Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Review: Raiding the Past for Joyless Nostalgia

It’s been 15 years since Steven Spielberg had the Indiana Jones character dust off his famed fedora and whip to return to the silver screen. And while Kingdom of the Crystal Skull eventually settled into a sillier, less exciting reworking of past Indiana Jones adventures, its opening act brought something fresh and exciting to the series with its pulpy rendering of Cold War paranoia and 1950s America. Sure, the film gave us the rightly derided scene where Jones (Harrison Ford) survived an atomic blast by hiding in a refrigerator, but for a spell, it at least served as a compelling arena for another of the irascible archeologist’s rousing adventures.

Set in 1969, just after the flower children of the Summer of Love began to wilt and myriad civil rights and political leaders were assassinated, James Mangold’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny could have mined this new cultural context in any number of inspiring ways. Sadly, outside of a chase sequence that unfolds within an enormous anti-war protest and a brief nod to the moon landing, the only signposts making it evident that we’re even in one of the most tumultuous periods in 20th-century American history are the groovy pants that Indy’s goddaughter, Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), dons throughout the film. Turns out, the only past that Dial of Destiny is interested in plundering is that of its own predecessors.

True to form, Mangold’s film opens in the mid-1940s with Jones, alongside another trusty sidekick, Helena’s father, Basil Shaw (Toby Jones), about to board a Nazi train carrying a cornucopia of stolen treasures from around Europe. After beating up some Nazis in order to hide in plain sight in one of their uniforms, Jones locates the Lance of Longinus—a blade that supposedly contains traces of the blood of Christ—only to stumble upon another, potentially more powerful relic hidden on the train. This one, the Antikythera, was created by Archimedes over 2,000 years ago, supposedly contains the power of time travel, but only if both halves, only one of which Nazi physicist Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) has, are combined.

The film’s familiar globe-hopping plot, which hinges on Indy tracking down and at other times evading Nazis searching for a relic that would fulfill their dream of world domination, exists primarily to tickle our collective nostalgia for this series. The de-aged Ford depicted in Dial of Destiny’s prologue is certainly the most desperate and obvious attempt to recapture the glories of the original trilogy of films. But there’s also Ethann Bergua-Isodore, as young Teddy, stepping into the adorable tween role previously filled by Ke Huy Quan as Short Round in Temple of Doom, slithery eels subbing in for snakes, and an extended stopover in Morocco that provides a reunion with Indy’s old friend Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) and another chase sequence that deliberately recalls the iconography of the Egypt-set sequences from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Over its mammoth 154-minute runtime, Dial of Destiny parades nearly every iconic music cue, facial expression, and character type that has come to define the Indiana Jones series. And in traveling from the U.S. to Morocco to Greece, and finally, to Sicily, the film finds a variety of backdrops for the countless lengthy action sequences to play out. Of course, Mangold is no Spielberg, so this barrage of lengthy chases is neither as visually dynamic nor emotionally galvanizing as any in the first three entries, overburdened as they are by the weight of too much CGI. They’re instead efficient and workmanlike, which, though that’s perhaps more than can be said for action sequences in many other Hollywood tent poles, isn’t enough to justify the narrative bloat that leaves this film nearly 30 minutes longer than any previous entry.

Unlike in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Ford does appear like he wants to be here, even if it’s only to definitively put the franchise to bed. And there’s certainly a joy in seeing him, at age 80, still performing stunts, while also acknowledging the limitations of his body. Unfortunately, this is yet another potentially new avenue of inquiry that Dial of Destiny stops short of traveling down, choosing instead to offer audiences one moment of fan service after another.

At one point in Mangold’s film, after Sallah mournfully says, “I miss waking up every morning wondering what wonderful adventure the new day will bring to us,” Jones dismissively responds, “Those days have come and gone.” While the filmmakers are clearly banking on audiences who share Sallah’s nostalgic yearning to flock to theaters, the mostly lackluster results will only bring on the crushing realization that those days are indeed long gone.