"You know what I hear, Indy? No screaming from the comments section, no clickity-clack of someone working on Photoshops of you with the Discovery Channel psuedo-scientist's hair shouting, 'Aliens!,' and no absurd YouTube performer who desperately needs skin conditioning bantering for 3 hours about how I've done monstrous sexual acts to their childhood. Do you know why I can't hear those things, Indy? Because we've taken out all abhorrent elements, and everyone else they've blamed for this has been shouted away from the franchise." *Shoots Indiana Jones*
-Presumably one of the producers of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, sounding weirdly like a monologue from Steven Spielberg's Minority Report repurposed for this article.
It is time to download my brain on the topic of the final Indiana Jones movie. This space is where I do writing gymnastics away from word counts, audience considerations, and all rules that discourage constant personal anecdotes and overt individual expressions. I make these things to come to peace with my full thoughts, and where and when I swerve in and out of them is up to me. I was trying to edit down from 7,000 words, but I instead built more structure to make it OVER 9,000 if that tells you anything.
This has been sitting with disconnected, long strings of thoughts for a few weeks before my self-imposed deadline of its digital release that I'm late for. I was looking for something to drive it, something symbolic, and the algorithms found me this, as a watch collector and an Indiana Jones fan:
For $750, you can have THE watch Indiana Jones wears in the new movie that he got from his father! It's the WATCH Dial of Destiny! Does it look great and iconic? Well, no. Does it do anything special? That's up to interpretation, I guess, but not really. Does it have some historical coolness to it? Given watch historians are tearing up the accuracy of how it's used in the film on Hamilton's comment section, I'm guessing no.
Why does this cost so much? Did the people in charge of product placement cast random lines and see who bit like that Applebees cross-promotion? If you're okay with not having big-dick American watch dials, I can find you recreations of Swiss and Italian retro designs that give that "mature man of the world" swag for $30-50 with easily-attained coupons. For the bigger dial, it goes to about $100-150, and for that, I can get you a boss design based on airplanes that go great with adventurer wear. This is so plain that I have to put the picture of the watch in this article so I remember what it looks like.
Welcome to the Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny experience.
Maybe it's we've discovered almost everything on the surface of the Earth, but adventure films have struggled for the past two decades. I say this not to be a contrarian: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is possibly the best archaeological adventure since 1999's The Mummy. Besides stating that I like it, which will cause most people to immediately disengage with this article, it's not something I say as a compliment.
"Hey, Joe, what about Atlantis: The Lost Empire?" Hmmmm, that's a good point. I still get hung up on all the elders forgetting how to read as a plot point (Around a thousand years of living is old enough to have degenerative brain issues, sure, but that raises about 20 more questions...). I really enjoy it, though, and I'm not going to argue if you consider it better. But what else have we got? Tomb of the Dragon Emperor? Lara Croft and the Cradle of Life?
Even with that exception, it's mostly not a good list of movies, and you would have to get technicalities like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow that are more based on the same well of serials that inspired Indiana Jones than an archaeological action adventure to bulk them up. Plus, that's ONLY a movie for sick bastards like me who need more German Expressionism angles and early 20th century steampunk.
I've watched Kingdom of the Crystal Skull more than enough to be 1000% aware of its flaws. Retired master cinematographer Douglas Slocombe is hard to replace, and Janusz Kaminski, despite being a lighting wizard, does not understand the deep field, detailed aesthetic. What we get is something that matches his team-ups with Spielberg at the time with one dominant color and lots of over-exposed light giving a layer of unreality to everything on top of obvious bursts of CG; not ideal for an Indiana Jones movie. The stream of drafts from a variety of names flows into voiceless screenwriter David Koepp where one damn thing falls onto another without regards to pacing or meaning. There are even long stretches of weirdly poor research (The Nazca DESERT PLAINS are terribly represented with steep hills and stormy weather, Spanish invaders are mummified like honored guests, John Williams' score is 3,000 miles off the mark, etc.). Then again, Spielberg does occasionally drop his historian cap with things like Venetian catacombs (Venice has underground graves like New Orleans has underground graves), so maybe it's not as off the mark as I assume. All of this is on top of what you already know.
HOWEVER, it is a pretty solid adventure film. It goes places, shows us stuff we've never seen before, it takes big swings even if a third of them backfire, it has character even if ONE of the actors is horribly miscast, and there are enough bursts of filmmaking from Spielberg despite it seeming like a favor for Lucas. Maybe my satisfaction was helped by the last paper I did in high school about what the KGB worked on during the Cold War, but they did a solid job at subbing in Russians for the Nazis, and people who throw the word Communism around like a beach ball on Twitter whenever discussing government programs didn't understand it. There's more I could say about that, but these paragraphs are getting awfully long for a former newspaper man.
That one of the Nazca tomb guards who has a breakdance style of martial arts apparently based on fact is played by Ernie Reyes Jr., the kid from Surf Ninjas, is more interesting than anything I can discuss about Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
The latest film in the franchise is something that has most of its limbs chopped off before anyone can go out on them. It's too afraid to be yelled at to even make a copy of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The first 25 minutes takes place at the end of World War II with Harrison Ford in de-aging special effects going through, essentially, an action sequence expected of an Indiana Jones movie. It's visually darker than Slocombe would allow so the effects aren't Tron: Legacy's Jeff Bridges face awkward, but Indiana Jones disguising himself as a German officer to varying degrees of success to get the Lance of Longinus (An object that drew the blood of Christ, and would later become a Neon Genesis Evangelion weapon) is what we expect and what it delivers.
