PicoBlog

It’s crazy to think that a whole decade and a half has passed since 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull paired Indiana Jones, one of the most beloved icons in all of pop culture, with Shia LaBeouf’s hotheaded Mutt Williams, one of the most hated characters this side of Jar Jar Binks. 

Steven Spielberg is a smart man with great instincts. There’s a reason he’s literally the most successful American filmmaker of all time commercially and one of our greatest and most consistent entertainers as well. 

But when he’s wrong he can be screamingly, egregiously wrong, like when he made Ready Player One. I fucking hate that movie. Just thinking about it makes me angry, just like I get angry just thinking about Mutt Williams and his extremely punchable face. 

Harrison Ford was sixty-five years old when he made Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. He was a swashbuckling senior citizen, a hero of the AARP set. A decade and a half ago he was already an old Indiana Jones. 

Yesterday I watched Harrison Ford’s fifth and final Indiana Jones movie with my eight year old son Declan. Both of Declan’s grandfathers are younger than Harrison Ford, the star of a three hundred million dollar action movie. 

Ford now makes for an extremely old Indiana Jones so Steven Spielberg has handed over the reins to James Mangold, who memorably gave the world a sad, bitter old Wolverine in Logan. 

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny can use new and, frankly, extremely alarming AI/Deep Fake technology to make Indiana Jones look decades younger in the opening sequences but they cannot pretend that Ford is a robust young man, or even middle aged at this point. 

So the filmmakers lean into the idea of a weary old Indiana Jones filled with sadness and regret. His son died in Vietnam. His wife left him. He drinks too much. He seems lost and lonely. 

It’s a new and different Indiana Jones. He seems more vulnerable and human but he's still Indiana Jones and he’s still a hero. In that respect Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny feels like Logan lite. So while the filmmakers take some chances by acknowledging their hero’s age and mortality the film nevertheless feels fundamentally safe. 

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny opens in 1944, at the very end of World War II, with Indiana Jones and his diminutive friend and colleague Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) looking for an artifact known as the Lance of Longinus. 

They learn that it is a fake but our hero acquires one half of Archimedes' Dial, a powerful MacGuffin sought by power-mad Nazi scientist Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen). 

Much of this sequence takes place on a train at night where everything is dark and brown and muddy-looking. For this sequence, and this sequence only, Ford is de-aged using computer wizardry, witchcraft, black magic, AI and deep fake technology to look much younger than he actually is. 

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny gets off to a deeply unpromising start. My brain simply refuses to accept deep fake technology. It all just seems so wrong. I know that the technology has gotten pretty advanced, and that’s why it’s being used in one of the most expensive movies ever made but it never stopped being an annoying distraction for me. 

I also was very angry that the filmmakers have given into the Communist agenda and made Indiana Jones “woke.” In this movie he’s suddenly strongly anti-Nazi when I’m pretty sure that never came up in any of his other adventures. 

But the filmmakers have to appeal to the blue-haired, America-hating Antifa demographic, I suppose, so they have their politically correct hero hop eagerly onboard the Hitler-hating train. 

The action then moves to a theme park version of 1969 overflowing with heavy-handed period detail like a ticker tape parade for the Apollo 11 astronauts. Indiana Jones is now eighty years old but I’ve got to say that he looks great for an octogenarian. 

Indiana Jones has traded in a life of adventure and saving the world for a more solitary life of quiet reflection, grief and sadness.

Then something extremely predictable happens: Indiana Jones goes on an adventure! He swaps out his professor clothes for the iconic ensemble he has been wearing since the very beginning of the Reagan decade. 

When I first saw the elderly action hero in his old get up I got all warm and nostalgic and also it looked like Ford was grudgingly wearing an Indiana Jones costume he got at Spirit Halloween. 

That was largely my response to the film as a whole. It was weird and clunky and a lot of things in it fundamentally did not work yet due to nostalgia or craftsmanship or low expectations I found myself enjoying it all the same. 

Shia LaBeouf was so unforgettably awful and iconically obnoxious in Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull that I was almost obscenely grateful that he’s not in this one. I was just as excited that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny pairs Ford with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the dynamic cult star, creator and writer of Fleabag as Helena Shaw, the larcenous daughter of Indiana’s old pal Basil. 

Let me just say that if someone who looks like Toby Jones is Waller-Bridge’s father then her mother must be the most beautiful woman in the world and also eight feet tall because while Jones is a wonderful character actor he is not a handsome man nor is he a tall one and Waller-Bridge is both beautiful and tall.  

Before Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny I had never seen anything Waller-Bridge had ever done but now I understand why people love her. 

She’s great! She’s a wonderful addition to the franchise, funny, sexy and wildly charismatic. I also appreciate that we as a culture have evolved beyond the point where Waller-Bridge would need to Indiana Jones’ love interest despite being forty-three years younger than them. 

That would have been particularly icky considering that Indiana Jones is also her godfather and a father figure but thankfully Indiana and Helena’s relationship is one hundred percent platonic. 

Acting opposite a firecracker like Waller-Bridge forces Ford to be engaged and involved just so that he’s not blown offscreen by someone significantly less exhausted and world-weary. 

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is the first film in the franchise not to be directed by Steven Spielberg from a George Lucas story. Mangold replaces Spielberg in the director’s chair and co-wrote the screenplay with David Koepp and Jez and John-Henry Butterworth. 

As a writer and a director Mangold is a solid craftsman and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Dignity is a well-crafted piece of old fashioned entertainment. Yes, I kept worrying about Ford breaking a hip but Indiana Jones and the Dial of Dignity delivers the goods for the most part. 

Like Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, Dial of Dignity gets wacky in its third act by introducing an element that’s fantastical even by the franchise’s standards: time travel. The bad guy wants to travel back in time and live out the dream of every red-blooded American boy and kill Hitler. 

This baddie doesn’t want to prevent the Holocaust or World War II. Instead he wants to kill Hitler so that he can take over as the head of the Nazis. So he travels back and time and, in what can only be deemed a boner of epic proportions, they accidentally travel back to 212 BC instead of 1939. D’oh! I hope someone gets thrown out of a helicopter to their doom for that blunder!  

At this point things get pretty fucking stupid yet I retained a distinct fondness for the movie all the same. This is one of those movies where you don’t realize just how much is wonky and wrong until you start really thinking about it. 

So while I’m not terribly surprised that the movie is getting lukewarm reviews and disappointing box-office I am at least glad that this epic saga ends with Harrison Ford and Waller-Bridge and not Harrison Ford and Shia LeBouef. 

This may not be a transcendent or even particularly inspired send-off but, as Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull illustrated, it could be so much worse. 

Two and a half stars out of Four

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