Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Okay, I finally saw Dial of Destiny. It was… “fine”, I guess? But I don’t understand why you would go to all the trouble of making “one more” Indy movie in 2023 if the best you could muster was “fine”.
Let’s start with what works: The best part of the movie was its enthusiastic endorsement of punching Nazis. It’s strangely rare to see that stated so clearly and without hedging these days, so that almost makes up for everything else.
Also, the cast is uniformly excellent. This is the first Indiana Jones movie since Radiers where there’s no weak link, everyone does a great job with what they have to do, and frankly, everyone looks like they’re having a good time doing it. Even Harrison Ford looks awake and engaged, which isn’t always a given post-somewhere around Air Force One.
Other than that, it’s well made, looks good, solid production design, the punches all sound great. The plot cooks along at a steady clip, the action works. And the strange thing about this movie is that while it doesn’t really do anything badly, it just also doesn’t do anything particularly well. It’s fine.
So what doesn’t work so well?
The funniest thing is that Harrison Ford doesn’t even try to make his voice sound younger in the prologue. Just a fifty-year old face with an eighty-year old voice. What a legend!
But the first thing I noticed was how still the camera was. I appreciate not wanting to make a pastiche, but scene after scene of actors looking at something in a locked-off camera shot, I’d think to myself, “man, Spielburg would have put a really cool camera move here.”
It’s way too long. There’s a reason all the others are a tight 2 hours, there’s no excuse for a two-and-a-half hour Indy movie. Halfway through the WW2 prologue I caught myself thinking “wow, this is still going, huh?” Also, look, the third time you write “and then Indy is captured and bundled into the back of a van” in the script, your movie is too long. So it’s not just Spielburg that’s missed, but also Michael Kahn.
Similarly, there is no universe where you should spend 200+ million dollars on an Indiana Jones movie.
And then it works its way through the other greatest hits of all the bad habits that “legacy sequels” have picked up over the last decade or so:
- Overly enamored with mediocre computer de-aging
- The Hero has suffered terrible personal setbacks since we saw them last, and are now living in failure, all past successes forgotten
- Full of new, younger characters, but they’re not super like-able, and are there more than makes sense, but not enough to tee them up as the new leads, as if they wanted to set up a spin-off but then got cold feet halfway through the movie.
- Way, way too much greenscreen instead of practical effects
Strangely, it seems like they used Crystal Skull as their main source of inspiration, fixing the cosmetic mistakes but not the fundamental ones. For example, replacing Shia with Phoebe Waller-Bridge is a huge upgrade, but at no point did anyone seem to stop and ask why they needed a Junior Varsity Indy to begin with. I like Phoebe Waller-Bridge a lot so she was fun; but giving one the big big hero moments to… the new kid sidekick? Why? Personally, instead of another one-off sidekick I would have much preferred Indy & Marion on one last ride bickering the whole time. If you’re doing a one-last-ride nostalgia piece, why add so many new people?
And look, Crystal Skull was bad, but at least it had Cate Blanchett vamping it up as an evil Russian psychic? This one had… the guy from Casino Royale playing Great Value Brand Red Skull?
And why break up Indy and Marion only to get them back together again at the end?
Frustratingly, It’s not like this movie was short on ideas. There’s at least a dozen really good ideas for an Indiana Jones movie:
- What if Werner von Braun was still a Nazi?
- Related: Nazis are sneaking back, time to get punching!
- The Moon Landing!
- Closely related: Astronauts! (Imagine a fistfight between Indy and some NASA guys)
- The Antikythera mechanism as a macguffin. Great choice, brings in a whole set of Mediterranean iconography you can play with that the Indy movies haven’t done yet
- Bonus macguffin: the Spear of Destiny, as used in every single Indy spinoff in the 90s, and for good reason
- CIA agents working with neo-nazis but not being happy about it
- Indy as a retired “old guy”, living an a world that’s passed him by, yet is still historical for the audience. Credit where credit is due, the cut to old Indy being awoken by “Magical Mystery Tour” was absolutely worth whatever it cost to get that song. (Plus, Indy in an anti-Vietnam demonstration? YES PLEASE!)
- A plot that ties unfinished business from whatever he was doing during the war with what’s going on now
- And more broadly from the above, what does a retired action hero do with his day?
- Confronting the past choices of the other movies: hey, wait a sec, was he a grave robber? There’s a whole confronting the past angle that the movie dips it’s toes into and then cowards out from. Remarkably, this is the only Indiana Jones to contain the words “grave robber”, and the only movie where Indy actually destroys a historical artifact.