Then the movie changes its mind. We're introduced to the villain Dr. Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), a Nazi scientist who is too insufferable for even the Nazis as he tries to convince his superiors the real historical item of value to Hitler is the second half of an Antikythera dial (Henceforth known as Archimedes' Dial for convenience) that he says will make its owner a god through mathematics. Like the movie itself, Voller has trouble explaining what it does, and the matter gets punted when Indiana Jones steals Voller's half and World War II comes to its end.
We jump ahead to 1969, and Indiana is living in a small New York City apartment by himself teaching archaeology at Hunter college to sleeping students while everyone else focuses on the future with the Moon landing. For what's happened to everyone else you know, I'll get to them in a bit, some later than sooner. Meanwhile, the U.S. are helped to the moon by Dr. Voller, who was secretly brought into NASA by the government (Based on real-life Nazi Wernher von Braun). Sneering at his American name "Dr. Schmidt" and telling a black bellboy that Hitler lost World War II and the Americans didn't win it, he clearly hasn't discarded his roots. Hanging out with a handful of obvious Nazis including who I think is a former student from his stint at the University of Alabama (By far the biggest laugh in the movie), Voller now has time to get Archimedes' Dial at conveniently the same moment Indiana Jones' goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) returns to Indy's life.
Before we continue, I think it's better to stop and discuss what this movie gets wrong at this point to keep it from dragging the conversation when we've well passed this section of the movie.
There was MUCH discussion of what an Indiana Jones movie is or isn't with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and how much do you want to put Temple of Doom into the equation. By my own admittance, Crystal Skull does plenty wrong. Thanks to the maelstrom of drafts culled into one movie, the clear line through the narrative gets a little hazy in the middle, and there are a few scenes like the bola-tossing tribesmen that are gigantic, "Why is this here?" moments. Ultimately, though, I can call it an Indiana Jones movie because it's about Indiana Jones and his friends of various colorful backgrounds and morality who ultimately come together with clear stakes to stop villains who are shadows of Indy himself backed by a group who want to wipe out all opposition reckoning with forces way beyond them.
I'm sure MILLIONS of people, including the makers, were waiting for my declaration or whether it was or was not a part of the series.
This is all to underline why here is where Dial of Destiny begins to lose the idea of what an Indiana Jones movie is in exchange for more modern ideas of popular fiction. I don't know if this was some sort of private joke, but the switch from the Lance of Longinus to Achimedes' Dial seems like a passing of the torch from the classic version of a MacGuffin to the J.J. Abrams' mystery box of mystery where there are lines that explain what it might do, but it's never made clear because possible reshoots, producer mandates, or writer's room squabbles might change it at any moment.
The titular Dial of Destiny is given a cumbersome name, the movie gets through about two-thirds of its runtime before spitting out what it does, and what it's said it does is NOT what it actually does. The last part can be boiled down to disputed claims about whether the climax was completely reshot, which is a John Williams said, director James Mangold said, Harrison Ford said situation. WE'LL GET TO THAT. What this evolves into is a movie that is unsure what the stakes are and why we're on this journey.
Now, for the first of what happened to Indy's people. He lives alone, separated from his wife Marion, and we don't know if Mutt Jones has returned to his home planet yet. Indy's nice to the staff at Hunter, but his only true friend is Sallah, who came over with his family after World War II to become a taxi driver (...No matter how beloved, minorities always have to be the driver, huh?). At least his goddaughter from his good friend Basil (Toby Jones) who helped him in World War II is here... and she immediately steals Indy's half of the dial to sell it to the criminal underworld while having a quiet disdain for Indy. Oh yeah, and Voller has called in the mother of all favors by having the CIA keep tabs on Jones led by Mason (Shaunette Renee Wilson), a black woman who can easily disappear on the streets of New York City. There are people who will tell you a black woman wasn't hired by the CIA until years later, but that's just what they want you to think. Seriously, you don't believe ANYTHING the government says until a black woman is cast in an Indiana Jones movie?
Everything pours out onto a, "WE LANDED ON THE MOON!!!" parade. The chase, until it gets into the subway, is pretty good. I imagine since Spielberg was conveniently doing West Side Story just before this, he was able to loan assets of his detailed recreation of 1960's New York City to the project. It is one of the few times there are moments of physical tension and the surroundings don't feel like everything needs a taplight or two. I love that some of the bad guys are disguised as ConEd workers (ConEd: New York City's greatest villain for over 50 years).
Indy does use a Vietnam protest to escape from the layers of pursuers as a humorous moment, which is curiously strange given what we know later, but it works. It's when we get to the subway that we're introduced to what the rest of the movie's action sequences will look like. Indy is on horseback going down a subway track racing a train. Everything's a gold/brown glaze, you can't see anything but the essentials, and it all feels unreal with few human (or horse) details. One of the best traits of an Indiana Jones movies is the constant reminder Indy is just a dude who constantly gets scratched up and beaten down, and even with Spielberg's most outrageous scenes in Crystal Skull, it still remembers there are people going through the meat grinder.
I've seen Mangold's Logan and Knight and Day, and his action sequences were FINE. Yeah, Logan's action wasn't really the focus, and Knight and Day is an entirely different kind of movie, but why does something that cost $300 million look like this? This is what the movie's vision is from this point: Muted palette, whiteout filtering on background details, everything's zoomed in too close, and... miles of darkness. Caves, underwater exploration, cloudy days, and overall a movie that would theoretically CRUSH on an OLED monitor if there were 25% more visible. I get the first 20 minutes where Mangold is using what he learned on Logan with Wolverine fighting a younger, bloodthirsty clone of himself. De-aging special effects have serious uncanny valley reactions if you don't kick some grit into it. The rest... looks darker than the climax of Logan even though the material doesn't really warrant it.
