Friday 25 October 2024

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (James Mangold, 2023)

1969. Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is forced back into action when his god daughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) becomes involved in a scheme to recover an artefact with the potential to  alter history itself…



I am not the biggest Indiana Jones fan. I enjoyed them as a kid, but they never became an obsession. So when Dial of Destiny came out last year, I skipped it.


A year - and a rewatch of Raiders - later, curiosity drew me in. 


Indiana Jones is a series defined by a singular creative vision from Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.


How does an Indiana Jones movie look and feel without its key creatives in charge?

James Mangold is a solid filmmaker. This is not a film made by someone who does not have ideas, and a specific way of developing drama.


From that perspective, Dial of Destiny is fascinating.  


On its own terms?


A bit lifeless.


This wants to be a movie about accepting the passage of time. But it also has a 20-plus minute cold open featuring a de-aged Harrison Ford. It feels like the filmmakers are scared to deal with their leading man’s age.


It wants to be a chase movie, moving from set piece to set piece. But it also wants to deal with the repercussions of the character’s life.


Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Helena is a unique foil for Ford. She is not a romantic interest or a blood relative. I wish there was more flesh on the character’s relationship with Indy.


The focus on a key familial relationship also starts to feel less than fresh. Going from father (Last Crusade) to son (Crystal Skull) to god-daughter feels like the filmmakers are xeroxing an existing template.


And while she is game, Waller-Bridge and Ford do not have great chemistry. 


The character’s arc makes some sense on paper - but there is no sense of an arc to their relationship. Waller-Bridge’s performance is fine, but the scenes feel disconnected from each other.


Is she the conniving con artist? The wounded god daughter? The redeemed heroine? 

The film’s one relative success - unique for the Indiana Jones movies - is a villain worth writing home about.


Mads Mikkelsen has played villains in Hollywood movies before. When he was cast, it almost felt too familiar.


But the character is interesting, or at least, the take on the character is interesting. He is not an OTT cartoon.


In a way, he feels like a response to Spielberg’s own feelings about Nazi bad guys after Schindler’s List.


Nazis are a trope of the Jones franchise - they are the only recurring villains. In previous films they were cartoons, cannon fodder for our hero to go through.


This is the first film where a Nazi is the central villain, rather than an opportunist (like Belloq or Donovan) using their manpower and technology for their own ends.


Using the real-life Operation Paperclip as a starting point, the film flips this dynamic by having the Nazi as the opportunist, using the largesse of the US space programme to fund his own private enterprise.


The scenes with the most juice are Mikkelsen’s Voller interacting with other people - the scene with the black waiter in the hotel is riddled with racialised and historical tension.


While a parade outside celebrates the Moon landing he helped to engineer, Voller waxes about the war.


“Are you enjoying your victory?” the Nazi-turned American celebrity asks the waiter, a veteran of a segregated force.


Scenes like this carry a weight and a thorny sense of American history that have not been present in the franchise before.


In the past, Indiana Jones is about history as a MacGuffin and an environment. The thirties milieu is a layer of remove - an imagined space for serial-style adventure.

This movie wants to actually deal with history.


I just wish it knew where to take it. It also starts to feel out of place.


The film’s desire to generate more pathos is admirable but it never meshes with the attempt at the familiar format of set piece-set piece-set piece.


This is not to hold the film up to its predecessors. The Indiana Jones movies, particularly the original, managed to combine straight ahead action with a sense of physical comedy and character development. 

By contrast, Dial of Destiny feels both too drawn out and too fast - and the story never fully lands.


Helena never makes the transition from con artist to sacrificing hero; her sidekick Teddy (Ethann Isidore) is barely defined.


As an action adventure, Dial of Destiny is passable. None of the set pieces are that memorable, but they are also not incomprehensible.


The 1944 section includes a few moments of Spielbergian-style cause-and-effect action - but after that, it is just a series of repetitive chases, with little of the fluid camerawork and blocking which marked the previous films.


There is an underwater diving scene that feels like a new concept - but it is brief and free of peril.


There is an airless, contained quality to the action. It always looks like our heroes are posing against backgrounds rather than actually in real locations. It never feels tangible. The finale - in which our heroes go back to the siege of Syracuse - is particularly underwhelming.


The transition to the film’s final scene feels like a cheat - a  hard cut which is meant to provide a transition point but does the opposite.


While it is admirable in concept, Dial of Destiny is unsatisfying in execution. It might carry some weight from its association with the previous films, but on its own merits, it is a slow, slightly dull action flick.


Related


Raiders of the Lost Ark


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