Indiana Jones and the Dial of Disappointment

So...Indiana Jones and the Dial of Disappointment. The film no one asked for.

Let me preface this. My brother and I grew up on Raiders of the Lost Ark. We had never seen anything like it before and it captivated us in a way that few films other than Star Wars had. I still consider it a perfect movie. It transformed cinema and gave us a new hero who we all wanted to be. He was a hero without super powers, just a guy, a professor with immense skill, knowledge and fearlessness to achieve something rare and precious. Something magic had entered into the world and we were different people after that movie. I wore a fedora in high school and my brother became a stunt actor and master of the whip because of this film, so I take this seriously.

I don’t like not liking things so let’s get this over with.

If you’re looking for a film where a beloved character despite his age has one last call to adventure where the stakes are high and raises up a younger protegee who learns from the master and in the end earns the right to be the hero by hard work, humility and sacrifice...You’re not going to get that.

What you will get is a washed up, broken, Indiana Jones where all passion and spark has long since vanished and now at the end of his career just drinks too much and yells at his teenage neighbors. The Indiana Jones of Raiders is long gone. He is no longer viewed as a hero nor even respected by his peers and students. It follows the new Lucas Film playbook of destroying our legendary heroes (ie. Luke Skywalker and Han Solo) and reducing them to hollow shadows of themselves for the sake of comic relief and mockery. This is not how they should go out. No hero’s exit. No respect.

What you will also get is an insufferable, arrogant, mercenary co-lead in Phoebe Waller Bridge playing Indie’s god-daughter Helena. This could have worked if she wasn’t such a know it all tool. If you thought from the previews she’d be a plucky sardonic side-kick you’ve been lied to. She has no respect or admiration for Indie. He’s merely useful to her for her selfish purposes and any time she “helps” it’s purely out of self interest. She is the antithesis of Indie in almost every respect. She lacks all integrity, character and intentionally demeans Indie at every turn. She mocks his age, mocks his sudden lack of knowledge and gleefully throws her superior intellect in his face at every turn and the film just forces him take it. Welcome to the anti-Indy.

The filmmakers ignored a critical opportunity for a character arc for Helena, but they clearly weren’t interested in one. All great characters have an arc where they fail, have set backs and grow but no, she’s just perfect as is. Apparently narcissism is all a hero needs now. Does she suffer consequences for her arrogant bravado only to learn and transform? Does she finally see the wisdom and experience in Indie to become someone of integrity and become a true hero? Nope. She’s just as obnoxious, mercenary and selfish at the end as she was in the beginning. This is Traitors of the Lost Character Arc.

Leaving the theater it took awhile for the pieces to settle into place. It was like leaving your principals office where they convinced you you were wrong only to get down the block and realize you were lied to. The film makes you think it’s enjoyable at first but given enough space you realize its betrayal. Was it fun? Sure, but only in fragments. The opening twenty minutes I thought were solid. It could have easily been right of Raiders. The de-aged Harrison Ford fighting nazis on a train is flawless and a technical achievement. It was fast paced and had all the daring exploits, set backs and triumphs you would expect from an Indiana Jones movie. As always Hitler wants ancient mystical relics which this dial of destiny is and Indy with the help of his friend Basil (Toby Jones) they steal it from the train and make their escape. It’s a film that technically works, but just barely. And at 2 ½ hours it can be a slog. But ultimately for all its watchability, it’s soulless and craven in the destruction of a character we have loved for decades.

The movie centers around the Dial of Destiny, an ancient artifact created by Greek mathematician and physicist Archimedes which is legend to allow the user to time travel. It’s based on the true discovery of the “Antikythera mechanism,” found off the coast of Greece in 1901 and is believed to be the first analog “computer” with complex mechanisms allowing for the calculations of astronomical positions and eclipses among other things.

The hitch is that the Dial is broke into two pieces. Indie has one piece and the other half is out there somewhere. The nazis now want it back and so does Helena and the race is on.