There is also this strand of works in the past 10 years that suffer from what I call The Last of Us syndrome, for lack of a better name. Following dramatic, operatic TV series like The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad, there have been works of depressing, self-flagilation narratives by white writers where the lives of minorities and the fate of humanity are merely one piece of the mosaic in the portrait of a flawed white guy. The Last of Us is my go-to as an example since, despite all the accolades, the game and the series are well-made depression porn that make minorities, women, and gay characters Greek tragedy figures seemingly trapped under the machinations of Joel's choices that took "#Joelwasright" debates before realizing they'd created a monster. That's not to mention it makes up reasons mankind deserves to be doomed. I can't walk five blocks without finding one reason or another humans deserve to end; making up a grossly inaccurate method of creating a vaccine is dangerous and lazy.
WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH INDIANA JONES, JOSEPH?! I'll tell you. After the New York chase, Indy has to go to Tangier to get to an illegal goods auction before Helena hawks it to the highest bidder, likely Voller and his Nazis. Having a chat about it, Sallah begs Indy to go with him. Apparently, actor John Rhys-Davies similarly pushed the makers to give him a bigger role. Indy refuses because reasons. It's not like the former EGYPTIAN deal maker wouldn't have contacts in AFRICA. We can't have an Indiana Jones movie where he and his good friend Sallah reflect on all they've lost and all they still have while reigniting the fire in their lives on a world-spanning adventure. Who would want to watch that? We have to make Indiana Jones alone, afraid, and having to force himself to continue on at the end of his life, even though he really doesn't have to.
By the way, at this point, Indiana Jones is framed by the CIA for murdering some Hunter faculty the Nazis killed, and this is never an issue or even brought up again. I felt the movie forgetting our hero is wanted for capital crimes needed underlining. I'm guessing the implication the federal government placating Nazis at the expense of one of America's greatest heroes was too much "modern" political commentary for some suits at Disney... suits at Disney who are getting endlessly hounded by the very Nazis they're trying to soothe. This is so much better than aliens, guys.
Now to MINOR SPOILER territory. In Tangier, this is theoretically when the movie is supposed to really get cooking. Indy disrupts the auction in a playful three-way tug-of-war for the dial, which leads to a taxi chase through Tangier you likely saw parts of in the trailer. To be honest, aside from a few chuckles, I didn't have much of a reaction to any of it.
The Tangier chase is probably the most obviously shot on a soundstage sequence in Indiana Jones history with constant cuts to nondescript street corners with nobody around for vehicles to plow through, and even the money shots of Indy jumping from one vehicle to another are hampered by the background of the city that is blindingly overexposed, feeling like it's hiding all the filmmaking strings. Nothing makes me feel like I'm in the moment, the bad guys for the one sequence are given less character with more screentime than people Spielberg could establish with one shot, and there is nothing that underlines the narrative the makers are trying to push.
Before I continue, I want to make a couple points clear: Nobody gives a bad performance in this movie. All the actors are good, though their characters either get shafted or are oddly out of place. Helena is based on a character from a 1940's film who seems wrong for 1969. I get nobody wants another Mutt, but how the film retracts the date and context into a timeless bubble where any Indiana Jones movie could take place pushes back on the very point it's trying to make about Jones being a relic. Also, no matter what I say, it's a two-star movie that has some wit and invention, but it is also immensely disappointing, which makes what I say sharper. I'm not going to make pointed personal comments about the makers or whatever, and merely go by Spike Lee's constant quote when asked why his version of Old Boy got an hour cut out and was dumped in theaters even after those compromises: "HOLLYWOOD. IS. A. TOUGH. BUSINESS."
The long, winding road of this review is to point out it's not Crystal Skull and you can't point at obvious flaws and say that's what wrong. WE HAVE TO GO DEEPER.
After Tangier, it becomes clear the movie's not going to recover. Voller gets his funding for his little mission cut by the U.S. for refusing to visit the President to celebrate the Moon landing. One would think, after CIA agent Mason figures out Voller's crazy, she would switch sides and help Indy. Nope. She gets shot and bleeds out. Oh, look, another minority character taken out of the mix. Who would want to watch an Indiana Jones movie where he teams with a superfly rogue CIA agent to kick Nazi ass? We do have a Temple of Doom-esque setup where Indy and Helena find a pickpocket in Tangier named Teddy they meet when he's doing ID check at the illegal antiquities auction who tags along. I'd like to note in a seamless, subtle bit of screenwriting that Teddy does his job while messing around with a mock version of a plane cockpit he knows by heart. Do you get the feeling this might come into play later?
I don't ask for much here. In my mind I kept thinking about simple fixes. Have Teddy identify the plane flying overhead by the sound of its engine when they're en route to the next location, get into a conversation with Indy about how Teddy loves planes, and he was about to steal one when he found out it belonged to a gangster who gave him his choice of his current job or death. Have Indy respond, "Boy, I learned Greek before I was in grade school, and how you kids get so smart so fast amazes me," or something. He's Indiana Jones! He speaks whatever language the screenplay needs. There, that's establishing a relationship between the characters while putting a little point for later, and having Last Crusade, "Fly, yes! Land, no!" callbacks. Is it great? No, but it's better than having Ethann Isidore do nothing but be sneaky every five minutes and smile.
