"Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny"

          ☆☆        

"And I hope when I get old I don't sit around thinking about it,

But I probably will."

— Bruce Springsteen, "Glory Days"

When Raiders of the Lost Ark burst on the scene in 1981, it breathed entirely new life into an old, tired movie genre, turning cheesy Saturday-morning serials and slapdash adventure films into something grand and new. Four decades later, we have a new Indiana Jones film, and it's sad to say that it's more like the wheezing contrivances Raiders was sending up, and is nothing grand and new.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny calls to mind The Boss's lyrics of the embarrassing inevitability of looking back instead of moving forward. "Saturday matinées" are history themselves — today's audiences haven't known them and probably weren't born when Raiders of the Lost Ark or its first two sequels were released. Who is this film for? One audience only, that I can tell: Old guys who remember the glory days of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Considered entirely on its own merits, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny fails rather spectacularly. There's no sense of character or setting, no effort to evoke a sense of urgency or consequences, no forward momentum to a story that, for all its kinetic movement, feels oddly inert. The movie is filled with a sense of fan service, of obligation. Instead of an abiding, giddy desire to take us on a new adventure, there's a dutiful and dull responsibility to hit the marks and remember the lines.

Appearances by a couple of characters from previous films feel jammed in to a story that largely borders on incomprehensible. There is a "MacGuffin," as Hitchcock used to call it — a thing that everyone in the story is after — but it's a pretty dim one here: an ancient mechanism that, we are meant to believe, can identify previously unknown "fissures in time" that appear as big reverse funnel clouds in the sky. Since this film takes place in 1969 (it begins not just in 1969, but on the day of the moon landing, no less), you'd imagine that science might have observed these strange phenomena into which entire airplanes can fly, but, nope.

The chief bad guy is a Nazi (yes, again — that's Nazis in 60% of the Indiana Jones films so far) still alive and well in 1969 and working for the U.S. government designing the rockets that take men to the moon. Now, there's an interesting story: Indiana Jones working to expose the bad guy in NASA's ranks. But that's not at all what Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny has in mind. The Nazi's motives are sketchy, but even cloudier are the motives and loyalties of Indiana Jones' goddaughter, Helena, who just happens to show up at exactly the right moment to set this convoluted story in motion.

It's impossible to fault Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny for never stopping — it is wall-to-wall action in a way that we like to recall the previous films being, even though they actually weren't. Until the final scene, there's not a moment of reflection or even explanation: when the film needs to explain something (which it frequently does), characters shout at each other while on the run.

Some characters, including one key "sidekick," appear and disappear seemingly at random, while another shows up at the last moment for a scene that tries hard to evoke real emotion, never minding that it undermines the only other moment of humanity in the film. It's false and fabricated, contrived to meet the expectations of fans, which so much of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny seems designed to do.

I've intentionally stayed away from revealing too much of the story for fear of spoiling the film for anyone yet to see it — but also because I'm not sure I understand much of it. Too many characters do and say too many things, to the point that the film seems to wind in on itself, and isn't even sure of its own trajectory. This is one strange, messy film that contains none of the assured storytelling and sharp wit that was the hallmark of the first three movies in the series.

As it nears its climax, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny goes in such a weird direction that I suddenly started thinking of the sharp and funny Bill and Ted movies. These scenes would be embarrassing except that they embrace their craziness so fully — and, oddly, they end up being the only ones in the movie I'm really likely to remember. For one weird, brief moment, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny comes fully to life, resulting in a massive choice for Indy to make. But he doesn't make it, and for the umpteenth time in an Indiana Jones movie, our hero is denied the chance to embrace his own story, deflating the film just as it should be reaching its climax.

For the most part, Indiana Jones is a long, lumbering, confusing escape room puzzle. It often seems inspired less by its own predecessors than by The DaVinci Code and National Treasure. That both of those films were, in turn, trying to evoke the spirit of Indiana Jones films seems at once illuminating and awfully depressing.

Indiana Jones has had some glory days. Now, it really is past time for him to hang up that hat for good.

Viewed July 2, 2023 — AMC Topanga 12

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