- But the absolute best idea this movie has is Indy trying to recover historical artifacts stolen by the Nazi as part of the end-of-war plunder. It’s inconceivable to me that they wasted this on just the opening: Just gonna throw this out there, but “Indiana Jones and the Secret of the Amber Room” set in the mid-70s would have been absolutely incredible.
And you can squint and make just about any of those work as a spine for a whole movie. Instead, this movie throws them all into the blender and they’re all just… there? They don’t line up in any sort of thematic way, the movie just flirts with one and then moves to the next. But also, there’s four credited screenwriters, so it really feels like they took every pitch from the last 15 years and jammed them all in there. Considering the director, it also feels like they started with “Logan, but Indy” and then kept rounding down.
As a point of comparison, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade has just as many plates spinning: the Nazis, Donnovan’s ambitions, Indy’s dad, whatever Dr. Elsa Schneider is playing at, the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword. But, all of those characters are oriented around the Grail, their actions center around their motivations regarding it. Plus, that movie has maybe the best action scene Spielburg has ever put together with the tank chase. In Dial, none of these elements go together, and there are some car chases.
This is a movie that knows “emotions” are a thing other movies have, but isn’t sure where they go? So we get Indy being—correctly—very upset that his friend Armand the Vampire was murdered but only for about seven seconds. Or the scene where Indy talks about his son’s death, which Ford acts the hell out of, but then descends to pure bathos the second you realize that yes, they really did pull a Poochy on Shia’s character and that Mutt died on the way back to his home planet.
The defining moment of the movie for me came about half-way through. The good guys are in trouble, and Indy says “hang on, I have an old friend that’ll help us,” right after a long conversation about the kid that Fleabag has picked up, and then the movie cuts to… ANTIONO BANDERAS, of all people, playing his character from the SpongeBob Squarepants movie? Meanwhile, at the exact same time, Ke Huy Quan is turning in an oscar-winning performance in another movie. Short Round is never mentioned.
Actually, though, the worst part of the movie is that John Williams took one look at it and decided not to even try. Less than ten minutes into the prologue, and he’s recycling the music from the Last Crusade tank chase. Say what you will about Crystal Skull, but at least the Skulls got their own leitmotif.
Dial of Destiny cost a lot of money, and didn’t do very well at the box office. It’s once of the central exhibits in both 2023’s weird box office specifically and Disney’s post-2019 slump generally. This is the point where people on twitter start blaming it’s failure on someone “having an agenda” or “repackaging nostalgia”. And what’s funny is this is the movie that proves all those people wrong, because if that was the problem, fucking Short Round would be in the movie.
Instead, I think the problem is both deeper and simpler. This is a movie made by people with no taste, no ambition beyond “making another one”, “whose main creative vision is they love to have meetings.” People who are here to make “content”.
I’d love to ask the people behind this movie to describe, in their own words, to explain what makes Indiana Jones a unique character, and to do that without using the words “brand” or “franchise.” Because I’m not sure they could?
Indy is a character who is always in over his head, but gets through because he’s got more guts and never quits. And that’s just… not in this movie.
And that’s where it starts to get a little insulting: Radiers of the Lost Ark is as close to a perfect movie as anyone has ever made, Indiana Jones himself was a truly unique creation. Here, he’s been sandblasted down to just another superhero-adjacent character, the hat and jacket more of a signature costume than something someone would really wear than ever. On the most superficial level, he doesn’t even really use his whip, it’s just hanging from his belt because “Indiana Jones”. There’s nothing here that couldn’t be in some other action movie. More than anything, this movie feels like a late-period Roger Moore Bond movie: perfectly competent, but utterly lacking in any ambition beyond the release date. That and the fact that the lead moves like an 80-year old when you can see their face, and like 30-year old when their back is turned to the camera.
Critically, the other Indy movies all have a moment where Indy realizes that the macguffin isn’t what he cares about, and that he’s really here to save a person—Marion, the village, his father, his son. Artifacts, supernatural or otherwise, can take care of themselves, he’s here to protect something else. And that turn never comes here, instead Indy’s real mission is—what, exactly?
This movie is made by people who really think that Indy didn’t do anything in Raiders, and he really doesn’t get anything done here.
Everyone in tis movie had better things to be doing with their time, and I don’t understand why they bothered to go ahead if this was the best they could do.
It was fine.