it completely.
So I went into The Dial of Destiny with modest expectations, which at least left me plenty of room to be pleasantly surprised.
The movie goes back to what Indy does best: fight the Nazi’s! This time the main villain is Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), who works for the American government in the late sixties, but wants to go back in time to win the Second World War for Germany.
To do that Voller needs the Dial of Destiny, which was invented by Archimedes and gives the person who owns it control over space and time.
The only ones to stop him are a retired professor called Henry ‘Indiana’ Jones and his goddaughter Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller Bridge), even though she may have some agenda of her own.
This sets up a series of sequences between the two (or actually three, as she is the caretaker of a teenage boy played by Ethann Isidore whose role becomes quite prominent as the movie goes on) in which they can be friends, foes or frenemies.
Their witty banter adds a lot of mileage to the action scenes which move the story along from New York to the Mediterranean like a well oiled machine.
Ford is at his charming best, but the real revelation here is Waller Bridge, who became known through her Fleabag character, but here shows she can co-anchor a summer blockbuster as well.
The movie is directed by James Mangold, who took over from maestro Steven Spielberg, and is known for well-received movies like Logan and Ford vs Ferrari.
Working from a script by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, David Koepp and himself, he once again delivers the goods, keeping his foot on the gas in the first half hour, which involves a high-energy train ride, before slowing down to do some fine character work with his actors.
A lot has been made of the de-aging of Harrison Ford. He looks convincingly young in the WWII-scenes and he also looks the part when he plays his own age. I’m guessing there was some digital make-up applied here as well, just as there was last year with Cruise in Maverick and Roberts and Clooney in Return to Paradise. It’s an open secret that Hollywood does this, but traditional make-up is also used to make actors look better and younger, so to me that’s not a problem.
But to get back to the movie: at 154 minutes it’s at the longish side and, admittedly, the final half hour does get a bit silly, but overall I enjoyed myself quite a bit.
And the final part does hit home some emotional truths about Indy, who is not some immortal superhero but has some real griefs and regrets like the rest of us.
Harrison Ford is one of the last remaining movie stars. So even if The Dial of Destiny suggests that Indy will finally hang up his archeologist hat, well, i don’t think that in this IP obsessed day and age, the character is going away so easily.
The ‘scanning’ of actors - filming them from all angles and saving the material for later use - is another AI-related development in Hollywood right now, so I wouldn’t be too surprised to see Indy return at some point in the future. Who knows, with the technique evolving as it does, they might even make a completely new movie with Indy in his forties without Ford even having to be there.
But that’s, quite possibly, a story for another day.
Note: Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny is released worldwide next week.