A worthy end to a revered character? Sure. "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny"

I don't know if it comes through in this writing, but I'm not the most nostalgic of movie goers. I mean, I did get misty eyed at various points in the Star Wars sequels, though mostly, I really feel those movies are whiffs (The Last Jedi excepted, but even there, hooooo-eeee, there was some filler). Indiana Jones, of course, is a touchstone for many people who have been with the character since Raiders of the Lost Ark, an all around summit of achievement for all involved and to which none of the sequels measured up. Some people will say that The Last Crusade did, and I really did like it a lot, but I didn't care for The Temple of Doom (parts of which are just outright dreadful and with all due respect to Kate Capshaw, did your future husband realizes he turned your character into the anti-Marion? The most unrelenting, screaming-mimi in cinema in the last forty years, coupled with, well, why yes thank you for noticing, some of the most racist portrayals of a culture seen on screen.) I cared for The Crystal Skull even less.

So it was with some trepidation turned to cautious optimism that I waited with varying degrees of hope that Dial of Destiny would not only not suck, but that it would be a decent send-off for a character that despite the inane plots he's been inserted into, was one of the more genuinely iconic (a word I will continue to ridicule for overuse and despise myself for using, even if it is appropriate, as here; the character Indiana Jones is nothing, if not iconic, as he has become a cultural touchstone, and has given Harrison Ford a chance to revisit a character he actually seems invested in; again, pity the films haven't been equal to his commitment or talent.) How'd that work out for me?

Not bad, really. Again, thanks for asking. As a send-off, it was no No Time to Die, but it hit some strong notes nevertheless. It starts out with a bang, introduces some insight into Indy's character, and deals with issues of aging and loss in a way that I found surprising and touching on the one hand, and then, on the other, casually displaced by the plot requirements of the blockbuster. I don't know that the plot is any more or less inane than the previous entry, but this time around, it does feel as though everyone is on the same page, even if a stiff breeze comes in and blows other pages around and over it.

I mean, it's hard to not like a film where Indy's god-daughter Helena Shaw is played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. That's a huge plus right there, and of course, she does a great job. As a foil for Ford she's the best since Karen Allen. (And as good as Sean Connery!) Sallah makes a return and while I'm always glad to see John Rhys-Davies, even if he's been reduced to a taxi driver in New York in 1969. Okay, that's dopey; Sallah will never be just a taxi driver, and of course, he still can pull strings and make stuff happen. The big bag this time out is Mads Mikkelsen who is a terrific and actually versatile actor but I felt like the showrunners just asked him to do La Chiffre from Casino Royale again. Only, "could you Nazi it up a bit? Cool!"

Boyd Holbrook plays Klaber, the lead muscle(?) of Mikkelsen's troop of idiots. And in what struck me as a wasted opportunity, Shaunette Renée Wilson plays a CIA agent who is somehow embroiled with helping Dr. Voller, Mikkelsen's baddie, recover the Antikythera, which in real, factual history, was uncovered from a 2,000 year old ship off the coast of Greek island of the same name. The device is called that for convention, but we have no idea what it's real name was nor do we have much more to go on other than it does appear to have been a sophisticated computing device. You can do more legwork on Wikipedia. The rabbit hole is yours!

Here, however, the device is called Antikythera and was created by no personage less or other than Archimedes himself! What does it do? What does an old Nazi want with it? What? What?

Well, this is sort of plot device number one. It's the McGuffin and does a fine job. We first encounter it early in the movie when a reverse aged Harrison Ford has been captured by Nazis and put on a transport train with his colleague Basil Shaw, Helena's father (and played by a very game Toby Jones). It's a fun opening that sets up expectations of a more kinetic movie than what followed and perhaps even a more fun one, but we'll get to that soon enough. Somehow, watching Indy - or really, anyone, if I'm being honest - outsmart and beat up Nazis never gets old. Indy and Basil were apparently on some covert operation to - I forget, but it had something to do with the ways the Third Reich were looting countries of their archaeological finds. i was going to write "heritages", but so much of the treasures in European and American (and elsewhere, granted) are the result of looting and theft.

It's a great sequence that, had it been followed by similar set pieces, might have lifted the film above what it is. Which, to repeat is, not bad. Ford does get to punch Mikkelsen in the face through Indy's fedora; it's in some of the trailers and sounds dumb but looks great. While it turns out that - oh, right, now I remember - the mystical thingy the Nazis were looking for turns out to be a fake, Basil and Indy do find the Antikythera or I should say half of it, and abscond with it. As Indy and Basil make their way up the train - on top of it, of course - Indy spends his time fighting off Voller and a few Nazi goons. In one of the funnier moments in just about any film of this sort is, as the train takes a turn, an anti-aircraft gun that had been struck by Allied aircraft swivels around and starts taking out German troops (and destroying the train as it does so). The mechanics of this entire set-up are tight and as good as anything in earlier entries in the series.

