The latest and last Indiana Jones adventure, The Dial of Destiny, sees an 80-year-old Harrison Ford wrapped in that chestnut leather jacket, tightly wound whip, and signature fedora for a send-off most people were waiting for after the disappointment of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Directed by James Mangold and four credited writers that’ll inflate my word count, The Dial of Destiny sees the return of two old souls Harrison Ford and composer John Williams to bring Indy home to his final resting place. A retirement home that happens to be an unimaginative, broken shuffle stripped of the tendons and loins that once made this franchise capable of thrusting into the perils of discovery that are encased in the riches of history.
James Mangold has been one of Hollywood’s most reliable journeymen of the 21st century, and surprising as it may sound, The Dial of Destiny has all of the makings of fitting into his filmography. He has a knack for building films around old guys not fitting in the outfits they used to, but unlike Cop Land and Logan, the Dial of Destiny doesn’t understand how to craft a compelling narrative around the weathered outfit. The serialized spirits that captured Steven Spielberg and George Lucas as they took over Hollywood in the late 1970s are abandoned here. The loose form of continuous storytelling that is relatively thin on plot and sprinkled with familiar faces and foes is exchanged for an abundance of plot that slams the door shut on any story that could come out of it. What Spielberg and Lucas understood about the simple gestures of storytelling is that it allowed them to use the camera to keep the plot at bay and expand on the story's details through the characters’ interaction with each other and their surroundings.
Spielberg’s compositions in the previous Indiana Jones films were thrilling because he tethered us to the experience of the characters. A thrilling discovery of information was equally so for us when he let us live in those spaces with them. Each cut or length of a shot was motivated by a sense of discovery. Think of the scene in The Last Crusade when Indy and Marcus visit Henry Sr.’s house, they peel back the curtain to his den, and it’s tossed over like a 90s grunge band just finished a night of partying. Spielberg’s camera jolts to life in unison with Williams’ score, and the camera pushes into the messy room and tells us a story through sight and sound without uttering a single word - efficient, motivated, excited, imaginative, and simple. The Dial of Destiny is the antithesis of these core concepts that have defined the legacy of one of cinema’s greatest heroes. This happens when the blockbuster climate is taken over by people who only understand the material at face value, without any functional details that made the Indiana Jones adventures leap off the screen over the last four decades.
Never has an Indiana Jones feature felt as endless or looked as drab. Most shots in the film are trapped in the 180-degree rule, which leaves little room for the camera to get creative with the space around the characters. Pushing Spielberg aside, great filmmakers separate themselves by finding a shot that evokes a perspective that feels true to the tone of the scene. If every shot in your movie (including the action sequences) is shot medium wide or close, every moment feels too similar to the last. It gives the audience no sense of space, continuity, or energy, and when the concepts at play are already half-baked, to begin with, the pieces start to come apart with each passing second. When it’s all tied together by a string of neverending exposition, all of the potential meaning is lost before the movie gets out of the first act. So, all of these scenes lack movement, and the Indy wit can’t save it either because there isn’t any to chuckle over. It’s not so much that there are a lot of ideas at play, they just don’t know how to creatively tell a story that services the development of character and narrative. It is a 2.5-hour flatline that doesn’t have a single peak of potential life.
Typically, the artifact that Indy & friends are in search of has some underlying personal stake that is personified through a character. The Dial of Destiny (kind of) has that in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s, Helena Shaw, but her character’s motivation is frustratingly underwritten. In a movie as overwritten as this, having underwritten characters showcases a visible disinterest in cinematic storytelling. If the visuals aren’t working to tell the story, and the dialogue the characters spew is an excessive barrage of exposition, there is no natural development of authentic emotion coming from the film. The film is defined by artifice from the beginning, and it hopes that it can ride the back of Harrison Ford’s de-aged face and crumbling back to elicit emotion. Like everything else in the film, it doesn’t even have the decency to utilize its lead to the best of its ability because they don’t understand the material they’re working with.
Sure, The Dial of Destiny has a moment or two that might allude to an aging subtext, but no element of the film is working to reinforce this. Harrison Ford might not be able to throw himself off moving vehicles like he used to, but Mangold doesn’t even go out of his way to use those limitations creatively. Indiana Jones was once a proactive protagonist that could completely reshape an action scene by throwing himself in front of danger. Again, things have changed, but Indy spends most of his time handcuffed, roped, with a bag over his head watching and listening from afar. He’s completely excluded from his own decisions, and if he has the chance to act on one, they use an outside force to topple the obstacle instead of having him engage with it. This never materializes within Indy’s story because what he is after doesn’t exist until they sandbag a line of dialogue out of nowhere to manipulate the audience into thinking it’s meaningful. This is how every character is treated in the film. We don’t know why the villain wants the McGuffin, Helena wants it, or Indy wants it. If you spend over two hours unsure of why anyone is chasing this device or what it does, the movie has failed and they’re hoping to drop it on your head at the last minute to convince you it was about something all along.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny looks to turn back the clock and revisit Indiana Jones as a man out of his element as precious moments of time wane out of his control. Unfortunately, Mangold doesn’t have the delicate movements of subtlety or fiery passion of artistic calculations that can service the mythic aura of Indiana Jones. The screenplay is completely broken as it fails to craft a compelling narrative that is in line with the supposed text. As most movies made for this much money tend to do these days, they allude to the ideas that were present on sticky notes during the screenwriting process but there is nothing within the mise-en-scene that reinforces the false beliefs of the artists involved with bringing this story to life. Everyone involved clearly loves being paid without the effort of making it worth a single penny of their paycheck.
The Dial of Destiny is boring. It is a frustrating and listless entry that denies Indiana Jones a conclusion that optimizes the beauty of history and mythology that time creates. In fact, it completely misunderstands everything about a man whose purpose was prolonging the physical delicacies of time’s forgotten fortunes and giving them back to us as knowledge. It isn’t as egregiously offensive as The Flash, but it is another Summer blockbuster that manages to waste every dollar in 2.5 hours and our own precious time because Disney/Lucasfilm believe that mythological titles and the old people that inhabit them are destined to be helpless hermits ready to die. No matter how few moments there are that may echo with potential, the film is ultimately broken and unsalvageable. What a disappointing send-off to one of the greats.
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