On the villains' end, a great actor like Mads Mikkelsen is also given the bare minimum. He's assigned to being a Nazi scientist who despite being too smart for the Nazis, is the leader of his band because he's the one with a plan. They do nothing with this dynamic but give him a one-liner about how he doesn't want to go back to Alabama. Aside from Mola Ram, the Indiana Jones villain is usually a shadow of Jones who doesn't necessarily believe in whatever national power or evil force backs him, but still gets thrown in with them anyway because their justifications are shallow excuses for their ego and the fortune and glory Indiana at the beginning of Temple of Doom searched for. I figured out an easy way to fix this, too. Have Voller's whole thing being a scientist and mathematician bent the wrong direction by his obsessiveness for order.
Here's a free monologue written by me in FIVE MINUTES that supports that: "Look at them. They're moronic psychopaths looking to hold onto any reason everything that's happened to them isn't their fault. *Pointing at buzzcut with mustache* He failed my courses three times, but still follows me around like a puppy with a pistol because he thinks it's because schools are unsegregated now. But they give the world one thing I can't: Order. Look at everything. The nuclear threat that hangs over our heads from fighting over who lands on a rock in space. Remember what happened to your son in Vietnam. It needs order, and I'm the only one who grants the world the ability to have it."
MAJOR SPOILER TIME, BY THE WAY.
Oh yeah, Mutt Jones died in Vietnam, and that's what's broken up the Jones family. The scenes where they address the actual pain the death in family caused are great. They are also islands in this archipelago of a movie that only connects the scenes in the most basic of senses. An hour ago in runtime, a Vietnam protest was used as a comedic beat by Indy to escape the CIA and the Nazis. Also, according to Indy, Mutt wasn't drafted, but signed up "to piss him off." The conflict couldn't be Indy was a captain in the U.S. military in WWII and did his duty to fight evil, and when his son was drafted into Vietnam, he pushed extra-hard for his son to not dodge it, feeling responsible for his death in a war that doesn't make sense. This couldn't be the last straw in feeling like he's in a world he doesn't understand anymore. This would also be a good point for Voller to try to push Jones, and Jones, who's seen way too many scumbags using such weak excuses for the murder and enslavement of millions, gets his resolve back. But we can't even be close to making any political statements about anything, can we?
Here's another free line from me off the top of my head that would support this: "I've seen the power of God... the power of MULTIPLE gods. But nothing has been more beyond me than dealing with the death of my son."
We can't have nice things because we must flog the horrible character the audience hates to his grave. It was all his fault and we hate him, even though his initial dislikeability was part of the point. Mutt Jones was made to be everything Indiana hates and continuing the cycle from his father Henry who was overly bookish, careful, and strict in opposition to him being adventurous, personable, and skipping the HELL out on his professor job. Yeah, us snobs got a whole scene in David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return where we all got a good laugh at Michael Cera unironically being a greaser for a long take, and we didn't need any winks to know what it was referencing. However, did no one consider that being an inauthentic try-hard in comparison to Indy's post Teddy Roosevelt Boy Scout history was intentional?
Since we spend most of these movies from Indy's point of view, we dislike Mutt, and yeah, Shia LeBeouf being no Sean Connery is an understatement. But like how Last Crusade Indy comes to an understanding with his father even if he can never have a deep personal conversation with him, they do the same in Crystal Skull with his son, though definitely to lesser effect. If they really wanted to go down the depressing white man road instead of a stream of poor excuses why Indy has to have no good friends backing him up, have Indy believe that the reconnection makes it his fault his son died, which causes him to push others away because he can't take further responsibility for what happens to the people he cares about. While I think killing Mutt is more of an extreme move than they needed, it's not just that they did it, but how they did it that felt like a mandate more than a fluid part of the story.
We come to the point where I've actually forgotten what happens in an Indiana Jones movie as an obsessive fan, and had to look up what happened in order. They're in a race to get the second half of the dial, which leads through Greece and another unimpressive action sequence that's way too dark. They also have the ONE map sequence that feels like someone made them do it because it HAS to be in an Indiana Jones movie, despite foregoing other visual trademarks. I GET Disney probably nixing the Paramount logo fading into something, but either we are doing a harder version of Indiana Jones figuring out what his life has amounted to, or we're doing a straight Indiana Jones movie. The project trying to meet everything in the middle causes it to keep stalling out. I'm trying to understand the vision here, and I CAN'T SEE SHIT!
AHEM. Eventually, they have to get to a shipwreck and need a diver to get them there. Indiana has a friend to help, and he's played by ANTONIO BANDERAS who gets third billing! That must mean he serves an important function and they gave something nice to one of our most charismatic actors. This is where the movie's going to redeem itself.... He's gonna' die in 15 minutes without doing much, isn't he? Dammit.
Yes, after Antonio Banderas' Renaldo hooks them up with Scuba gear and gets them to another series of dark scenes with choppy editing, the Nazis catch up and kill Renaldo. Were they prevented from writing characters of different nationalities or races? Did they just think, "Oh, we're white, so we shouldn't be doing this?" Tell that to the writers of the recent and beloved beloved Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, I guess. How do movies that are 30 minutes longer with faster editing have so much less character in them?! The film has such a blah color palette that I thought they'd actually brought back Jock from Raiders in a long shot if that tells you how much Antonio Banderas' presence affects the movie. Them killing Jock would've had more resonance and meaning if they weren't going to bother to make a better character for a THIRD-BILLED,WORLD-FAMOUS ACTOR than an extremely minor role who had three seconds of screen time fishing followed by a couple lines talking about his pet snake Reggie. Just sayin'.
