A True Temple of Doom: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Tis a rare day indeed when I and the good missus can get away from our offspring to have a half-arsed day date to see a film in a theater.  So, when the opportunity presented itself that the grandparents would mind the children for three hours, we left before they could change their minds and stole off to the multiplex!

It was exactly 34 years ago when I was in this same theater in lovely Hartford, WI to see Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade with my family.  When it came out, my ten-year-old eyes were dazzled.  It was the first Indy film I had ever seen on the big screen.  At that time, I was also getting into watching James Bond movies, so I was thrilled seeing Sean Connery on a theater screen.  More recently, Last Crusade proved it had staying power as my jaded brood of children thoroughly enjoyed watching it for the first time a few weeks ago. 

But alas, we weren’t going to see that film.  We weren’t even going to see Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, which I had also seen in that same theater also back in 1989.  Instead, we were going to see the unbelievably titled Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.  (In retrospect, I would have gleefully watched Bill Shatner smugly asking why God needs a starship instead.)  But enough delaying prattle!  I shall get into this film with my usual random scattershot approach of paragraphs that don’t necessarily lead into one another.  Oh, and I’ll be dripping with spoilers too, so before I go any further, here’s your warning to take the left tunnel.  No, Indy!  The left tunnel!

• Let me start off with the obvious.  I like Harrison Ford.  I do.  He is a true film star, and we don’t really have many of his caliber left.  His name can open a film, his name can get funding, his name triggers a response.  Ford has a body of work that has solid entries and questionable choices.  But that’s true of any actor’s resumé; I don’t begrudge the man for doing films like Firewall or Ender’s Game.  The man’s earned his place and he’s kept on working even as he’s gotten to 80 years old.  I’m looking for a good place to put a “that being said” moment, and it might as well be now.  I know Ford loves the character of Indiana Jones, and he should.  It’s his signature role.  But Ford was already a bit long in the tooth with Crystal Skull.  While it was barely pulled off back in 2008, it is now 2023.  Let me put it this way: I was thirty in 2008, and if I’m falling apart at the age 45 in 2023, I cannot imagine what it is like for an 80-year-old to get on a horse or attempt some whip-cracking in a convincing manner.  (Of course, since he’s admittedly taken better care of himself in the intervening years than I have, I give Ford all the credit in the world.  For instance, even though Clint Eastwood’s over 90, I know he’d still kick my ass without a second thought and get right back to enjoying his cup of Ensure.) 

• Ford’s age isn’t necessarily a handicap story wise, but it certainly shows throughout, and it gets to be a bit sad to watch a formerly rollicking adventurer in his ever-increasing dotage.  (Look, I love James Bond, but even Roger Moore knew when to hang up the PPK.  Though now that I think about it, Moore was only 58 when he quit Bond, so theoretically, he could have followed Ford’s example, playing 007 until…2007?!)

• Since I mentioned Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, time has been far kinder to it than you remember.  No, really!  Look, in 2008 I was disappointed too.  I thought that it couldn’t get any worse for Indy.  However, upon semi-mature reflection, it was an honest-to-goodness Indiana Jones adventure.  Yes, Crystal Skull has flaws, but Dr. Jones does partake in the action and certainly isn’t a supporting character in his own movie.  True, the commies are mostly dull as dishwater compared to the Third Reich or Kali worshippers and your mileage on Shia LaBeouf varies depending on your tastes, but overall, Crystal Skull is a perfectly serviceable addendum film to the series.  A coda to the trilogy proper if you will.  Plus, John Hurt and Cate Blanchett and Jim Broadbent are all solid actors and none of them are phoning their roles in.  Spielberg and Lucas took a chance on taking Indy out of the 1930s, threw together a rather entertaining first half of a movie, and then barely managed to get out of that scrape alive, with reputations relatively undamaged.  And as a bonus: Harrison Ford smiled in that movie a few times.  (I know Dial of Destiny viewers would be shocked by this, but yes, Ford used to smile as the character!  No, really!)

• I know the trailers would have you believe otherwise, but John Rhys-Davies is in the movie for about 4 minutes.  No, Sallah doesn’t join Indy on anything other than a trip to the airport.  And frankly that would make for a more interesting adventure: watching two elderly men navigate the concrete jungle of New York City as Sallah tries to get Indy to his flight on time!  Think when John McClane drove the cab in Die Hard with A Vengeance except with the “Raiders March”!  Waitaminute…why is Sallah even in New York City?!  I know Sallah says a hastily written sentence to justify his presence, talking about how Indy got him and his family to the U.S. during WWII.  Then Sallah mentions how he misses home, and I was touched until I remembered that the film takes place in 1969!  At that point, the Nazis had lost over twenty years ago.  Go home!  Instead, you’re stuck in New York driving a damn cab?!  Get back to Cairo, the city of the living!  Perhaps this taxi hack gig was revenge on Sallah because he had heartily laughed about how Indy was named after the dog.  Pretty petty, Dr. Jones.

