I didn't have high expectations for 2023's Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and my expectations were not subverted. Well, actually, my hopes were gotten up a little when I heard the present day segment of the movie would start with an elderly Dr. Jones in 1969 grieving for the death of his son in Vietnam, finalising a divorce from Marion, and feeling unappreciated by students. I thought, yeah, good idea. Undo the sappy ending from Crystal Skull, make Indy a desperate old loner. Unfortunately, Dial of Destiny doubles down on all of Crystal Skull's biggest problems and adds a few new ones. I'll give you a spoiler-free list:
Repeated Problems from Crystal Skull:
- Too much cgi.
- A sense of very limited location filming (despite the fact that the film did go to many real locations).
- Plot elements introduced in the first half of the film that are completely ignored or forgotten in the second half.
- Bad cinematography with excessive colour tinting.
New Problems Introduced:
- An annoying new sidekick who functions more as an uninvited new main character.
- The absence of anything funny.
- Shallow, false profundity.
- The misuse of John Williams' score.
A Few Things I Liked:
- The simple fact of a new action/adventure movie with a puzzle for the characters to work out.
- The supernatural event in the climax.
From here on, my review will contain spoilers.
The film begins with a twenty-five minute segment set in 1944 with a digitally de-aged Harrison Ford in the role of Indiana Jones. It's set at night and largely on a train so, with Ford's cgi head, it feels very much like Polar Express. The action sequences are mostly striking in that they lack Spielberg's unique gift for dynamic momentum. The new director, James Mangold, set himself an impossible task and failed. I did like the fact that the initial McGuffin, the Lance of Longinus, turns out to be a fake.
Hopping forward to 1969, we see Harrison Ford has admirably embraced his age. Jones is resentful that all the kids are talking about the moon landing instead of archaeology. The film seems to share his disdain for NASA and goes on to make the Nazi antagonist, played by Mads Mikkelsen, an Operation Paperclip style scientist working for NASA, like Wernher von Braun. If you feel like you've heard this one before, maybe it's because you watched For All Mankind, the Apple+ series about NASA in which von Braun's involvement was part of the plot, or maybe you remember that it's a plot element in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Now, Mikkelsen's character is working with the CIA to investigate Jones, though this is totally unrelated to the CIA's antagonism of Jones in the forgotten, interesting subplot of the first half of Crystal Skull.
It feels like some people really want us to hate NASA, the same people who really want us to like Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
The few people who've seen her series, Fleabag, seem to adore it. That seems to be enough to make her Kathleen Kennedy's own Camilla Rhodes ("This is the girl") and she's pushed her in projects as often as possible. Kennedy has such faith in her that Dial of Destiny goes all in on her. "It doesn't matter what you believe," says Indy in one of the film's most egregiously meaningless stabs at profundity, "It matters how hard you believe it." Kathleen Kennedy believes in Phoebe Waller-Bridge really hard.
We're expected to like it when she consistently outmanoeuvres Indy and delivers a sassy line for all occasions. We're expected to like it when she has all the fun in Tangiers while grumpy old Dr. Jones struggles to keep up. Every time he does manage to hit someone or successfully pull off a difficult jump, John Williams' theme is pushed in loudly to argue that the film is not sidelining the guy we actually came to see. I imagine someone in editing watching like a hawk and periodically shouting, "Look! He did something! Play the theme, play the theme!" With all the cgi, it gives the film a video game quality, like the sound effect you hear every time Mario gets a powerup.
The cgi is only part of the reason the film looks bad. Significant blame should go to the cinematographer, Phedon Papamichael, whose use of colour tinting is largely responsible for the film's lack of visual nuance and complexity. I usually complain about the yellow tint when it's applied to Mexico but it's just as bad here applied to Tangiers. You know what movies didn't use hackneyed colour tinting? The other Indiana Jones movies. Once again, I'm compelled to remember how much of what gave the first three films a sense of visual identity was the late Douglas Slocombe's cinematography.
Perhaps the filmmakers hoped Waller-Bridge's character would be another Furiosa. If you're wondering why these franchises keep trying to replace popular old stars with new female characters, they were probably encouraged by the one time it actually worked, in Mad Max: Fury Road. But I think the people holding Fury Road up as a model underestimate how important Max really is to the story and how his minimal control of the situation functions as a great source of tension. The audience is interested in Furiosa's endeavour but Max's hopeless situation is far more captivating and his escape is more satisfying. Furiosa's story is interesting enough to make it a truly interesting moral dilemma when Max is put in a position to decide whether or not he's going to help them.
