Time Warp — Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny review

A version of this review appeared in The Scotsman.

It’s no real secret that the plot of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny messes around with time. Even so, watching Harrison Ford’s Benjamin Button-ed archeologist seamlessly square off against Nazis in the opening scenes of this fifth instalment is so uncanny it briefly makes you wonder if its makers had access to some never-before-seen footage from 1989’s Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. Initially rewinding the franchise clock back to 1944, the new film — the first not directed by Steven Spielberg or co-written by George Lucas — finds director James Mangold (Cop Land, Logan) doing his best to invoke the spirit of the first three by dropping Ford’s digitally de-aged Indy into the dying days of World War II in pursuit of a sacred relic aboard a train full of stolen loot and soon-to-be-defeated Nazis.

The set-piece itself is a pastiche of a pastiche, with Mangold deploying this younger-looking Ford in a sly effort to re-establish the vigour and vibrancy of the series after the creaky, extraterrestrial missteps of previous instalment The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. But if the extensive CGI required to pull it off is the antithesis of all those corner-cutting practical effects that Spielberg initially utilised to mimic the cheap Saturday morning adventure serials that inspired Indy’s creation, the irony isn’t lost on Mangold or his star. Introducing us to the titular MacGuffin, a mathematical device known as the Antikythera that was built by Archimedes and supposedly has the power to locate “fissures in time”, the film’s lengthy opening salvo gives way to its own fissure in time by jumping us forward to New York City in the age of the moon landings to reveal the film’s best and most unadorned special effect — Ford playing Indiana Jones as he is now: a white-haired, craggy old man who shouts at his hippy neighbours for blasting out Beatles songs and whose own archaeology lectures as the soon-to-retire Professor Jones no longer inspire eyelid-batting and swooning, just eye-rolling and yawning.

There’s real poignancy to seeing Indy this way. Living by himself in a cramped New York apartment, divorce papers on his kitchen counter, it’s no longer just the mileage but the years that have taken their toll and Ford — a minimalistic, yet intensely physical, actor with a brilliant gift for wry comedy — is good at conveying the extent to which Indy has been displaced by the rapidly changing times without getting all mushy on us (as another iconic Ford character might put it). In truth, though, there’s no time for mushiness. The tick-tick-ticking sound of the clock that starts the movie also functions as a metronomic statement of intent for Mangold to keep the film moving at all times and within minutes of Indy’s reluctant retirement from New York’s Hunter college two figures from his past plunge him into another adventure.

The first is Mads Mikkelsen’s entertainingly sinister Jürgen Voller, a German rocket scientist who’s just helped put the Americans on the moon but is now using his government privileges to track down the Antikythera so he can revive his own thwarted Nazi dreams. The second is Indy’s goddaughter Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who’s after the Antikythera for her own roguish, ignoble ends and is convinced Indy has it stashed somewhere. The elaborate chase that follows spills out from the archives of Hunter college onto the streets of Manhattan, revealing the film’s other big special effect — the transformation of contemporary Glasgow into Manhattan in the midst of a ticker tape parade celebrating the return of the Apollo 11 astronauts. The film was shot in the city in the summer of 2021 and anyone who spent time wandering the sets will see that the extreme attention to detail — the shop windows full of authentic-to-the period products; the street posters advertising upcoming events on the cultural calendar  — wasn’t wasted.* As this CGI-augmented action sequence jumps from street level to roof level to the New York subway (with Indy on horseback), it’s as ridiculously fun as it is ridiculously implausible.

Thenceforth Indy, reunited with hat, whip and leather jacket, travels to Tangier, Athens and Sicily, his bickering relationship with Helena deepening as they hunt down a missing component of the titular dial, which keeps falling into and out of their possession as Voller closes in. Characters new and old (including Antonio Banderas as a veteran diver and John Rhys-Davies as series favourite Sallah) enter the fray at various points, though Waller-Bridge is by far the sparkiest addition, her character’s cantankerous relationship with Indy mirroring Ford’s earlier pairing with Sean Connery — only with Indy now the disapproving father figure. There are plenty of other call-backs to the earlier films, mostly involving oversized insects and underground tombs and all of them accompanied by John Williams’ incomparable score (rumoured to be his last). None of them are particularly egregious. On the contrary, they help keep the film in check, even as its preposterous finale really starts warping time and hurtling the film into Crystal Skull territory (though lets face it, the endings of the first three films were pretty fanciful too).

As a final crack of the whip, then, there’s not all that much to complain about. It lacks Spielberg’s effortless visual panache, but moment to moment it’s diverting enough, if a little forgettable. Having grown up with these films, though, it’s still a strange experience watching it all come to an end in this way. Time wise we’re as far away from 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark as it was from the adventure serials it was riffing on, yet for better or worse we’re still very much living in the blockbuster world it spawned: one of repeatedly exhumed IP, escalating set-pieces and apocalyptic events from which humanity needs repeated saving. But blockbuster spectacle isn’t really why Indiana Jones has endured for 42 years. He’s endured because of Ford and the small character moments that Spielberg smartly layered into that first film. And it’s those that Mangold honours with a final scene that brings things full circle to one of the quietest moments in Raiders, giving the man in the hat the gruffly tender send-off he deserves.

*Mangold has his own little pseudo-connection to Glasgow; he studied with the late, great Alexander Mackendrick, the Scottish-American director who grew up in Glasgow and directed Whisky Galore! and Clydeside puffer comedy The Maggie for Ealing Studios. Dial of Destiny is dedicated to him.