• I mentioned the “Raiders March” and before I forget, I want to talk about John Williams.  Williams is a legend.  He literally wrote the soundtrack for my childhood, as he did for so many others of my generation and beyond.  So many incredible scores and themes.  And his work on Indiana Jones films has been top notch.  (I’m sensing another “that being said…” moment.)  But that being said (I knew it!), the score here just is not all that memorable.  In fact, it seems like Williams is digging out a greatest Indy hits package for Dial of Destiny.  Everything feels like a retread, if the overall sound mix isn’t smothering the music in the first place.  Even something as simple as the music for Indy’s travelling line on a map is wrong.  In the other Indy entries, the “Raiders March” would kick off the red line on the map and then a different theme would follow until the line stops and lands someplace exotic.  Instead, for at least one of the map scenes, the “Raiders March” didn’t kick in until they had landed and then it was for when the group was getting off from their hitched ride on a truck.  Perhaps the thrill of watching an 80-year-old get down gingerly from a flatbed warrants the thrilling Raiders theme, but that is a depressing situation indeed.  (It reminded my wife of the early James Bond films where his theme would kick in when he was just simply checking into his hotel in an actionless manner.  “Please sign the register, Mr. Bond.”  BAH DAH DA DAAAH DA DA DAAHHH!)  Mr. Williams, I’m sure that you probably got tired of having to score and rescore a movie that was reshot and reassembled repeatedly.  You just thumbed your nose at it and since the production was using your old scores as temp tracks anyway, they just had it be the actual score.  I completely understand your frustration.  Your legacy was assured before this film anyway, sir.

• Let’s look at the rest of our cast here!  Mads Mikkelsen is our main villain, a Nazi scientist who was snatched up for the U.S. rocket/space program and now has a villainous Nazi plan to execute in a villainy Nazi way.  Mads is a rarity in that he has now appeared in a Bond movie, a Star Wars movie, and now an Indiana Jones film!  Not since Julian Glover has someone truly pulled off that triumvirate of franchise goodness!  Unfortunately, Mads is not given much to do other than handle the direction of “Be Nazi-ish”.  Thankfully, Indy hates Nazis and golly, he hates Nazis good here.  So, I say “Boo!” to you, Mr. Nazi Guy and all your Nazi-ings!  I know Mikkelsen was a great choice and sadly, he was given this script and that’s where it all fell apart.

• Antonio Banderas is here as well and by the time you read this sentence, he’s about halfway done with his total scenes in this film.  I like Mr. Banderas and to take the trouble to get him involved with this hokum only to chuck him before he has a chance to sit in his trailer is disgraceful.  I mean, did he even snag some of those delightful shrimp eggrolls over at craft services on his way out?  I hope he stuffed his pockets with regular size bags of M&Ms and made good on his escape from the lot!  That’ll show you, Lucasfilm!

• Toby Jones is here for two, yes two, flashbacks!  Gosh, I’m glad that he was here because he was a delight.  Of course, in a movie that’s about as long as the Ten Commandments, and by that I don’t mean the film, I mean the actual time it took for the exodus and journey of the Israelites on their way to the promised land, how is it that so many good actors get almost no screen time?  From John Rhys-Davies to Banderas to Toby Jones to Karen Allen, if you totaled up their entire screen time it would amount to maybe 20 minutes.  Half an hour, tops.  So, if they aren’t onscreen, who exactly is?

• Gosh, I’m tickled to death to tell you!  Why it is none other than whatshername playing Indy’s hitherto unmentioned goddaughter!  (Yes, this goddaughter business must mean that Dr. Henry Jones Jr. is listed on her baptismal certificate, right?  There had to have been a service.  Perhaps they served cake afterwards.  I love cake.  How big of a slice would Indy have had?  I wonder if it was a buttercream frosting.  Perhaps two layers with a layer of frosting between.  Maybe a hint of strawberry jam or raspberry preserves between the layers also?  Anyway, what was I saying?  Eh, probably nothing important.)

• All right, yes, the movie has Phoebe Waller-Bridge, a writer that has written nothing you know.  She’s also an actress who has acted in nothing you’ve ever seen, even less now, judging by how few people are seeing this film.  For reasons still unknown, she’s held in high regard by people who have terrible opinions about everything else in life.  Yes, Waller-Bridge was the voice of the most annoying character in Star Wars history, which is quite an accomplishment for a galaxy that has plenty of excruciating voices already.  (Yes folks, it took until an exasperating droid in Solo to exonerate Jar Jar Binks.)  She is written as someone better than Indy at everything because she just is, so there.  Now, if we paid our tickets to see her, then that would be a great thing.  But her name isn’t on the title of the film because even the most basic of publicity material calls the film Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.  (Even though Sean Connery could have easily done so, he didn’t steal thunder from Harrison Ford.  That’s what makes Connery a mensch and Waller-Bridge a wanker.)  Waller-Bridge (argh, even her name irrationally irritates me) is essentially a secondary antagonist in the film, trying to manipulate and then later ditch Indiana Jones every chance she gets.  She only changes her tune because we’ve reached a point where the movie is ending in 40 minutes, so why not, I guess? Let me put this in the simplest of terms: when you are more insufferable and irritating than the Nazis in your movie, it is time to have a rethink of the character.