Lit like the theoretical ocean beneath the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa, we have an underwater scene that's supposed to make us scared of electric eels like we got scared of snakes and insects in the previous movies. It's so poorly done with absolutely zero tactile threat by the eels that I missed the CG ants in Crystal Skull. Them dragging the massive Russian guy under at least conveyed how terrifying they were even if the shot itself looks fake as hell. Anyway, when they have what they need, the Nazis come upon them, capture them, and it has this fake scene of Helena betraying Indy while secretly helping him with forced tension. Speaking of which, there's a member of Voller's Nazi club who looks EXACTLY like that giant Russian. Are they... are they copying Kingdom of the Crystal Skull?
The trail leads to Archimedes' tomb in Syracuse (Uh, Sicily, not New York), where we get some archaeological action adventure in this archaeological action adventure. It looks like they flipped the breaker and everything has to be shot with the help of the neighbor's porch light, though.
Okay, I've been sticking on this point for awhile now, so I might as well get the rest of it out and let's move on. I need to, or it's not going to stop. I have to get this out of my hyperfocus. WHY DOES A $300 MILLION FILM IN ONE OF THE FRANCHISES THAT SET THE STANDARD OF HOW TO MAKE AND SHOOT ACTION MOVIES LOOK LIKE A $10 GRINDHOUSE FEATURE ABOUT MUTANT CAVE BATS SHOT DURING THE 70'S ENERGY CRISIS HALF THE TIME?! MY FIELD PRODUCTION PROFESSOR USED THE TRUCK SEQUENCE FROM RAIDERS AS THE PINNACLE OF HOW TO ASSEMBLE A FILM, AND HERE WE HAVE SOMETHING THAT IS AN EXAMPLE OF HOW TO MAKE THE MEDITERRANEAN LOOK LIKE THE MIDDLE OF BEAVER LAKE AT NOON IN JULY!
Speaking of aesthetics, you know what name attached to Indiana Jones has been missing from 99.9% of this review? John Williams. The score is... fine. The only thing that stood out is the beginning of the New York City chase has a motif from Minority Report of all things. At his age, Williams isn't even conducting anymore, and I'm simply happy he's been given enough life to keep composing. That said, this movie doesn't inspire memorable music as the only elaborate new addition is "Helena's Theme", and if you put a gun to my head and told me to hum it, pull the trigger, 'cause I got nothin' even if it's spread all over the movie. I can whistle the brass and pan flute music that's inaccurate to South America in Crystal Skull if you need to test my film score nerd credit.
Where were we? Ah, Archimedes' tomb. We get some fun puzzle solving, an actual scary creature scene with some insects even if it's diet Temple of Doom, and tantalizing details of what's to come with Archimedes' tomb covered with dragons that look like modern airplanes and Archimedes having possession of a modern wristwatch. It seems we have time travel afoot!
But even with these sequences, the word that comes to mind when watching Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is forced. I know I've been all over the map, but it all links into this idea that movie feels like an obligation built out of not wanting the franchise to end with aliens. Before we get to the climax and ending, WHICH HAS TO BE ITS OWN DAMN SECTION BECAUSE HOO BOY, I have to discuss what seems to be the major problem here is there likely wasn't one script they took and went with despite what the initial announcement and interviews for the film would make it seem.
A huge mistake critics of the Siskel and Ebert variety screaming at the screenplay make is not realizing EVERYTHING changes once a movie's greenlit, for better and worse. From one of the screenwriters of Blade Runner 2049 working with the actors every day to make the dialogue fit better to the script of Quantum of Solace being "unofficially" rewritten by Daniel Craig and Marc Forster after it was turned in just before that year's writer's strike, the screenplay that gets the movie approved rarely keeps itself 75% or even 50% intact in many cases. While Dial of Destiny's process wasn't as infamously public as Kingdom of the Crystal Skull's parade of names such as M. Night Shyamalan (I like to think he was the one that floated the barely-there idea the Crystal Skull alien was Jesus and the rest of them were his disciples), clearly there was serious internal "massaging" of the script during production.
When the film's concept was announced to the public, the people who made the script that got greenlit were brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, who've worked on various projects such as Mangold's Ford v Ferrari. From the interviews, it seemed what they were the ones who keyed in on is the idea of Nazis being in 1969 America through NASA. It was curious to me they went with this, since the idea of putting straight sci-fi into Indiana Jones was so thoroughly pushed back on in the previous entry. It turns out it's mostly background context, as is most anything else that would even theoretically stick out, including Vietnam and race relations at the time.
NOTE: Everything I say about the script from this point on is theoretical, and I feel like I'm trying to explain how a bowl got broken a year ago by looking at what still hasn't been cleaned.
It's probably a factor Spielberg himself was set to direct before the pandemic delayed the ready-to-go film for years, and after they switched to Mangold, Spielberg was extremely hand-off with the project, leaving Mangold with the Disney/Lucasfilm execs. These are the people who scrapped whatever plans they had for what became The Rise of Skywalker after the response of the toxic fans to Last Jedi (Despite being a massive financial and critical success) made them blink, bringing in J.J. Abrams to do an extremely expensive rushjob that pleased almost no one. By the way, the response to THAT and Solo-so micromanaged, the initial directors were thrown out after making 20% of the movie-cancelled Mangold's Boba Fett movie, and is the reason he's here in the first place. This might be a problem.
