NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE T he first time we see the face of Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, he is more or less as he appeared in the first three movies. Modern technology now can restore actors to their past selves, allowing a long prologue set in World War II. But then Indy speaks. And the voice that emerges is not that of Harrison Ford from 1981, 1983, or 1989; it is, discordantly, his voice today, tumbling gravelly out of a digitally de-aged face.  

This is the first of many moments in the latest — and, one hopes, the last — Indiana Jones film in which an attempt to revive the past falls flat, an apt characterization for the enterprise as a whole. The odds were stacked against it to begin with. Ford’s age (nearly 80 at filming) was an obstacle, though apparently not an insurmountable one. 2008’s Kingdom of the Crystal Skull had left a sour taste in the mouths of many fans, giving us, in one infamous scene, a new term (“nuking the fridge“) for “jumping the shark.” And nowadays, audiences are increasingly wary of long-awaited sequels, revivals, and reboots. Though such properties can (and do) still make money, enough have been misfires that they must now overcome innate skepticism. Which is not to say that such skepticism — for which there has emerged a kind of market of its own, prejudging and even predestining all such ventures as automatic despoliations — is always justified. See last summer’s Top Gun: Maverick for a counterexample.

So Dial of Destiny did not have to be a disappointment. Yet it is. This is despite the fact that director James Mangold (Logan, Ford v. Ferrari), taking over from series director Steven Spielberg, understands some of the familiar elements of a proper Indiana Jones story, even one set in the late ’60s. There are locations both exotic and historic; red lines on a map trace the journeys between them. There are action set-pieces. There’s a MacGuffin. There are Nazis who want it. Some familiar faces return in addition to Indy himself.

But the attempt to tie it all together founders, making the proceedings seem more like a box-checking exercise than anything else. As Indy himself stresses early on, “It’s not an adventure.” The locales seem picked almost at random. The action set-pieces lack Spielbergian wit, flair, and coherence. As in Crystal Skull, the MacGuffin – this time something called the Antikythera — hails more from the world of science than of mysticism, depriving this installment of the latter’s spiritual and transcendent possibilities. (Indeed, in the opening scenes, an artifact of the mystical kind is introduced, then discarded as a “fake.”) Time-related themes about regret and loss are present but feel forced and underexplored. And they’re present only because this sequel, merely by existing, forcibly deprived Indy of whatever closure he achieved at the end of Crystal Skull. Indy’s motives for seeking this device, moreover, are far less clear than in prior quests, as are some of the technical details of his pursuit: An early encounter with the main Nazi and his crew leaves Indy fingered for murder, yet he has no trouble taking a passenger flight out of a normal airport.

As for that Nazi: Though played by skillful heavy Mads Mikkelsen, Jurgen Voller never truly rises to the level of past Indy threats. Nor does Mikkelsen here even measure up to the menace of some of his own prior villainous roles. Somewhat hapless in the past where Indy first meets him, Voller is more competent in the present. Working with the U.S. government in some unclear capacity as a kind of composite of Operation Paperclip scientists, he becomes a key figure in the U.S. space program, and now he wishes to conquer time — and correct some Nazi mistakes along the way. His henchmen are not very notable either. Oliver Richter’s hulking mass is a nice throwback to Pat Roach’s giants from prior films, at least, and his inevitable death is one of the movie’s few memorable moments. 

That this character’s death comes not at the hands of Indy is one of many examples of how the title character is often merely along for the ride in his own movie. Familiar beats are hit, but with workarounds required either of necessity (given Ford’s age) or out of attempts at novelty that fall flat. Much of the focus is, instead, on Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), Indy’s goddaughter. Dial of Destiny often seems like it wants to be her movie rather than his. She drives much of the plot, is at first the main object of attention for the story’s villains, and has a relationship with the film’s MacGuffin (an obsession of her father, a deceased friend of Indy) meant to mirror that of Indy with Last Crusade’s Holy Grail (an obsession of his father).  

Shaw is not quite as annoying as she could have been. Yes, many of her quips, typically at the expense not just of Indy but of his character and history, fall flat or even read as metafictional criticisms of Indy himself, though her own morally ambiguous status leaves unclear how seriously they should be taken as such. But occasionally she displays some franchise-befitting moxie. And at least the rumors that Dial of Destiny would literally erase Indy from existence, with her as a replacement, were unfounded. But she is still largely a (not very interesting) distraction from Indy, in a movie that ought rightly to be centered on him.  

In Dial of Destiny, the villainous Voller is obsessed with the past, and seeks a device that will return him to it. He does not get quite what he sought. Those who watch the movie itself will again see one of cinema’s greatest heroes on screen, at times apparently restored to something like his former glory. But like the fake artifact and the fake Indy that appear at the movie’s beginning, it is only a replica. No amount of box-checking, fan-favorite cameos, or even John Williams musical cues can rescue the underdeveloped, contrived, at best middling product that has resulted. Even though Indy, in-universe, is clearly a man out of time — seeing him amid the trappings of the 1960s counterculture is jarring, and not to the movie’s benefit — there may have been a way to give him a fitting end. But it wasn’t this. If you want to see Indy ride off into the sunset, stop two movies ago.