I’ll probably stray into SPOILERS here so read at your peril…

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So after the opening train sequence we’re back in present day 1969 and Indy is just a washed up grumpy alcoholic with divorce papers from Marion. Then Helena happens and everything becomes intolerable. She wants this dial not because it has significance but because she just wants to make money off of it and become famous. She manipulates him into retrieving it from a shelf where it was hidden for decades but for reasons that are not entirely clear, Indy never pursued finding the other half. The reason seems to be that it drove Basil crazy and that there was no “there there” in his estimation. At least that was my take. Unlike pursuing the Ark of the Covenant, the dial’s purpose at this stage is still sort of vague and overly conceptual so its importance doesn’t carry a lot of weight which makes the pursuit of the other half lacking in sufficient emotional gravity. Maybe I missed something.

Anyways, the nazis show up looking for it and start shooting innocent staff members because that’s what nazis do. Why pursue this now after all this time? Don’t know. Likely because Helena had some sexual dalliance back in Northern Africa where she was dealing illegally in relics and put the dial back on the nazi’s radar, namely Dr. Voller’s (Mads Mikkelsen) who Indy punched out on the train but is now a prominent scientist who oversaw the first moon landing. So as the shooting begins Helena double crosses Indy and steals the dial, locks him in the room with the nazis and leaves him to be potentially murdered. She got what she wanted so screw him. And with that the Helena character is dead to me. The film continues to depict her as a protagonist and just asks us to accept it because she’s oh, so witty and clever. Fuck you, movie.

Well, Indy naturally finds a way to escape and the entire second act is a protracted gadget fetch where he never calls her out on her betrayal since he now seems to no longer have any agency. So a a gadget fetch... You’re looking for a thing that requires you look for the next thing to lead you to the last thing. The problem with this is that it’s tedious and your story just meanders. It’s like the maddening side quests in a video game where you are pursuing the bad guy but have to stop to fix a pump system in order to make progress. It’s the same mistake they made with The Force Awakens where the story just stops for a third of the film when they have to find some random part in order for the plot to advance. In the case of Dial this involves impossible chance encounters that challenge credulity. How did the nazis find them in the middle of the ocean with no possibility of doing so? How did Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) show up at the precise right time to aid Indy? Don’t ask questions we’re Lucas Films, you peasants.

Yeah, there are fun chases and action sequences though they play a little too long, seem self indulgent and are cringy for an 80 year old guy. We’re also introduced to Teddy (Ethann Isadore) who is a kind of a proxy for Short Round from The Temple of Doom. He’s a great young actor but also portrayed as the magical kid who can figure anything out without effort. At one point towards the end he manages to hot wire a plane (which I’m not sure is a thing) and fly it through a storm towards a time portal and pulls it out of a full tumbling stall and he accomplishes all this from a one time lesson from a drunken pilot in a brothel over fake controls made of beer coasters. There’s suspension of disbelief but this is seismically impossible. Granted he had help from a pilot who was conveniently asleep in the back seat and didn’t wake up until the plot called for it but dear God.

Now, the locations and sets are rich and immersive and there are genuine moments of emotion, namely when Indy describes why he would want to go back in time to prevent his son dying in the war which led to the break up of his marriage. It was genuinely moving even though it was simply emotionally convenient to the scene. Helena listens with some analog of sympathy and the filmmakers lean on this to make her more likable, but their mistake is that this glimpse of fleeting compassion isn’t redemptive to her character. She doesn’t change and continues to be a self centered, narcissistic, money hungry dick. And to further her descent, when Indie’s friend Renaldo (Antonio Banderas) gets murdered and Helena nearly gets them all killed by setting off a stick of dynamite on his ship, they make their escape in a boat with her being all smug and self congratulatory until Indy has to remind her that his close friend was just murdered. She muses over this for about a second and is then, well whatevs and smirks. Is cold flippancy another trait you want in your main lead? Her character just becomes more detestable as the film progresses.