The Butterworth script likely got diced by producers, probably for the reasons just discussed. The other people credited were director Mangold and longtime screenwriter David Koepp, the latter of whom was the person in charge of taking all the drafts of Crystal Skull and making one movie out of it. What I theorize is once they poached Mangold from the cancelled Boba Fett movie and got into pre-production, a producer or group of producers mandated the script changes, and once he did his work, it got filtered through Koepp who was once again brought in to smooth it out. Koepp has done work in Hollywood for decades on mostly adaptations, and the thing I can say is I still don't know what the voice of a Koepp script is even after watching dozens of movies with his writing in them. If there's a fundamental mess with characters or tone at the core coming in, he doesn't really fix that.
I won't question anyone's motivations or excitement working on it. The point here is it's obvious the movie that it came into production as is not the movie it came to be, and while it's less obvious that there were disagreements on what it should be than Crystal Skull, its shifts cost Dial of Destiny far more dearly.
The final story on what happened is still sorting itself out based on what people can or will tell, and the IMDb trivia page is in daily flux because of all the confusion. It's clear the people left with fixing up the script afterwards had a weird indifference to Archimedes, yet HAD to make him more of a central feature. There is a puzzle solution in Achimedes' crypt that involves water displacement, but the slam-dunk one-liner "Eureka" is saved for one of the most head-scratching parts of the film's climax. Go look up how Archimedes discovered water displacement if you don't get it. It's fun.
A dial that does mathematical tables or calculations doesn't have the same draw as a relic of God or gods (Shiva and Kali, I did not forget you), and it doesn't work like these artifacts where you can just handwave that it's only effective until you cross the seal or whatever. It's a measuring or calculating device. It's literally a dial that was built based on observation of the Earth, and spits out what it means through the two parts, even though there are calculations all over the place using one, apparently.
The storyline struggles immensely with this at points like Helena becoming jaded with the whole business after her father drove himself mad with... looking at dates, I guess. Dates made on a half a device? Or did everyone have an unreleased journal of Archimedes that had the results? Look, I get a psychic skull futzing around with your mind can make you bonkers. However, despite being a journalism major, I took astronomy courses for my science requirements where I used formulas to make a "reasonable" guess at when the universe would stop expanding, snap back, and destroy everything as quickly as it began (Billions of years away, by the by. You're fine). Filling out an astrophysics equation about an unimaginably catastrophic celestial event did not make me obsessively insane. Wait, the old friend gone crazy... that's like John Hurt's character in Crystal Skull except without John Hurt having the time of his life. They're echoing the movie that mustn't be spoke of again, but making it less good.
All cards on the table. We're at the climax/ending, and it's a testament to how much the blandness sucked the energy out of the room that this isn't vastly discussed. In the argument over whether the ending was reshot at the last minute, I'm willing to take John Williams and an offhand comment by Ford talking on late night programming at their words. That doesn't meet Professor Jones' standard of finding FACT, but if everything wasn't changed at the last minute, then that makes the ending completely inexplicable.
What the dial measures is events that create time fissures. What Voller wants to do is figure out where the fissure's going to be on a specific date he found in one of Archimedes' writings and take him back to 1939, kill Hitler, and become BETTER Hitler because he knows all the mistakes Hitler made and how to prevent them. His small group of men grabbed an old German plane, uniforms, and are flying straight up to the Langoliers fissure near Syracuse. Indy and Helena are their prisoners while Teddy hot-wires a civilian plane to follow them while the person who owns it is sleeping in it.
At one point, there's the sudden realization, "ARCHIMEDES DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT CONTINENTAL DRIFT!" Perhaps this was the result of an emergency script meeting where all the wrong questions were asked and all the wrong answers were given. We are not going back to 1939 Germany. Where are we going? As foreshadowed a variety of ways, it's the moment the Romans began sieging Syracuse, an act that eventually caused the death of Archimedes in 212 B.C. Here we go, folks!
I'm going to put the most ridiculous detail up front: The dial was a distress call from Archimedes. It apparently was ALWAYS going to send the person who used it back to 212 B.C. Syracuse. That's not how that works. As I've said, it is a MEASURING/CALCULATION DEVICE. It doesn't have the power of God or psychic waves. If Archimedes was meaning to call for warriors to help him, he would've said so instead of making this a Dan Brown search with a metric load of reading between the lines, Polybius ciphers, and secrets within secrets. You don't turn a 911 call into a point-and-click adventure game with Moon logic. And if it ONLY singled out fissures that sent people back to this time, how many damn time fissures do we got out here?!
Even Archimedes is seriously confused when coming upon Indiana and wondering if this is what "warriors" of the future look like, much like the knight of the Holy Grail. So, simultaneously, Archimedes screwed up by not knowing about Continental Drift AND this was Archimedes' plan ALL ALONG. Sure. Also, unless the Nazis survived and took the opportunity to reshape history in their image, Indiana Jones is pointless to the result of this narrative. A narrative that insists it's the ultimate culmination of Indiana Jones' life.
But of course, to start the counterargument about how this all went as planned, we must go back to the nerd argument that nothing would've changed in Raiders of the Lost Ark if Indy was there or not. First, the argument you SHOULD be making is that if it wasn't for Belloq, the Frenchman who betrayed his countrymen and any personal value he had to witness "history," Hitler's face would've exploded like in Bionic Commando before WWII. If you're going to nerd on who's a useless shit, bring your A-game.
Mmmm, one of the most satisfying moments of video game histoy.
Okay, SECOND, we would've lost Marion, who's the most important person in Indy's life, and even this movie doesn't forget that.