• She ends up being like the anti-Mikkelsen at the end of the day, leaving a trail of destruction across three major franchises.  Waller-Bridge put a severe dent in liking Solo in the Star Wars universe.  She compounded that dent by showing up Indiana Jones in his own movie.  And she did some rewrites on the Bond film No Time to Die, an entry so frustrating, I don’t know if I can even rank it in my legendary Bond movie article series.  (I might put one of the Flint movies ahead of it as being a better Bond movie than No Time to Die in the 007 canon.  I know I’m damn well putting 1985’s King Solomon’s Mines ahead of Dial of Destiny in the Indy canon!)

• The Indiana Jones films are known for some impressive stunt sequences and Dial of Destiny isn’t not an exception.  Remember in Raiders of the Lost Ark, when you could clearly see Vic Armstrong stunting away underneath that moving truck in the bright desert sunlight?  Remember when the bridge in Temple of Doom was slashed apart in the glorious light of day?  Remember the tank battle the Last Crusade that was right in the heart of a noon, drenched in the sun’s rays?  Remember in Crystal Skull a motorcycle chase that takes place during the daylight hours where you can see everything?  Yeah…well, that doesn’t happen here.  Most of the stunts are done in the middle of the night, in the pouring rain, in the fogbank a train goes through, in the depths of the ocean, in a dimly lit cave.  To be fair, amongst the barrage of unending chase sequences, there is a taxi cart chase in the setting sun and a car/motorcycle/horse chase amid the CG parade/subway wonderland.  However, these two scenes are also frustrating because aside from feeling nothing beyond the desperate need to visit the restroom due to the excessive runtime, you can see how bad the effects are in the light of day.  After a while, you just want the CGI thunderstorms to take over the screen and drown out the effects of Indiana Jones and The Uncanny Valley as quickly as possible.

• Indiana Jones has his own Sherman and Peabody moment because whilst time-travelling (oh, don’t ask), he truly meets Archimedes.  Yes, the real one. The off-the-rails time portal nonsense is admittedly a slight redemption for this dreck, however at the same time, it is wildly out of place in an Indiana Jones movie.

• Speaking of time travel, Mads’ original idea was to get back to 1939 to kill Hitler, so the Nazis (boo!) have a better chance to win WWII.  He miscalculates and everyone ends up back at the time of the Battle of Syracuse, hence all that Archimedes nonsense.  It is here that I posit the following brilliant script change: if you’ve decided to go off the rails and introduce lazy time travel as a cheat into your lazy script, why not go all out?  I would have given several dollars for Mads to still be wrong about his math and when the Nazis come out on the other side, they are immediately attacked by…pterodactyls!  Yes, dinosaurs!  Why not?  Watch Mads get devoured by some velociraptors!  Heck, even have John Williams do a callback to the Jurassic Park theme!  Yes, my genius is remarkable, I know.  You’re welcome for that image.

• By the way, a velociraptor kill would be rather tame compared to this film’s remarkably harsh and cold-blooded murder body count.  Sheesh, we already know that the lead bad guy is a Nazi.  With that comes the baggage of being a Nazi.  It is one of the few groups that doesn’t need too much of a backstory to regard them as evil.  We don’t have to have unarmed secretaries and fishermen gunned down left and right to make your point, getting Dr. Jones accused of murders he didn’t commit.  I think if the producers could have the antagonists mowing down innocent paradegoers, resulting gory and glorious Peckinpah-like blood squibs to get at Jones, they would have.

• Oh, they killed Shia LaBeouf offscreen at some point because he signed up to serve in Vietnam just to tick Indy off.  Unfortunately, there’s no production photo shot of his head from Crystal Skull in memoriam on Indy’s desk, so I don’t believe it ever happened.  I can totally understand not having Indy’s son around because…well…um…reasons?

