Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

If adventure has a name, it must be Indiana Jones.

Well, I kind of had to, didn’t I? Look at my author photos. Look at my major in college. Look at what I named my company. Look at my years in China. Indiana Jones left a deep and permanent stamp on me, and I’d be remiss not to send him off in style.

This week, my childhood best friend Kane Lynch invited us all out to the Sunset Drive-In. We piled into our tiny Prius, all four of us together, for my belated birthday celebrations and for Lyra’s first theater experience. It seemed only just – her first movie experience (her first anything on a screen) was Raiders of the Lost Ark for my birthday last year, why not Dial of Destiny this year?

Short version: This is the movie Spielberg, Lucas, and Ford thought that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull would be.

Unmarked spoilers ahead, read at your own risk.

The same as Crystal Skull, the opening prologue is gorgeous. Set in 1944 and with a reasonable-looking de-aged Harrison Ford, Indy escapes a German castle and adventures all over and in a Nazi train full of relics as it retreats at the end of the war. With the assistance of non-action Englishman Basil Shaw, Indy wrests half of the Antikythera Mechanism from German scientist Voller and kills Nazi Colonel Weber.

In the present (1969, a few days after the moon landing), Indy wakes up in his New York apartment and sets out for his last day of class and, unwittingly, his last adventure as a professor. His students no longer respect him, his colleagues are writing him off as an old duffer. Shaw’s daughter, Helena, is the only one who respects him, and he shows her where he’s hidden the half the Antikythera mechanism he liberated from Voller back in the war…when Voller (now working for NASA and totally not von Braun totally glad we had this talk) and his CIA goons close in on them. Helena sells him out, one thing leads to another, and Indy winds up racing through a ticker tape parade and down the New York subway on the back of a stolen police horse.

There are intrigues (none of them romantic, thankfully) with Helena, more vehicle chases than strictly speaking necessary, and exotic locales across the Mediterranean, from Tangiers to the shores of Greece to Syracuse, and plenty of character development for Indy. Rather than giving a blow-by-blow, I’d like to discuss a few aspects that I particularly loved.

They loved everything Indy. Indy repeats a number of his old tricks (climbing from horseback, how he rams with a truck, a number of others) but they feel like respect rather than rehash, Indy going back to the same moves that got him out alive the first time. There are musical motifs that come back (most notably Marion’s theme, but also Scherzo for Motorcycle and others) which is only to be expected from John Williams. But there are little touches that are somehow more touching than the obvious wink of the Ark in Skull or Indy’s offhanded callback to the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles in same.

And they leaned into the Fate of Atlantis imagery for Tangiers, the dive, and Syracuse that I swear to God I was expecting Sophia Hapgood to show up and verbally castigate Helena for making the family look bad.

I love how they set up and deliver on Indy’s age, regrets, and living in the past. He gets, once again, an extremely well-executed textbook case of pulp character development, trading the false goal for the true goal. The powerhouse of this is his heart-breaking, voice-cracking speech to Helena about what he’d change if he could, but also little moments like covering up Marion’s photo, the contrast of his ancient history to the arriving astronauts, and how he’s visibly animated thinking or talking about his past adventures, and how his shoulders sag when he’s in the present. Indy earns that desire to die on the shores of Syracuse, and Helena’s coldcock back to 1969. This is, in many ways, similar to his attempted arc in Crystal Skull, but this time, it’s actually written with some deftnesss and skill, and masterfully delivered by Ford.

Speaking of which, Helena’s coldcocking Indy. This was a beautiful inversion of a very common pulp trope – the example my brain went to was when the white, rough-and-tumble hero of Streets of Fire coldcocked his girlfriend to send her back to safety, but anyone who’s read a book with punching in it written before 1990 has seen something similar, and it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. This time, it’s the woman (and not even a romantic interest!) who punches out the hero to knock some sense into him! If adventure has a name, it must be Indiana Jones, and Helena just cleaned his clock because he’s talking nonsense and it’s the only way to get him to get with the program.

In another nice subversion, I loved Indy shutting Helena down as she tosses off a quip about the dynamite after Renaldo is killed. For a series that literally started as Spielberg and Lucas wanting to do their own Bond movie, this was a wonderful way to play with the Bond One-Liner.

The scene itself, the tension with the dynamite and the discovery, was also the highlight of the action and suspense scenes for me. I felt like they relied heavily on vehicle chases – seriously, how many were there, like five or six? And three separate car chases alone? I mean, given as Voller is a Non-Action Big Bad and Indy is a little old for a reprise of the Airplane Fight, it made perfect sense on paper, but calisse de criss! They clearly sought other ways of delivering the blood-pounding, and while Indy on horseback through the parade was splendid in a “atomic testing scene done right” way, the best action of the movie belonged to Helena and her silver tongue.

Marion. And Sallah. Yes, Indy, they are the true goal, and they are worth it. I love how she invoked and reenacted the “where it hurts” scene, I love that she was there, I love how Karen Allen played the scene, I agree with her she could have been in more of the film. Hell, I turned to Kane and said “she…looks right” from the moment we saw her.

Bref, I can’t believe I’m hearing myself saying this, but I hope they hold true to their word and this is the last Indiana Jones film. They’ve breathed new life into the character one last time after Crystal Skull, ending on a high note and with an appropriate story to tell for a man like Indy at the end of his career…but not, as we iris out, on the end of his adventures. This is fitting. This is right.

It can’t touch Raiders, nothing really can. But win, lose, or draw, it punches in the same weight class as Temple or even Crusade, with great chemistry, great characters, depth of soul, and great love for the character and his world as we say goodbye.

If adventure has a name, it must be Indiana Jones. And if he has a high note to go out on, it’s the sting of the Raiders march, closing out Dial of Destiny.