If Indy isn't here in Dial of Destiny, all the minority characters who die still die, Teddy is attached to crappy gangsters, but they're nice enough to let him build and work a mock cockpit in the middle of his job (Don't give me that, "They'll make him sell drugs." HARRISON FORD WAS THE WEED DEALER ON THE SET OF STAR WARS), so they're better than some bosses I've had. Helena would've died, but honestly? I don't know what I'm supposed to make of her with the screwball dynamic spiked with bitterness who I never got a decent grip on. Look, Mutt Jones trying to be cool and failing because he's a stepson raised by a square-ass professor makes more sense than a twenty-something rebellious daughter who looks untouched by the entirety of the Sixties.
There have been rumbles that the original ending WAS going back to 1939, and the conflict was Indy wrestling with whether to go along with Voller's plot of killing Hitler and then stopping Voller afterwards that was changed because controversy or whatever. I believe it and don't believe it at the same time because it at least makes sense with what the movie and the marketing have been building up to. But also, the internet is a lying liar stuffed with lies. I look forward to the Patrick Mahomes of Monday Morning Quarterbacks who visit here later with the full story stating how stupid all these claims are. Here, today, in late Summer 2023, we don't have it.
Wait a minute... is Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny essentially The Amazing Spider-Man film where all of the marketing was built around a major plot point that was removed? Oh no, I'm inviting another fandom to march in here and start another war where they don't understand they are the ones actively making everything worse. I KNOW I'M NOT TAKING THE SHORT ROUTE HERE. JUST SIT DOWN, SHUT UP, AND LET ME FINISH.
What are the quotes that are in all the marketing?
"I don't believe in magic. But a few times in my life, I've seen things. Things I can't explain. And I've come to believe that it's not what you believe, it's how hard you believe in it."
"I've been looking for this all my life."
They don't just strike me as the few lines they could market (There are a few quips here and there, but they either are in the moment or feel like some of Koepp's lines from Crystal Skull such as, "Oh, I believe, sister. That's why I'm down here," that don't sound right coming from Indiana Jones). They strike me as quotes from another story.
So, Voller believed SUPER hard in the dial which... didn't do ANYTHING he wanted to. Archimedes believed super hard in the dial... which brought him a bunch of Nazis and an archaeologist (Granted, history IS changed in this movie, and apparently Archimedes survives past the siege of Syracuse and the Romans are defeated by "dragons," so he DID get what he wanted[?]). And what is this thing Indiana Jones has wanted his entire life? To find his elephant graveyard with Archimedes and die?! Glad all y'all threw the baby out with the bathwater and Harrison Ford's efforts to make people less afraid of aging in Crystal Skull is now, "The best you can do is find your place to die unless people pull an It's a Wonderful Life on you." Is this what we want our heroes to be these days? Full of pain, regret, and surrounded by people he met like three days ago he kinda' knows?
Phew. Now I have to deal with what's actually in the ending. The Nazi plane strangely flies low for no reason and becomes one of those modern units in Civilization games that somehow gets beat by phalanx troops. I thought I missed a detail about why they have to fly low due to a malfunction, and maybe I did, but Christ, I can't find it. To hell with it. They do enough damage to the Romans to change history, but it does lead to the death of Voller in a really uninteresting action sequence, and Archimedes takes his watch (Which is a bit fancier than the one they're selling, but you don't exactly want to promote a Nazi watch, so good for them). Indy and Helena are still alive, and Indy comes face-to-face with Archimedes. It's not impressive, it's not awe-inspiring, and you'd think seeing Indy for the first time arriving in a "dragon" would be the moment to break out, "Eureka." He doesn't say it until Indy is almost done with his spiel about, "I'm old and forgotten and sad in the present time. Can I hang out with you until I die?" Archimedes does have the most grim of, "What the fuck?" faces.
Okay, that's not what was said. But it does have this mix of stoic and confused with the hint of goofiness on the peripheral that makes it rife for parody if it had any life to it. Indiana Jones movies have always had a human touch which realizes the silly and serious simultaneously, and this has the touch of a cow hoof. It clomps and stays there for awhile. At least there is one moment that inspires the imagination, but I had to make up my own scene that plays solely in my mind.
Helena comes up and knocks Indiana out to drag him back to the present because he's being stupid. And, well, yeah, that delivery straight to the edit of cutting to black after Helena punches him is intentionally supposed to be funny and it is, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the assumed scene after where Indiana Jones is laid out in front of Archimedes as Helena, Teddy, and some random Sicilian who's just been here this whole time after sleeping in his plane drag him back. The last dude is only there because I'm sure someone asked how Helena and Teddy were supposed to carry Indiana to the plane by themselves. THAT'S the issue here. Man, Spielberg would've made this guy the star of the final sequence. Remember the librarian in Venice from Last Crusade? Good times. Anyway, Archimedes can do nothing but stand there. He has two bodyguards, and they're probably asking, "Do we, uh, shoot them? I mean, this man said he was going to stay here and help us." But he has no response for anything that has developed in front of him. I wouldn't either, honestly.
That is the last action sequence in the Indiana Jones franchise. Muddled, "...eh," and the only highlight is when they essentially make a joke out of it. Is this what you wanted? Is this the big finale you were hoping for? Two champions of knowledge staring at each other with hopeless eyes and SMACK!
