Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: Listless and Meandering

Lucasfilm needed a win desperately at the theatrical box office. Solo: A Star Wars Story was a failure considering how high the budget was, The Rise of Skywalker couldn’t even break a billion dollars as the end of the Skywalker Saga, and in the nearly five years since (granted, there was a pandemic in the middle of it) Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is their only theatrical release. On top of this, director James Mangold has been tapped by Lucasfilm to direct the upcoming Dawn of the Jedi movie so a ton is riding on the success of this film. Unfortunately for them, Dial of Destiny is a bloated letdown that is not worth the over two-and-a-half-hour runtime.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny tells the final adventure of the famed archeologist Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford). This time he’s in 1969 and must team up with his god-daughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) to stop a small remnant group of Nazis (Mads Mikkelsen and Boyd Holbrook) as they seek a relic with extraordinary power.

The relationship between Helena and Indiana Jones does make for an interesting dynamic over the course of the film and can elevate the material to an extent. Helena’s personality brings a new perspective to the franchise which allows Indiana Jones to go on an adventure in a way that has not been done yet.

Despite this, the film does have a large number of issues. The sequences in the trailer with the de-aged Harrison Ford occupy about 20 minutes of screen time and the shots in the trailer are the only time it looks good. To try and mask the bad effects at that point (an issue previously seen in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story with the resurrected Peter Cushing and de-aged Carrie Fisher and in The Mandalorian/The Book of Boba Fett with the de-aged Mark Hamill) these scenes are all poorly lit and hard to follow. On top of this, there is no adjustment to Harrison Ford’s voice so there’s this strange uncanny valley effect where the viewer sees a young Harrison Ford talking with his now 80-year-old voice. It is all the more baffling since another studio at the same company managed to de-age Robert Downey Jr., Michael Douglas, Samuel L. Jackson, and Michelle Pfeiffer five years ago or more, and the effects hold up better. Compare this week’s flashback in Secret Invasion with a 1997 iteration of Samuel L. Jackson to the opening 20 minutes of this movie and there is a marked difference in quality.

The opening would be less egregious if it were integral to the plot, but really it is not important in the slightest. All the information given (the titular dial was in the possession of the Nazis until Indiana Jones stole it) could be exposited with a sentence or two of dialogue without wasting all that time. When a movie is clocking in at over two and a half hours before counting trailers, there better be a good reason for it to be that long. That’s not the only place where things could be trimmed considering there is also a chase sequence later in the film through the streets of Tangier which definitely could have been several minutes shorter with a few characters omitted.

There is nothing about Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny that demands to be seen in a theater. There are some appealing moments later in the movie (not explained in depth above as to avoid spoiling the film), however, there is a lot of nonsense that one needs to be willing to sit through to get to that point. Unless one is a diehard fan, there is not much in this movie to warrant watching it in a theater when it’ll be on Disney+ by the end of the year and, if someone waited this long, they can wait just a little longer.

Final Rating: 5/10