Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
The worst thing they ever did to Indy was make him wear a tie
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)
2 / 5
Looked at now as a five film arc, the lessons of Indiana Jones are far sadder and depressing than they ever should have been, and that’s a shame. What it comes down to is that as each film has joined the sequence, Indy has become ever more a spectator in his own movies. In Temple of Doom (and remember ToD is a prequel, so is chronologically first) Indiana Jones is indispensable. Without him getting involved, the bad guys win. Starting with Raiders of the Lost Ark, however, Indy becomes less of a character and more of a plot device, and an increasingly irrelevant one at that. He does not stop the bad guys. The best he can do is slow them down, though he does get to watch as said bad guys destroy themselves trying to use whichever macguffin-artifact they’re chasing.
On some level, that final warehouse scene of Raiders actually sets the tone for the decline of the whole sequence from there: for all that Indy seems to accomplish, none of it matters, and it will all be forgotten and nobody will care. Sadly, Dial of Destiny leans into this. After a reasonably promising Nazi-punching opener (hooray for CG de-aging … I guess), the movie comes forward to 1969, with Indy himself warehoused and forgotten, slowly rotting away in his tattered apartment when he’s not trudging through a thankless day of classroom lecturing. That could have been fine as a plot point, giving him motivation to get back in the saddle for one last adventure. But he is an unwilling participant in everything that follows. He doesn’t WANT to get back in the saddle. He is a tired, broken-down old man, fully domesticated, his edge totally blunted, made irrelevant by advancing time. He even seems to consciously know that, as demonstrated by the gobsmacking “dilemma” he has in the film’s climactic scene. Indiana Jones does not save the day in Dial of Destiny. He embraces failure. He actively declines the heroism that those who love him desperately need him to refuse to surrender. He’s just … sad.
Dial of Destiny is made with yeoman craftsmanship (though it feels like a red flag that Spielberg did not helm this final chapter personally), and the film expresses technical competence. It’s not a bad movie (though I’ll probably never forgive them for not bringing Short Round back). However, it does not bid farewell to Indiana Jones. It says good riddance; there are no more frontiers and your time has passed and you will now be warehoused and forgotten. And that’s appalling. Indiana Jones is a hero. He’s even a superhero (in a mythic quasi-Campbellian sense). He is not an avatar of cisheteronormative patriarchy that must be torn down in the name of postmodern social progress. He is not a hurdle that girlboss-feminism must leap. He does not belong in a museum. The world needs the idea of Indiana Jones. The world needs swashbuckling adventurers. It’s tragic that Lucasfilm/Disney is trying to say otherwise.
2 stars of 5: This isn’t bad, but it IS sad, and that means it’s not very good either.