Helena, Waller-Bridge's character in Dial of Destiny, doesn't work like Furiosa because she's not as intriguing or as charismatic. We don't know right away why Furiosa is turning rebel but George Miller establishes a sense of a world so quickly and solidly and uses composition and editing to make us interested in Charlize Theron's apprehensive and calculating expressions that we're compelled to study the situation, to try to piece it together. Helena's motives for betraying Indy and trying to ditch him are never clear and seem to contradict other pieces of information we're getting.
Is she really trying to unravel the mystery that drove her father mad or is she just looking for fortune and glory? This is the tension teased for Indiana's character in the first two films and I suspect Mangold was trying to replicate it in Helena. But while the original films clearly show to Indy why he shouldn't go down the fortune and glory route, we never get that for Helena, nor is her pathological hatred of Indy ever credible or interesting. She accuses him of not assuming the role of a godfather, and taking her under his wing when her father died. Since we never know the circumstances under which Indy learns of her father's death, or if someone else assumed guardianship of Helena, we have no idea how negligent Indy's actually been. I suppose it's similar to Marion in Raiders nursing a hatred for Indy because he left her at a young age when she was infatuated with him, but that was more effective because the issues between the two are established right away while in Dial of Destiny we don't get Helena's reasons until some time into the film. The lack of any possibility of romantic tension between the two also makes it less interesting.
One popular recent criticism of Raiders of the Lost Ark is that Indiana Jones, for all his efforts, actually has no effect on the fate of the Ark. If he hadn't gotten involved, the Nazis would have found it and their heads would've melted just the same. The same could be said for Dial of Destiny, When the Nazis do find Archimedes' Dial, their plane would have been shot down in the Siege of Syracuse and any survivors would've had no means of returning to the 20th century. I did actually like the time travel element and the shots of planes flying into time fissures in the sky. I wish the depiction of ancient Syracuse had been more interesting. It kind of reminded me of The Time Monster, the Doctor Who serial that so nicely built up tension and weirdness about the possibility of connecting with the far distant past, only for the latter portion of the story to resort to the usual ancient Grecian style costumes, makeup, and sets. I wish Dial of Destiny had found a way of depicting ancient Sicily that was impressively weird and different from how we've seen the period before. I also wish they'd gotten a more interesting actor to play Archimedes, someone who gives an impression of shrewd intellect. The baffled old gentleman unfortunately gave off Bill and Ted vibes.
This leads to the single most loathsome part of the film, when an apparently mortally wounded Indy decides to stay in the past but Helena countermands his decision by punching him, knocking him out. He wakes up back in his apartment in 1969, Marion shows up and they reconcile, and Helena swaggers off, satisfied that she's saved the day. How do I dislike this ending? Let me count the ways.
First of all, I really hate the lazy plot device of the "punch out". Do you know how hard it is to safely knock someone unconscious? This is why Star Trek invented the Vulcan Nerve Pinch. We don't see punch outs in the original Indiana Jones films, either. Even Marion was obliged to use a frying pan when she knocked a guy out. I guess you could say it was easier for Helena to knock Indy out since he was bleeding from a gunshot wound to the chest. But that just leads us to contemplate the insulting jump cut, the one that tells us not to think about how Helena dragged Indy's body into a plane, departed from the still raging Siege of Syracuse, re-entered the time rift, came back to 1969, found a place to land where she found medical care for Indy good enough to cure a bullet wound to the chest, and then got him back to his apartment without him ever regaining consciousness. No wonder she's so impressed with herself. By the way, she's also the one who kills Mikkelsen's character.
Thematically, Helena's elevation to deus-ex-machina deprives Indy of a story. In the climax of his own final film. In previous films, in which the climax features Indy having an epiphany, what Indy learns here is that he's a doddering old fool who needs to let his superheroine goddaughter make decisions for him. Thank you so much, Miss Kennedy. The film may have cost 295 million dollars, becoming one of the most expensive movies ever made. It may be the box office flop that becomes the final nail Disney's coffin. But at least you made it clear how much you truly hate us. I guess that's kind of punk.
By the way, the movie has Indy framed for murder in the first part of the film, one reason he's forced to flee the country, but forgets about it. When Indy and Helena meet Archimedes, Indy realises Archimedes made the dial specifically to bring people to the past to rescue him from the siege. We never find out how this is resolved or if it is. To be fair, this script was only in development for over a decade.
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