They eventually find Archimedes’ tomb and recover the second half of the dial while battling it out with Dr. Voller and his goons. It’s been revealed by this point that Voller wants to go back in time to kill Hitler and lead the nazis to victory himself since Hitler botched it and lost the war. This is thematically problematic and I don’t think the writers thought this through. Essentially, if our heroes are successful in gaining control over the dial...they save Hitler. Awkward. A lot more happened but I don’t have the patience to get into it. Regardless the Dial is now complete and functioning and our heroes escape with it.

Then we get to the third act. Fuck me.

Now, I’m not sure what happened here but I’ve got a pretty good guess and I think acid in the writers room may have had something to do with it. I won’t go into too many details, but the film now strays into absurdo land. But we do get one delightful bit when Helena punches Indy out when he entirely gives up on life and just wants to die. So much for the hero's journey.

For months there have been inside rumors of all the changes being made to the film. Potentially six different endings, rewrites, reshoots and this ending came up the least detestable. Not a way to make a film. You end up with a patchwork narrative made by committee with uneven tone and it shows. Director James Mangold does his best but he’s out his element with the constant changes and demands. One version purportedly had Indie dying in the past only for Helena to take his place and relive all his highlights as herself, basically erasing Indie altogether from his own story, and ultimately give all the relics he “stole” back to their indigenous peoples and take the helm as the future Indiana Jones. Apparently the test audiences vomited at that and so Lucas Films went with this head scratching ending instead.

It’s not that it didn’t work on some level, but it didn’t feel like part of the same film. I sat in the theater thinking, “Hm. Well I guess that was a choice.” But it’s an adventure film with no dramatic climax. It doesn’t so much have an ending as it just...stops. It gives us no real closure for the series and we’re just left with a baffling vagueness played for nostalgia.

Dial exists in some bizzarro land between likability and insult never quite knowing what it wanted to be or who its audience was but three agendas were painfully clear. 1. Bilk as much money as they can from the franchise before Harrison Ford dies. 2. Destroy Indiana Jones as a relic of the past to make way for: 3. Introducing a plucky young replacement to carry the franchise into the future. They succeeded on 2 but failed on 1 and 3. As much as I liked Phoebe Waller Bridge in Fleabag, she basically plays the same character except without the self sabotage. But she’s not an heroic actress. She is inherently snarky and lacks the nuance and gravitas of some other actresses who could have carried this forward. I think of Julia Garner (Ozark and Inventing Anna) as well as Jodie Comer (Killing Eve which was ironically written by Waller Bridge) or even Anya Taylor-Joy (The Queen’s Gambit). I can think of a dozen others.

But the biggest fail was writing an intrinsically selfish and narcissistic character who was the polar opposite of Indy and portray them as a hero. This was done by design. “Kill the past” has been Lucas Film’s MO from the time Disney bought it. I knew it then but it’s brutally obvious now and I lay the blame squarely at the feet of Kathleen Kennedy. Once the trusted producer of films like ET and Jurassic Park, she was Lucas and Spielberg’s right hand person. She got the job done and did a damn fine job. But something broke when Disney bought Lucas Film. As opposed to working with others as a team or a companion to an auteur, she was now the boss with virtually unlimited resources and it all went horribly awry. She then became the franchise vandal, kicking Lucas’ vision to the curb in favor of some personal agenda. Well now she no longer has any more franchises to destroy. This was her last and if this thing doesn’t crest a billion dollars (which it basically needs to but won’t) she will likely be out at Lucas Film and I won’t shed a tear. Lucas Films no longer has any more franchises to kill now. This was it and is a potent sign of late stage Hollwood where originality and vision are almost entirely absent and everything is a sequel of a sequel. Like an alcoholic ripping open the cheap box of wine to crush the last dribbles out of it. I of course fault no one for liking this. I've loved films that everyone I know hates. But ultimately for me, Dial of Destiny was a ride without any destination and an insulting desecration of our favorite hero. Indy deserved better and so did we.