Indy and Basil leap from the train and before long we find ourselves on Moon Day, the day the crew from the Apollo (so June 24, 1969) in Indy's apartment with the Beatles blaring very loudly. Indy gets ready to do the "Hey you kids! Turn it down!" He's in not bad shape, of course, but you see the years on his body and spiking his early morning cup of joe with booze may indicate greater stress in his life. We see what it is; Marion has filed for separation. That's the first indication that the movie may be dealing with a deeper issue than merely sending a beloved pop figure off to Valhalla.

Turns out Indy's been teaching at Hunter College and it is not a stellar gig. I don't know what the institution was like in 1969, but Professor Jones is met with students who can't be bothered, until one pops up that answers all his questions and adds some nifty commentary to his lecture. It's Helena, but Indy hasn't seen her since she was a kid and so doesn't recognize her. She catches up to him as his retirement festivities get underway and eventually gets him to take her to the very thing that had driven her father a little mad; the Antikythera half that Basil had sworn Indy would destroy. She said she was researching the piece and was aware of her father's wish to destroy the instrument and his making Indy promise to do so. Naturally, Helena knew her godfather (by reputation, at least) to know that he wouldn't destroy it, but she wants it to pay off gambling debts. Yep, she buys and sells stolen antiquities, dates a gangster, and apparently, is what one might call a free spirit.

It's not long before Dr. Voller going by Schmidt shows up with a new set of goons and Wilson as CIA agent Mason sporting an awesome Afro and channelling the pure badassery of Pam Grier. I really want to pause for a moment and note that this is the first person of color to have a prominent role in the franchise, a woman, and perfectly capable of handling herself. She also discovers quickly just how much on the wrong side of the law Voller is on when his aides waste the retirement party. 

Helena, by the way, has stonewalled Indy, nabbed the Antikythera and bolted. Now, Waller-Bridge gets to do some badassery herself and she sells it as she evades Voller and company, and we're watching as she loses herself down an alleyway as a parade celebrating the astronauts is underway. Through a number of brutal discoveries, Indy calls the cops to report the slaughter, then heads down to the parade to get away from Voller and Klaber and the other doofuses (these guys aren't really very good at their jobs). He makes off with a horse from the protest march that shows up after the parade and Klaber follows in hot pursuit on a motorcycle and this is the first instance of kind of janky CGI (the de-aging effects on Ford, by the way, were perfect, on par with what Scorsese had done in The Irishman). I get that Ford did some of his own riding, and while the descent into the subway read as genuine, it's the sequence on the tracks in the tunnel that kind of fumble. This is particularly glaring as Indy and the horse jump from an on-coming train through a divide onto the set of tracks going in the opposite direction. It's a bit that doesn't come off well as the blurring doesn't read as genuine and that frankly, the horse and rider's volume doesn't come across as having any weight or even density. 

Still, it's a cool conceit, though I pity the horse. 

Eventually, he meets up with Sallah who gets him out of the country. Good thing, because Indy is now wanted by the law. 

Once in Tangier, Indy tracks Helena down, interferes with her auctioning off the piece on the black market and then, like clockwork, Voller and crew show up. Helena has a confederate in Teddy Kumar, her Short Round you could say, and they take off in a tuk-tuk; the CIA intercept Voller and his group and they, in turn, waste the agents (including Mason; I think this actually as counts as fridging a term I rarely use, because like "iconic", it tends to be poorly used). They then take over the helicopter and Jones, Helena, and Teddy follow them to Greece where they - correctly - assume Voller is looking for the map, the graphikos tablet that will tell them where the device's other half is.

Mind you, there's been some eye-popping scenery, but it's also with the Tangier episode that we realize we are not in the hands of a Spielberg. Please understand that this is not a diss on Mangold who has given us Logan, Ford v. Ferrari, 3:10 to Yuma, and Girl, Interrupted; what I'm saying is that he's no hack. It is just that the action sequences lack the propulsive force of Spielberg's and the set-ups and execution seem so effortful. Also, the blocking and composition just doesn't have Spielberg's economy. Even in Crystal Skull, for all the cruddy CGI in that one, there was a sense of the moment and a visceral thrill of movement. Here, it just felt like the camera was too static when it shouldn't have been and thus, set up a remove from the immediacy of some of the sequences.

