It’s really hard to make everyone happy when it comes to making movies. No matter how hard you try, you’re bound to run into resistance from any avenue you take. It doesn’t make it right, but it certainly makes it so.
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For Lucasfilm, it’s been more than 20 years of trying to appease all sides of all expectations. Whether it’s with Star Wars or Indiana Jones, you either want what’s comfortable or you want something daring. You either want to recapture the nostalgia of what you had when you were a kid, or you want a subversive exercise in challenging what’s come before with new ideas.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny straddles a very careful line between one of the most iconic templates in film history and a very peculiar moment in history. Like Indy walking on a rickety bridge over a river full of crocodiles, the film has to do a lot while still trying to stay true to itself.
It’s somewhat of a miracle that this latest Indiana Jones adventure finds what it does, especially with longtime director Steven Spielberg not in the director’s chair for the first time in the five-film run. Spielberg’s first four Indiana Jones adventures are all singular works, as they call came at various points in the legendary auteur’s career. Filmmaker James Mangold is the first person ever to excavate the caves of this franchise with fresh eyes.
If anything, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny somehow finds a way to give everyone what they want out of this series in some fashion or another. Do you want a globetrotting spectacle with creepy-crawlies, Nazi-punching, breakneck chases and treasures beyond belief? You’ve got it. Do you want a film that feels starkly different than what’s come before it, even down to the way the adventure is paced? Mangold can do that.
Much of the criticism for the previous Indiana Jones film Kingdom of the Crystal Skull feels disingenuine as time has passed, haphazard internet memes born into slapdash talking points without much weight. That film was Spielberg at his wiliest, a spiritual successor to Temple of Doom combined with the filmmaker’s endearing homage for the sock-hop society.
This latest Indiana Jones film feels right in place with The Last Crusade, as Mangold and company nail the contemplative nature of all of these films. While it’s easy to get fixated on the boulder chases and the historical artifacts, the Indiana Jones films have always been about discovering a world bigger than you. Harrison Ford has always brought the smirk and irreverence we love him for, but he’s also well aware of Indy’s inner awe for his journeys.
Despite the grandiosity of the adventures, Indiana Jones is just an average guy with a whip and fedora, trying to make sense of the supernatural, the terrifying and the downright divine converging on his moment in history. The movies are always made by Ford’s disarming sense of wonder and fear when things really hit the fan and all you can do is look in disbelief.
Mangold’s film doesn’t quite have the same momentum as the other Indy films, but it doesn’t need to. It finds perhaps Ford’s best performance in the series to hang its narrative, one that finds our hero dealing with the weight of his personal history and that of the world he’s in. He’s a man lost in time, and it’s fitting that he’s still battling with those nefarious Nazis over a device that could alter the course of history.
There’s more than enough here to satisfy the lifelong fan, just as there’s more than enough here for folks yearning for a fresh take on Indy’s galavanting. Ford’s more than up to the task, as are newcomers Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Jones’ goddaughter, a chip off the old block) and Mads Mikkelsen (a dastardly Nazi scientist from Jones’ past who wants to turn back the clock on the failures of the Third Reich).
The balancing act can get understandably tricky in spots for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, but it makes it across the bridge in plenty of style. Like the films that come before it, this latest Indiana Jones film stays true to the title character. Through all the hand-wringing about what these movies are supposed to be, they always seem to get right what matters most.