Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Watching Dial Of Destiny the second time around, (December 3, on Disney Plus) I like it a lot less. This is the second or third Indy movie obsessed with getting older or the end of your life, and they're not getting more fun as they go along. Adding to the charm, a bunch of Indy's personal friends are murdered by the Nazis (his college colleagues, plus Antonio Banderas), and by the third act, he basically admits he has nothing to live for IRL.

My second gripe with Dial Of Destiny is Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Helena: her character is deeply bitter over Indy's abandonment of her father Basil (Toby Jones), in the grip of madness over the Dial's power. For the first third of the movie, she treats Indy with nothing but disrespect and ridicule. Her smug attitude is tough to swallow when it's not Helena's movie. She can have a character arc, but would this character be more palatable played by a man? Maybe. Is that fair? No. While Helena's motives are profit, and a mostly subconscious anger towards Indy, she never lashes out at Indy. Would a male character have done so? Probably. Indy himself doesn't ever express any guilt over walking away from Basil and Helena - just like in Raiders, he's determined to keep this historical object out of the Nazi's hands, denying it has magical powers until he sees them for himself. Only in the last third of the movie does he even acknowledge that Basil was right about the dial.

At the end of the movie, Helena forces Indy to return to 1969 to knit back together his relationship with Marion, and the movie throws in Sallah and his family too. These relationships are shown to have value to Indy in his golden years. For this idea to have meaning, the screenplay should have validated Indy's personal and professional relationship with Basil and Helena. Instead, he never acknowledges he was a bad friend to Basil, and he's still bitter towards Helena until the last minute of the movie.

Another problem with the fifth Indiana Jones movie is that the first Indiana Jones movie is the best movie ever made. Well, most entertaining, anyway. It's not fair to compare any Indiana Jones sequel to the first one, a problem I grappled with throughout this movie. Even putting aside the first movie, this movie's plot is not as airtight as I expect from George Lucas and Steven Spielberg:

SPOILERS: In the third act, the screenwriters send Indy and Helena through the midair wormhole on the Nazi plane with the villain. They have to somehow get the heroes back through the wormhole after the Nazi plane crashes. There's no airplanes in ancient Syracuse. What do they do? They add ridiculous moment in Act 2 where Helena's pickpocket pal Teddy (the talented Ethann Isidore) has set up a mock cockpit in a Tangier hotel casino? He's an aspiring pilot, getting tips from a random off-duty airman? So in Act 3, Helena drafts Teddy to steal an airplane (he's never flown one before). He successfully hotwires a plane, takes off during a rainstorm, follows the Nazi plane, threading a needle into the wormhole?? Then and only then does the plane's owner wake up from the back seat. Isn't an airplane the noisiest place on Earth??? Teddy and the pilot then successfully land the plane on a beach in ancient Syracuse and also take off from the same beach. Spielberg and Lucas would never have countenanced this nonsense.

What they did right: the Nazi Plunder Train prologue was fun. They included some ideas I'd never seen before (the antiaircraft gun strafing through the train on its own was genius), Indy faking his way from car to car was entertaining, I liked the Nazi noticing Indy's uniform already has a bloody bullet hole in it! And most importantly, Harrison Ford looked perfect as a younger man. Even 10 years ago they would not have written this prolog because they would never recast middle-aged Indy. In 2023, even with me scrutinizing every frame of the prolog, every pixel of his face, I only think I might have spotted one shot where his face looked funny. Nice work, gang.

I love time travel movies, so ending this franchise with Indy traveling 2,200 years to the Siege of Syracuse, a Nazi plane strafing over Roman triremes, Nazis impaled on spears, Indy and Helena telling Archimedes he is a hero to his people, Archimedes actually saying "Eureka"? I loved all of this.

Pet Peeve: I am sick and tired of movies with trains and trucks that never stop moving regardless of what's happening on or around them. I can believe that the Nazi Plunder Train would not stop even when it was being riddled with its own anti-aircraft fire, because they were in danger of being targeted by Allied aircraft. Fine. But when Indy rides a horse in NYC subway tunnels, why do the trains only sound their horns and not slow down or stop? The Hollywood convention that trains are not driven by engineers, or that the engineers can't/won't stop to avoid hitting obstacles, has been going on for too long and I'm tired of being asked to swallow it. In some movies, they show the engineer getting killed/incapacitated, or the vehicle getting disabled while in motion (thank you Shang Chi for your excellent bus fight sequence where the driver is knocked out and the brake lines are cut), but in Dial Of Destiny, I think we can all agree, the subway train drivers would not continue to chug chug chug down the tracks when they see a galloping police horse in their path.