Summer 2023 has been dominated by viral interest in the Barbie and Oppenheimer movies. This, undoubtedly, has had a detrimental effect on another blockbuster, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which is on its tail-end of a cinema run across the UK having under-performed at the box office (the film is just meeting its $360m production costs, worldwide). The site ‘Rotten Tomatoes’ give this squeezed-out film an audience score of 88% and 69% on the ‘Tomato-meter’! I would urge anyone interested in the film to catch it on the big screen before its run ends and the big screen experience is gone. Go now, read the review later (minor spoilers).
There are many ways in which this is a remarkable and super-ambitious spectacle, rather than just a formulaic effort firing on one cylinder, which I half-expected. The decision to delegate the film’s writing and direction to James Mangold (Walk the Line, two of the Wolverine movies), with co-writers with Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, and David Koepp injects new fuel into the franchise, with Spielberg and Lucas as executive producers. Delegation of franchises doesn’t always work, take some of the recent Star Wars films, which have arguably impacted on the legacy of certain characters and plot (made a bit of a mockery of Luke Skywalker; had a Carrie Fisher floating in space back to her ship, brought back from the dead; resurrected a wired-up, suspended Emperor Palpatine on a hidden planet), but The Dial of Destiny feels like a classic film within the canon, with the dial turned up on a tuktuk with the speed of a Ferrari.
Without spoiling too much of the plot, the film takes us to 1944 to a younger Indiana Jones and his friend Basil Shaw (played by Toby Jones from The Detectorists series), who are looking for the lance of Longinus, a spear-tip that is said to have pierced Christ on the cross. As with other Indiana Jones films, they are in competition with the Nazis and the cat-and-mouse chase between these enemies takes the viewer straight into fast and furious action. This is a deeply absorbing part of the film because we get to appraise the quality of the de-ageing technology on Harrison Ford. Only once or twice for split seconds could you detect the older Harrison Ford under digital skin (around the eyes, I thought!) – almost flawless in execution. The choice of Toby Jones is excellent – a quirky, quaint English character, very much the stereotype of an Oxford archaeologist with enough emotional depth to make his character seem authentic. These two on-screen friends are a great combo that the film could have featured more of.
The film then takes us to the more sought-after, precious object – half of the Archimedes’ Dial, an Antikythera mechanism developed by the mathematician Archimedes which reveals time fissures, allowing for possible time travel. This, of course, represents a great deal of poetic licence as no-one knows what the function of these ancient machines are but, as with all Indiana Jones films, this is fantasy requiring suspension of disbelief. Jones’s new sidekick, later in in life, 1969 to be precise, is Basil’s daughter, Helena Shaw, played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. I wasn’t sure what to expect and was concerned that the role might be hammy, a comedian brought in to energise a film and crank up the gags but ultimately to have really bad acting, as has happened on occasion with Russell Brand, but Waller-Bridge gives a credible performance as a morally-dubious but ultimately endearing character. This is a film of effective contrasts with Harrison Ford, an ever the highly-strung, abrasive character, full of resilience and grit in spades. With Waller-Bridge playing the whimsical sidekick, there is plenty of light-relief to offset the deliberately-jaded main character; there was a nostalgic cameo with John Rhys-Jones entering the fray which, again, the film could have made more of.
The casting of Mads Mikkelson as a Nazi scientist, Dr Schmidt, hunting the Archimedes’ Dial was a safe option with the Danish actor delivering the goods as an archetypal Nazi villain with the same strength of on-screen presence as Ford playing Jones. This seething, scheming character with incredible intuition as to where Jones might be, keeps the tension going right through the film. If there were some weaknesses, I felt that the filmmakers didn’t quite know what to do with some of his sidekicks, who got killed off too abruptly after making them potentially memorable characters. Casualties, perhaps, of the cutting room floor.
I was disappointed, too, at the way in which stereotypes were deployed with Arabic people. The scenery and sets depicting Morocco were nothing short of gorgeous – the casino/ auction scene, the bazaars and the frantic chase scenes on a tuktuk but too often Arabic people are stereotyped as hot-headed, murderous and/ or peasant-like in these kind of films. This could have been an opportunity to change this but a resumption of cultural stereotypes took the shine off the film at certain points for me, personally. We all understand that a film like this relies on stereotypes, which are sometimes playful or benign, but I did reflect on this aspect, feeling more than a little uncomfortable.
Scenes in New York, another exhausting chase scene involving Jones on horseback, and a deep-sea dive in Greece again make this film a feast of different environments and, of course, the cave scene towards the end of the film, a place of revelation. No more information on where they end up!
I would strongly recommend cinema-goers catch this film before it goes out of the cinema. Overall, as an experience, the film is expertly-conceived and produced. I hope that Harrison Ford has at least another film in him and, of course, the technology can do anything now. There are plenty of mysterious objects to base a film on and Hollywood blockbusters love a seething Nazi villain and the eventual trump of a flawed but loveable hero. The next film should be a little more mindful of equality in its cultural representation but overall, this gets a 8.5 /10.
The performance space at The Kings Arms is a relatively modest venue, essentially a large-ish room above a pub that’s well worth
Tulsa is a city that feeds the soul as much as the stomach, and Irish poet Jay Rafferty has captured its essence
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The Broken Spine is a poetry and arts collective proudly published on the coastal edge of North-West England. Founded in 2019 by Alan Parry and Paul Robert Mullen – two school friends reunited after twenty years through a mutual love of poetry.
