Harrison Ford’s Rendezvous with ‘Destiny’

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It’s been in the works a long time. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg planned the fifth Indiana Jones movie even before the release of the first, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). When the time finally came for the film that might be the series’ finale, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Lucas and Spielberg hovered in the background as executive producers. They handed the director’s chair to James Mangold (The Wolverine) and a shifting team of writers who labored on the project since 2016.

By some reports, Dial of Destiny became one of the most expensive movies ever made. Some in Hollywood are murmuring that Destiny has “bombed,” despite millions at box offices on opening weekend. The budget grew big, hard to recoup.

If fault must be found, it’s not in the acting. Harrison Ford fits the role of Indiana Jones like everyone’s favorite pair of old shoes. Old is the word because—except for flashbacks—Dial of Destiny is set in 1969. Indy is stiff and grouchy, yelling “turn it down” out his New York apartment window to the kids next door. The students in his big lecture hall are unresponsive to his passion for ancient pottery and his face is grey with bemusement at his retirement party.

At his best moments, Mangold visually reveals the recent developments in Indy’s life. A glance discloses divorce papers on his kitchen table. Without a word, he covers his wife’s photo with a refrigerator magnet.

But marital woes pale when Indy becomes—like an Alfred Hitchcock character—an innocent man on the run, hounded by the authorities and dodging the bad guys. And not unlike North by Northwest, Indy has a slippery, uncertain and much younger female traveling companion. Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), the daughter of a wartime associate in archeology and espionage, sets the plot in motion when she turns up asking about her father’s obsession, the film’s MacGuffin, the Antikythera.

Here's where Dial of Destiny (and previous chapters in the saga) becomes interesting in its blend of history and myth, fact and fiction. There really is an Antikythera and it really is a mysterious ancient Greek device discovered at the bottom of the sea by sponge divers. Archeologists were baffled for years before determining that the device’s multiple gears form an analog computer, possibly for navigational or astronomical calculations. In Dial of Destiny, it becomes the wheel on which history could turn, a time machine, and the chief bad guy wants it badly.

That baddie is a Werner von Braun stand-in who calls himself Dr. Schmidt (Mads Mikkelsen), a Nazi scientist responsible for the Apollo moon landing (the astronauts have just returned as Indy’s flight begins and he must dodge the villains through a ticker tape parade). Still a true believer in the New Order, Schmidt wants to seize the Antikythera and change the outcome of World War II. By contrast, Helena pursues the profit motive, hoping to auction the Antikythera to the highest bidder at an exclusive nightclub in Tangier, a scene of Orientalist decadence worthy of Edward Said’s scorn. For his pary, Indy just wants to return the darn thing to the university storeroom where it sat, unexamined, for decades. Oh yes, and save the world. He's thrown together with Helena to find the missing piece of the Antikythera, believed to lie at the bottom of the Aegean. Will she turn good in the end, or will she be in it for her own gain through the final scene? Hold onto your seats for the two-and-a-half-hour ride.

Ford is digitally de-aged for the opening flashback amidst the Nazis’ drunken and disorderly retreat from France. He’s on a plunder train crammed with looted valuables (yes, the Nazis stole as well as killed). Among the artifacts onboard is the legendary spear that pierced Christ’s side, which according to popular conspiracy theories the Nazis sought for its occult power. As action scenes go, Dial of Destiny’s computer-generated mayhem (maybe the Antikythera could have done better?) looks unreal, limp, dangerous as a fake carnival ride compared to anti-Nazi adventure films of an earlier age such as John Frankenheimer’s The Train (1964) and Arthur Hiller’s Tobruk (1967). Some of the other scenes are better staged, including a comical chase through Tangier’s casbah and an underwater dive in the Aegean menaced by angry eels.

Ford is capable throughout, Waller-Bridge is charmingly vivacious, and Antonio Banderas turns in a good performance as Indy’s Greek fisherman friend. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny comes with every hallmark of the franchise, including John Williams’ fanfares, moments of humor amidst the cartoon violence and most of all, Indy’s brown bomber jacket and felt Fedora. Will the saga continue? The box office numbers will tell.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is screening at Marcus Southgate Cinema, Oriental Theater, Downer Theater, Marcus BistroPlex Southridge, Avalon Atmospheric Theater, Marcus Ridge Cinema, AMC Mayfair, Marcus South Shore Cinema, Movie Tavern Brookfield Square, Marcus Showtime Cinema, Marcus North Shore Cinema, Silverspot Cinema, Marcus Majestic Cinema, Marcus Renaissance Cinema and Marcus Menomonee Falls Cinema.