Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

PG-13.  There's a slight shift in objectionable content.  The Dial of Destiny is the least scary and gory of the bunch.  I will say, it also has the most on-screen casual death, which is almost more upsetting in other ways.  Instead of someone's face melting off or ants eating a dude whole, regular people die from gun violence.  Do you see where I'm going with this?  It's almost more upsetting, but grounded despite being an Indiana Jones movie.  There's also the regular language that these movies share.

DIRECTOR:  James Mangold

My daughter doesn't want to do her summer math league problems.  I don't want to write.  We're going to see who has the greater willpower as we sit next to each other to do something that we don't want to do.  I've been prepping my kids for Indiana Jones and the DIal of Destiny.  I think I've tried getting them on the Indy train for years now.  But my kids don't often have the attention spans for whole movies.  I'll give them credit.  For all of their fidgeting, they made it through every movie.  That must mean that they kinda sorta liked these movies. 

I'm almost overwhelmed with thoughts.  Part of me thought that this was the quintessential Indiana Jones film.  Part of me was kind of bored.  I think that the process of writing this might get me exactly where I need to be to find out what I thought about it.  I remember with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that it was a story about an elderly Indiana Jones going out on one last adventure.  I mean, context at the time was massive.  There was old man Harrison Ford coming back to punch bad guys and dig up treasure?  Surely, that was a story about aging.  After all, Indy becomes a dad and is about to pass the torch to the next generation.  Then Shia LaBoeuf decides to slag off the movie and get booted from the franchise.  But knowing that there was going to be a real last movie (let's get back to that later), it makes this the movie about being old without saying that this is the movie about being old.  Sure, Indy has a retirement and he has annoying neighbors who call him "Mr. Jones" as he stands outside in his underwear with a baseball bat.  But the movie (as Harrison Ford has stated in interviews) doesn't need to remind us that Indy is old.  The only thing is that, in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, it made me think that Indy might have been losing a step in his action.  Boy, Dial of Destiny really reminds me that 80-year-old men aren't exactly ready to be punching Nazis as hard as he used to.

It's not that this isn't an action movie and Harrison Ford definitely has action sequences.  But they're all car sequences.  There's a great line about Indy has been shot nine times and that he's full of all kinds of pins and that his spine is just a hot mess and I needed that line.  But any time there needed to be an old man Indy action sequence, a vehicle with a stunt driver shows up.  This where my split is.  It was almost silly how Crystal Skull Indy was trying to (pun intended) keep up with the Joneses.  But this is the Indy who is hesitant to punch his way out of a problem.  Old Man Indy is constantly captured by guys who have the leg up on him.  I mean, if there was a car or a horse or a boat nearby, Indy would hold his own.  But this is a guy who is world-weary and incapable of doing stuff that young man Indy would do on a dime.  It makes sense that the movie gives us a 16-minute reminder of what Indiana Jones used to be like so we wouldn't feel cheated out of a movie where Indy is doing all kinds of daring do.  CGI is fun, isn't it?  (Note:  My only real problem with the slightly uncanny valley de-aging, which I think is B+ impressive, is that the voice doesn't match.  Harrison Ford's voice has aged more than he has.)  But it's fun.  It's not like the movie doesn't give us some good ol' fashioned Nazi punching.  I mean, it gives us Helena Shaw.

Helena Shaw is the character that Mutt Williams was supposed to be.  Geez, Shia LaBoeuf, why are you so vocal against something that a lot of people worked really hard on?  I mean, I'm a guy with a blog (who has become more forgiving with that movie each time I watch it).  You worked along side people and you slagged off the movie?  Anyway, Phoebe Waller-Bridge gets it.  My goodness, she gets the charisma that this movie was supposed to have.  She's not perfect, which is what was part of Mutt's character.  But she's also not whiny.  She's going through stuff.  That's what movies are supposed to do.  They put characters through stuff.  But Helena is aware of the tone of Indiana Jones films and just lives up to it.  She fills in the gaps that an aging Harrison Ford can't really live up to.  Now, it feels like I'm being hard on Harrison Ford.  In no way am I criticizing Harrison Ford.  That dude would shame me into a corner if I said nice things about him, let alone mean things.  I'm happy to see Indy up on that screen, even if things have to move a little slower to get there.  I'm just saying that having Helena and Henry as backup (or, in this case, protagonists.  More on that in a minute).  They fill in so many necessary gaps for the movie to be fun.  Like, Helena straight up knocks out Indy.  She scales a moving plane.  She's the new Indy, right?  Also, I never thought as of Phoebe Waller-Bridge as an action hero.  I'm straight up impressed by her and might start Fleabag tonight.