The other issue, and a bigger one for me, was how we don't get the sense that the man we saw at the beginning of the film is the same guy we see once the movie gets going. This could, of course, be by design. What better way to avoid depression and having lost your family than by falling back into a world hopping adventure? But that's the problem; I'm not sure that it would help if the script foregrounded Indy's familial tragedy more; Ford brings a stateliness to Jones here that we haven't seen before. Sure, even as far back as Raiders, we get that he's been battered by life as much as he's brought it on himself, but in this chapter of his life, there's something in Ford's carriage, in his face, that reads considerably deeper than what we're seeing his character go through. 

I've referred to the last Bond outing, but that's what's uppermost in my mind here. Both Daniel Craig and Ford are able to bring considerable gravitas to these pop cultural ...okay, icons...that only serves to ensure those figures resonate more deeply with the audience. We discover, too, that what tore Indy and Marion apart was the death of Mutt, their son, in Vietnam. 

When asked later about where he would go if he could travel back in time, Indy says he'd go back and tell his son not to join the army, that he knew he was going to die. "i would tell him that he would die, that his mother would be overcome with a grief so intense that his father would be unable to console her, and that it would end their marriage." It's this that I felt frankly the film either needed more of or a better balance between this kind of dramatic grounding and the silliness of all the other stuff. It's not out of place, but it's not given a place to breathe, either, in the plot machinery of a franchise like this. In this way, it doesn't match the pathos of Craig's Bond's ending; but you feel like it should. 

Anyway, I've jumped ahead. This is a conversation between Helena and Indy later when they discover where the other half is, and have duped Voller out of it and gotten a lead on him to uncover it in the Tomb of Archimedes. When they open Archimedes sarcophagus, we see the corpse with a 20th century wristwatch. My first thought was - wait, they're doing a time loop thing and that's not Archimedes, it's Indy. It's not, but I actually prefer my version.

Oh, sorry. The Antikythera is a time machine, of sorts. Archimededs discovered a way to create a "fissure" in time. Voller's idea is to go back to 1939 during the Poland invasion, assassinate Hitler and because he's seen all the mistakes Adolf made, he'll do better and conquer the world. Mikklesen's too cool for this, but I would have paid good money if he'd gone full Dr. Evil and started mwuh-ha-ha-ha-ing at this point. 

Naturally, Indy and Helen are brought along for the ride on Voller's plane (with Teddy in hot pursuit in another plane) and it's not long before they realize they've gone way past 1939. We're in Syracuse around 2300 years ago during the Second Punic War at the battle of Syracuse. The airplane is seen as a dragon and the Romans and Syracusans turn their attention, catapults and spears to it as the Nazis open fire on them (Teddy's plane landed safely). Indy and Helena parachute to safety before the plane crashes and Archimedes meets them, handing the Antikthera over to them. His hope is that people from the future will return to aid his people against the Romans. 

Indy's been wounded and insists on staying behind to die; that it's a fitting end to his life. Helena argues that he's just going to die of sepsis and if he lives that he'll just muck up history; he doesn't belong here. When he refuses to give in, she pulls a Marion and coldcocks him.

Indy wakes up in 1969 and sees Helena sitting on his couch, eyeing him somewhat balefully. Teddy is in the background and there's some discussion about ice cream, but mostly, less through dialog than simple acting, we sense that Helena's done with her old life or she's at least taking a break from it. Sallah and his family show up and then, well, this is where the movie landed for me; in walks Marion. The others make their exits and Marion and Indy reprise their "where does it hurt" dialog from Raiders. This was the movie I wanted to see; where we get more of Marion and Indy working through their trials as a couple. There's a script where, sure, danger ensues, and yes, Helena could be there, too; but we'd see the Joneses battling one and all and each other and eventually, arriving at this same point. 

Altogether, this is not the ending of the franchise I was quite expecting. When they introduced what the two had gone through, I was impressed Mangold and the writers took such an emotional tack, though I suppose this last entry was likely to be emotional even if it was just Indy and Helena playing drinking games. As it is, the script is strong in terms of character, even if Voller is standard issue and Mikkelsen doesn't get to do much. It's just that the movie is weighed down by the very element that typically gets butts in seats; the action starts out with a bang and then, is just sort of okay. If you're going to shortchange characters and arcs with just okay (and granted, much really is better than okay), then you have problems of either sustaining emotional involvement on the one hand or excitation on the other, but what happens is they cancel each other out.

Mangold wrote the screenplay with Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, (both with Edge of Tomorrow, Ford v. Ferrari, Fair Game; Jez also worked on Black Mass and Spectre - another Bond link!) and David Koepp, who has done remarkable work over the past thirty-five years: Death Becomes Her, Jurassic Park, Spider-Man (Raimi's - 2002), Panic Room, the first Mission Impossible, Ghost Town, and Kimi. But I wonder if he took this on as a form of atonement since he was responsible for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I'm willing to say he's made up for it.