Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is 20 minutes of brilliantly choreographed, jeopardy-filled action featuring a de-aged Harrison Ford as everyone’s favourite whip-wielding archaeologist followed by a further two hours-plus of an 80something Harrison Ford doing the same, slightly slower, with a bit more regard for tardy reflexes and a more shatter-prone skeleton. Old or young, he’s great if sometimes a bit slow, which you could say about the film too.
It’s mostly a case of back to basics, with the “basics” being, of course, the Nazis, who have set their sights on the Antikthera, the dial of Archimedes, an ancient Greek artefact long thought lost, which is powerful enough to unlock the secrets of time as well as space.
This is where the breathless first 20 minutes take place, at the back end of the Second World War, where a German colonel (Thomas Kretschmann) and his scientific adviser Dr Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) are trying to make off with a haul of ancient artefacts, pursued by Indiana Jones and sidekick Basil (Toby Jones), among the treasures Archimedes’s great invention.
Jumping forward to the late 1960s we meet Jones again, in a topless shot designed to show Ford isn’t in bad shape at all for 80 (cycling is the secret, apparently) but also to demonstrate that Indiana Jones is now an old guy. He’s been left behind by modernity – the Beatles are blaring away on his neighbours’ overloud record player and Apollo 11 has just touched down on the Moon. No one in this movie is out to pretend that Indiana Jones is still young, or even youngish. Rather, Ford seems happy to explore the meaning of ageing (pain, mostly).
Off we go again, with Indie now accompanied by his god-daughter, Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), Basil’s daughter, a vision in Lennon specs, velvet jacket, Groucho beret and spaniel hair whose ambiguous morality gives the film a bit of grit. The German Dr Voller, who’s now renamed himself Dr Schmidt (which means he’s Voller Schmidt, a joke name, surely), has also made it to the 1960s and is still in pursuit of the Antikthera, the better to go back in time and ensure that the Nazis win the war on this spin of the wheel, time paradoxes be damned.
James Mangold, who was 17 when the first film came out, directs in busy, big Spielberg style, aided enormously by John Williams’s score – all children’s matinee heroics – and oblique references are made to the first films, with a reprise of the “don’t bring a knife to a gun fight” joke, a glancing reminder of the snakes scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark and production design that brilliantly captures the look and feel of 1980s production design aping 1940s production design, especially when the action eventually shifts to Tangiers.
There is a snot-faced kid, Teddy (Ethann Isidore) and re-appearances by blasts-from-the past Karen Allen and John Rhys-Davies, as well as big-ticket current stars who seem happy to do spear-carrying work – Antonio Banderas for one, but more obviously Boyd Holbrook, who does little more than play the henchman.
It’s clearly made for the boomers, who will know who Archimedes was without being told (and also what a dial is, come to that), and they’ll also still have a trace of a memory of the old-school programme-filler serials that the whole Indiana Jones franchise feeds off. Dial of Destiny also plays to a notion of a boomer golden age, with Indie on one side with museums and other institutions believing in a public-service ethos and Helena on the other selling to the highest-bidder and the devil (or the Nazis) take the hindmost.
In short, it’s as if 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull never happened.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