Actually, there is a FINAL final scene, and if there's anything in this movie that will make it on Top 5/Top 10 best Indiana Jones moments, it's this. Indy is back in New York when Marion visits him, and they have the most honest exchange of pain and sadness of their son's loss that loops into a callback to the, "It's not the years. It the mileage" scene from Raiders. Ford and Nancy Allen still have impeccable chemistry, and it's the one time after the World World II sequence where I feel warmth from this project. Allen has said this was in the script from early on, and I believe it. Indiana never got to keep the great treasures that defined his adventures, but the treasures of the people most precious to him mean far more, even in a tiny New York City apartment that catches a harsh angle of the sun most days.
If someone changed that final scene even after reshuffling every other card in the deck, they would almost be worthy of the vile den of scum of villainy that has infested a good amount of Lucasfilm fandom. But they were spared the rod of many of those who stretched their faces into subjects of Picasso's "Guernica" and used words like "abortion" to describe Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Dial of Destiny was, "Okay. At least it wasn't Crystal Skull." I'm sure they're being more reserved since the era of screaming toddler film critics and Mystery Science Theater 3000 clones has crashed down with perhaps some regret in the remains.
I get it. I once so elegantly trashed a movie, my mole person self got a date out of it. The way it so easily opens up creative floodgates with a jolt of energy in ways, say, the novel I'm writing that could be the defining work of my life just doesn't for whatever reason is appealing. But when it became the one tool in the box and the defining voice for film criticism, it plumed into a massive, toxic cloud that has made movies worse, as both the last Star Wars and Indiana Jones flicks in response to the vomiting Linda Blair fandom reactions have been these tubes of generic -brand toothpaste; they serve a purpose, I suppose, but is this really what you wanted for supper? And no, they aren't better than The Last Jedi or Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. To apply the dynamics of the discourse approved by your group, no, YOUR mother sucks cocks in Hell.
However, I'm sure THE DISCOURSE is about to change when the new generations of people who make 3-4 hour essays with their film degrees to bumrush nothingburger movies academically will have Dial of Destiny at their fingertips. I'm not much of a fan of them either. They're better than the previous generation who are FAR more likely to pal around with Nazis and rapists, but they still engage in overkill in their own way, and they're still a monoculture that, intentionally or not, puts a limiter on discussions of film, TV, or whatever else. There's something that came across my social feed that was labeled essentially, "It's Okay to Like Steven Universe." It wasn't before? ...Here comes another war party. For those not in the know, Steven Universe is a cartoon that fell between the two generations, so no matter what opinion you have on the matter, your earth's gonna' get scorched, causing most people to stay out of that arena. And it's a goddamn show whose main audience is KIDS who don't normally get catered to. How do we keep finding new ways to be awful?
The scales on everything are broken. It seems in every matter, there is no nuance even by the nuanced people, and the severity of any shortcomings measure the same. And yet, I will risk being hanged in some parts for saying this: I would rather have the epic, beautiful disasters than what this atmosphere is creating. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny feels like a $300 million TV movie and the cinematic equivalent of a military ration.
Can you tell me anything NEW in Dial of Destiny that DOESN'T REFERENCE THE PREVIOUS MOVIES that matches the intensity, memorability, balls, and scale of nuking the fridge? It's a surrealistic moment where Indy, being a captain in the army and a WWII hero, has just been overly prodded by a military jumping at shadows and then attacked by the real villains, and then runs into the nuclear testing village. It establishes that this is a new world that Indiana Jones is in stark contrast with. As for the fridge, oh, "They must've switched the baskets," Willie Scott somehow surviving breathing in molten smoke while Short Round cures Indiana of the dark blood of Kali-mah, and Indy surviving falling with a tank he had NO chance of jumping out of the way he did are less ridiculous. You're right, I'm sorry. If you confuse my sarcasm for sincerity, I suggest you go talk to Kathy Bates in Misery about her filmgoing experiences.
Nuking the fridge, the casual film lingo describing for when a franchise is destroys itself, has more to offer cinema than anything created in Dial of Destiny. I will take all the Highlander 2: The Quickenings of the world if people are still taking huge shots and throwing their imaginations at works that can still amaze us even if it's in the exact opposite way it's supposed to. Even if Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was half as much a nightmare as its detractors say it is, I bought it the first day it was out on DVD to study it more. I have no desire to go out and pick up the ULTRA 4K HDR JFK BVD of Dial of Destiny because... why would I? Someone's going to put the final scene on YouTube, and that's all that will remain on the cultural mark of a film that one way or another was likely forced into being a "Just Okay" loaf. AND YES, I SNUCK A JOKE FROM SPY HARD INTO THIS PARAGRAPH. FIGHT ME.
We remember the Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise. We don't remember that there was a really expensive Baywatch movie remake nobody really knew what to do with that disappeared after a couple weeks.
But whatever. You have your film that didn't feature CG monkeys swinging with Mutt Jones, and those pesky, "pointlessly-cast" minorities like in Last Jedi got removed from the movie as quickly as they were introduced. It lost $100 million, and the only conversation it's been brought up in is with my brother who is a fellow film fanatic I haven't spoken face-to-face with in months. Go conformist manchild, get broke, I guess. Enjoy your $750 watch that nobody will notice unless you force the issue.
What, you forgot the watch was the opener of this conversation? That's fair. Why would anyone have any reason to remember it? This has been the Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny experience. At least you didn't forget Indiana Jones getting hit with a multiple murder wrap, I hope. Enjoy your Applebees, everyone!
By the way, James Mangold, I look forward to many more good movies from you in years to come, and Ethann Isidore, if you get an Oscar, I will be the first person to cheer for you. Everybody, best of luck in this extremely tough business.