But it might be Helena and Henry's movie.  I know the movie focuses on Indiana Jones, but from an outside perspective, it might only be because we're familiar with the two of them.  The way that Raiders is structured is that people come to Indy to tell him to do this thing that he knows a lot about.  The same happens in Last Crusade.   But in the other ones, Indiana Jones is on the case.  But when he gets a case, he usually jumps on that idea.  He packs up his stuff and goes on an adventure.  One of the core concepts of this movie is that he wants nothing to do with Archemedies's Dial.  This is a burden on him.  He rejects the call and is punished for it.  There's a weird side effect for this: it makes Indy a secondary character in his own film.  Helena has more to do with the dial than Indy does.  From Indy's perspective, the dial has always been a representation of how obsession can destroy someone.  It harkens back to Indy's view of the grail and how it destroyed his father.  But with Bas, his friend actually loses all his sense of perspective when studying this dial.  Shifting the story from Indiana Jones, if it was about Helena, this is a story of how she is trying to rebel against her father in a search for love by selling the dial.  It's only through meeting someone who serves as a Luke Skywalker role in the sequel trilogy that she can remember her appreciation for what her father saw in history before losing his mind.  It allows her to connect to two father figures in a small amount of time.

Can I state something may be blasphemy?  Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny might have my favorite Indiana Jones third act. It's funny, because Indiana Jones movies have always had this religious element to them that Dial of Destiny doesn't offer.  But I am almost more cool with it.  Indiana Jones has always been way too much of a skeptic considering what he has seen in the past.  This is the first movie that addresses that skepticism and thank you for that, James Mangold.  But each Indiana Jones movie has a moment where Indy must accept that his skepticism was misplaced.  With Raiders, he knows to close his eyes as the Ark of the Covenant is opened.  With Temple of Doom, he knows that someone can be hypnotized, albeit temporarily by stones.  Lost Crusade, he has to heal his father's bullet wound with the cup of Christ.  Crystal Skull, the spaceship takes off.  Okay.  These are moments where the curtain is raised for a second.  He remains a skeptic because he chooses to.  But the third act of Dial of Destiny takes him back to 212 BCE.  And it hangs out there.  It doesn't just give us an image from a distance.  Indiana Jones talks to Archimedes.  It's everything that he loves and he is seduced by the Macguffin for the first time.  Every time, he can give it up.  The Dial is something that actually grants him a wish that he oh-so-desperately holds onto.  He's alone. He's got no one.  He's dying of a bullet wound.  Who wouldn't want to take this once in a lifetime chance?  Yeah, I kind of love that as an ending for Indiana Jones.  But that's almost against the message of the film.  

After all, Indy's big problem is that he doesn't realize how much of an impact he has made on the people around him.  Despite Helena's frustration with Indy's aloofness all through her childhood, there's a reason that she still saves him even though he is directly in conflict with her.  And that Marion bit.  I've never seen a more necessary cameo for a film.  My goodness, that cameo sticks the landing so hard.  It's central to the story.  If this is a story about aging, part of aging is being alone in the world.  I don't know why Indy isn't the associate dean anymore. But something happened in his life that has perverted everything he's loved.  Because he doesn't have anyone telling him that he's a good man, he believes that he's a waste of space.  I don't like Indiana Jones drinking, by the way.  But that's part of his character, especially in this one.  So, as much as I want him hanging out with history, I don't know.  I think the ending is the one that the movie needed.  The thing is, it's not a guaranteed end.  Everything I've read said that this is the definitive end of Indiana Jones. But the Marion ending keeps the door open for yet another one.  Like, I could write one right now.  I really could.  (Okay, I don't want to and it's pretty much delusions of grandeur to think that I could write an Indiana Jones script on a dime.)  But technically this story could keep going.  I mean, I want a series of Helena Shaw movies, but whatever.  

Can I dork out about one thing though?  I know why they didn't do this, but there's a bit of a lost opportunity.  Indiana Jones is in 212 BC and he meets Archimedes.  Cool.  Love it.  Archimedes is in the middle of building the Macguffin for the movie.  Helena knocks him out, worrying that Indiana Jones can't die alone in the past and that he would screw up history.  Cool.  Love it.  She knocks him out and flies him back to the future.  But before flying him back to the future, she can't have Archimedes put a little code on the dial that Indy would discover.  After all, she knows that her father is going to be the foremost expert on the dial.  She can't put something warning Mutt not to go to Vietnam?  I mean, that's all within the realm of the story, right?  It's such a specific message that only Indy and Bas would get.  Sure, they wouldn't bring back Shia LaBoeuf.  I'm just saying it's an ending.

So what's my take away?  I think I'm in the same place I was at the beginning of this blog: I absolutely loved the movie and was also kind of bored at the same time.  It's absolutely quintessential Indiana Jones.  But it's a character who is known for risking life and limb on a dime; a guy who punches before asking questions.  And he's an old man.  It's a great movie.  I mean, Picard season three pulled the same card and won.  It's just that I wanted Indy as a more central character in his own film.