• Now comes the part where I can salvage this whole mess.  I’m taking some inspiration from a theory that states if you take Indiana Jones out of the first Raiders movie, the story would end up almost exactly the same.  Think about it: the Nazis would get the headpiece to the staff of Ra and Marion is either dead or a smidge richer, they’d dig out the Ark, have a lovely peaceful flight out on a flying wing to Berlin, and Belloq gets to open the Ark in the presence of the Führer where everyone in the room would be annihilated by the awesome face-meltin’ power of God Almighty.  (Say, doesn’t that mean that Indy’s intervention only meant that Hitler was temporarily saved from divine punishment, thus allowing for everything post-1936 to happen in the world of Nazidom?  Oh, good one, Dr. Jones!)

• Anyway, who was Dial of Destiny made for?  I don’t honestly know.  It really isn’t an Indiana Jones film.  So, why does he have to be in it?  That’s right, the best way I can salvage this film is…take Indy out completely.  You don’t really need him in this adventure.  He doesn’t really want to go on it, the others are constantly trying to ditch him anyway, and for the last 40 minutes he’s just a wounded pathetic tagalong who wants to be left alone to die in the past and he even gets that end denied to him.  (By the way, isn’t Indy still wanted for murder?  Also, how did Waller-Bridge even get wounded Indy back to New York?  Did he only finally gain consciousness when he was back in his crappy apartment back in New York?  By another way, why did Indy ever leave a marvelous university setting with a lovely house to end up in a dumpy New York apartment, pathetically having to deal with made-for-TV hippies that blast Beatles music instead of something a bit more counterculture in 1969?)

• Oops, I got sidetracked again.  It’s okay.  My mind wanders about as much as the script.  Anyway, getting back to how you’re making this film better by taking Indy out of it.  Instead just make it a father/daughter adventure with Toby Jones and Waller-Bridge.    Besides, Sallah and Marion were window dressing afterthoughts anyway, so you can completely cut them out with ease.  Toby Jones is a professor who gets the dial by taking in from Mads back in 1944, the Allies knock out the train, and he escapes with it.  Fast forward 25 years later and Waller-Bridge is his estranged daughter, who is a bit on the shady side, and she takes the dial from Toby.  But he pursues her, and the rest of the movie happens.  Give Banderas more to do by being an old friend of Toby’s.  Have Mads stay on as your Nazi, no problem.  Even keep the 1969 setting, I don’t care.  At the end of the day, Lucasfilm could have actually created something original, how novel!  The film would have been all Waller-Bridge, all day long instead of going through the chore of dumping Indiana Jones into this drivel.  She wouldn’t need to ride on his aged coattails and now could just get jump started on her own adventures with dad Toby Jones in tow.  Phoebe Waller-Bridge could be just like Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft, just without the intelligence, charisma, and beauty.

• And finally, there’s the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles issue.  As older viewers might recall, the 93-year-old Indy on the show was depicted as having lost an eye.  So that means that sometime after the events of Dial of Destiny, Indy has to invest in an eyepatch.  Given the circumstances, I hope that he lost the eye for some mundane reason, like he used his whip to remove an eye-booger or he blinded himself after he walked into a cabinet doorknob during New York’s 1977 blackout.  Perhaps using time travel, Indy ended up in the early audience at Cannes and thought gouging his own eye out would be better than having to sit through more of Dial of Destiny.

And there we have it.  An unsatisfying mess that cost over $300 million dollars.  (Let me put it another way, if over 300 million people each donated a dollar to this production, that’s how much it would cost.  A tidy sum indeed!)  I think the biggest winners here are Spielberg and Lucas who can both hold their heads up high above this dreck.  Also, Ke Huy Quan is a champ here.  Even though it would have made for some nice nostalgia to bring Short Round back, ultimately, Quan didn’t have to suffer through these indignities.  (Plus, I think Shorty was too busy polishing his Academy Award, a duty that Mr. Ford himself is not able to do.)

I am surprised there are people who claim to like Dial of Destiny.  Granted, there’s no accounting for taste.  Also, I’m sure there are plenty of interweb trolls and shills who are futilely shouting the short list of merits about this thing.  I can only imagine that…actually, no, I cannot imagine why anyone would truly like this film.  I have seen others saying this entry is even better than Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but it turns out that is a wildly incorrect opinion as they’ve forgotten how to perceive correctly. I will take Indy getting nuked in a fridge every day of the week and twice on Sunday rather than seeing him deconstructed to the point of irrelevance. 

Yet, in the end, what about Dial of Destiny?  Well, it just wasn’t necessary.  Ford certainly had no need to prove anything at this stage in his career.  Hopefully, he took home a sizeable check, knowing that by this point the well is fairly dry with him having to re-portray any of his catalog of fan favorite characters ever again.  (Unless Dr. Richard Kimble is accused of another murder!  Get Tommy Lee Jones on the phone!)  Dial of Destiny ends up being a soulless cash grab, made by folks who are creatively bankrupt, so in other words, the current Lucasfilm administration. 

And instead of having Dr. Jones riding on a dinosaur, he ends up being the dinosaur, and that is an unforgiveable destiny to be sure.