Indiana Jones and Sequel of Pointlessness
In every Indiana Jones film, bad guys want to take control of some fabled artifact, whether it’s the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail, and use it to rule the world. Every time, Professor of Archaeology Henry “Indiana” Jones, Jr., stops them and makes sure the artifact is hidden away or put in a museum.
When it acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, apart from Star Wars, Disney also gained possession of a powerful artifact called the Indiana Jones franchise. Paramount retains distribution rights for the first four films and financial participation in future films while Disney owns the IP as well as distribution and marketing rights to subsequent films, such as Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Now, will Disney act like Nazi physicist Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), who wants to use the Antikythera, aka Dial of Destiny, for his own nefarious ends, or like Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) and keep it safe and in a museum?
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The fact is, Harrison Ford is 80 years old. He suffered an injury on the set of The Force Awakens in 2014, delaying production and costing the production company a $2 million fine. He hurt his shoulder in 2021 while reprising Jones for the fifth installment. The man is a treasure and should be kept as far away from harm as possible, kind of like an, uh, ancient artifact. But if Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny proves anything, it’s that advancements in filmmaking pretty much guarantee Ford can play Indiana Jones for as long as he wants.
The film opens with a ten-minute action piece that sees a young Indy in a Polish castle surrounded by Nazis. If you’ve seen Scorsese’s The Irishman on Netflix, you might think that de-aging looks terrible and kind of horrifying. A de-aged Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing) and young Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) were unsettling and weird in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. But it’s 2023 and we now have AI apps that generate our faces pretty convincingly right on our mobile phones. The first ten minutes of The Dial of Destiny are terrifying, not because the de-aging was bad but because you’re literally watching a forty-year-old Harrison Ford and you forget for a moment that the film was shot in 2021 and Ford is a geezer.
It’s pretty powerful stuff. Disney, or any other production outfit, for that matter, can keep making Indiana Jones movies with a CGI Harrison Ford’s face slapped over a body double pretty much forever. In a few years, there won’t even be a body double, and the CGI will be as deceptively real as the CGI photographs AI apps can generate. The de-aging is just that good, and it’s merely a harbinger of things to come.
But just because Disney (and Ford, who felt that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull didn’t give the character the closure he wanted) can, it doesn’t mean they should. Or should they? The film’s MacGuffin is the Antikythera, an ancient assemblage of gears that’s been described as the world’s oldest computer. A de-aged Mikkelsen, who looks terrific, attributes its creation to Archimedes and tells his Nazi buddies that it has the power to change the course of history. Wink, wink. It’s a time travel device, obviously, so when the story moves to the current setting of 1969, when men first set foot on the moon, we know the Nazis are out to do some Back to the Future shenanigans.
Indiana Jones is a great franchise. It single-handedly inspired, if not invented, the whole treasure-hunting genre of cinema. Few films have come close to replicating the cleverness of The Last Crusade’s three tests of faith. The Dial of Destiny has a few puzzles, but when National Treasure does a better job of feeling like an Indiana Jones film than an actual Indiana Jones film, there’s something amiss. Even John William’s iconic score, wafting through key moments, feels less of an adrenaline booster and more of a sneaky attempt to fuel nostalgia.
Make no mistake, the action sequences are great. If anything, there might be a little too much of it, as it’s one chase after another, on planes, trains, and automobiles. The entire film feels like an extended car/horse/motorcycle chase, and it’s exhausting. There’s also way more face-punching than Creed. You feel tired for Harrison Ford, who at one point questions why he’s even trying to scale a rocky wall when he should be enjoying his retirement. And he’s got a point. Indiana Jones has already had many great adventures, should he really embark on another one?
Blame Disney. Seduced by the power of the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’s $790 million box office, and fine, because Harrison Ford wanted to give it another go, the House of Mouse gives us one more Indiana Jones for old times sake. From de-aged Indy to Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) and Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), the Dial of Destiny is a nostalgia trip in more ways than one. They don’t even need to activate the Antikythera to go back in time.
And really, they shouldn’t have. As with every Indiana Jones story, when the bad guys try to use the MacGuffin, something goes horribly wrong. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that activating the Antikythera won’t go according to plan. The trouble is, The Dial of Destiny comes after The Flash, an actually wonderful time travel film that pays homage to Back to the Future, the most famous time travel film of, well, all time. Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny has such an inane treatment of time travel that it’s a wonder it’s even in the film at all. The Antikythera would’ve been better off being some ancient weather machine or other powerful, world-ending mechanism.
Instead, The Dial of Destiny uses time travel as pointlessly as the MacGuffin itself. Granted, every Indiana Jones film returns to the status quo in the end, but when a film bothers with such a high concept as time travel and devotes its entire third act to it, it’s somewhat infuriating to have the journey amount to nothing. At one point, his goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) asks him what the ancients would’ve thought about man making it to the moon. Jones, unimpressed, says that going to the moon is like going to Reno, in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do. It kind of describes the film in a nutshell. A fifth Indiana Jones film is impressive, but then? Why?
To be fair, The Dial of Destiny breaks with tradition by introducing characters from Indy’s past only to kill them off in the same film. Unlike past films where old friends like Sallah make it through the end and make cameos in later chapters, it’s hi and goodbye for the new chaps in this one. In addition, The Dial of Destiny actually kills off a major character from a previous film with a few sentences! It’s an unexpected and even a little disrespectful move for a franchise trying to capitalize on nostalgia.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge is great, but Helena Shaw is no Indy, and a tomb-raiding nepo baby with a British accent isn’t the most original character. Even Helena’s pubescent sidekick, Teddy (Ethann Isidore), is a poor attempt to recapture the charm of Short Round that completely misses the point of why the character was so beloved.
Maybe this is the last Indiana Jones film. There’s no Indiana Jones without Harrison Ford, after all. Harrison Ford is Indiana Jones. George Lucas, who made the character, has expressed as much. This isn’t James Bond. If Ford feels that Indy finally got the closure he deserved, maybe the story can finally end and Disney can keep all its chapters on display in Disney+ streaming glory, the way Indiana Jones tried to do for the Antikythera. Only time will tell.
