Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) Review
1/10
An aging archaeology professor in 1969 New York is teaching students who do not care, living alone in an apartment where the neighbors complain about his music, and being asked to retrieve a device Archimedes built.
The 1 is the floor and it is charity. There is no decision in this film, no jeopardy, no antagonist with a stake, and no reason for any scene to follow the one before it. Remove the title and the hat and nobody alive would sit through it.
The money is the clearest evidence. Roughly a quarter of the budget went on a rubber mask stretched over an eighty-year-old for twenty-five minutes of flashback, and the remaining three hundred million bought an itinerary. Nobody at any point asked what the film was about.
Even the Premise Is Wasted
There was a premise available. Indy in a vest in a small apartment, banging on a wall to stop a neighbor’s stereo, walking to a job that has been quietly taken from him. The film raises it in about four minutes and then abandons it for good.
His son is dead, his marriage has ended, the field he defined has moved on, and a former Nazi works for NASA and shakes hands with the president. Every one of those is dropped in as set dressing and none of it changes a single thing that happens afterward.
Ford is eighty and visibly exhausted, and the film has no idea what to do with either fact. It wants him weary in the apartment and spry on a rooftop within the same reel, so the performance is pulled in two directions and lands in neither.
The result is a character with no condition at all. Every time the film establishes that Indy is finished, it puts him on a horse to prove he is not, and after twenty minutes the audience stops believing anything the picture says about him.
Logan is the comparison Mangold invites, since he made it. That film committed absolutely to a diminished hero, took its rating and its grimness and its ending, and is the better picture for it. Here the same director had a franchise to protect and the protection is visible in every scene.
A late-life sequel has one genuine subject available, which is the cost of the years between. Using the character’s age is the only thing this kind of story can do that the originals could not.
The failure mode is to establish the decline and then undo it for the audience’s comfort. Doing both means neither reads, because the audience cannot hold a man as diminished and undiminished in the same scene.
Commit and pay for it. If your returning hero is old, he has to be slower, and the plot has to be built so slowness matters. Otherwise the age is makeup.
The Train Sequence Is Not Good Either
The opening flashback runs about twenty-five minutes on a train in 1944 with a digitally de-aged Ford, and it is the stretch defenders point to. It does not survive a second look.
It also cost enormously. Post-production in the year to April 2023 alone came to seventy-nine million dollars, bringing the total to three hundred and eighty-seven million, which makes it one of the most expensive films ever made and one of the least eventful.
The de-aging never solves movement. Ford’s face is forty and his body is eighty, so the scene is cut into fragments to hide a physical performance that cannot match the mask. There is no sustained action in it, only a rapid assembly of pieces engineered to conceal a problem.
Casting a younger actor for the 1944 material would have cost a fraction and looked better. That it did not happen tells you the priority was the novelty of the technology, not anything on the page.
There is a structural problem with opening on it as well. The film front-loads a young Indy at full capacity before the story starts, then asks the audience to accept a slower man for two hours. The comparison is built in and the picture loses it in the first reel.
The Middle Has No Engine
After the train, the film becomes a series of chases through locations that are on screen because a globetrotting adventure requires locations. Tangier, the Aegean, a cave, a Sicilian hillside.
Nothing in the middle hour is driven by a decision anybody makes. Indy is told where to go, arrives, is chased, and receives the next instruction. The Antikythera mechanism is a plot token that reveals its next requirement whenever the film needs a new country. Two hours of screen time contain no choice with a consequence.
Compare it to Raiders, where every location follows from Indy working something out, and the object he chases has a specific and terrifying property the plot is arranged around. Here the dial does whatever the next scene requires, which means it is not an object, it is a schedule.
Mads Mikkelsen’s Voller is well cast and given nothing. He is a Nazi rocket scientist working for NASA in 1969, which is a real and appalling piece of history, and the film raises it and then uses him as a man in cars pointing guns.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge is handed a rogue with a running commentary, a mode that requires the film around her to be light, in a picture about a man whose son is dead. Two registers, neither serving the other, and she is stranded between them.
A quest structure needs the protagonist to generate the next step. If information arrives on schedule instead of being earned, the audience stops watching a character and starts watching an itinerary.
The diagnostic question for any scene in a middle act: what did the protagonist decide here, and what did it cost him? If the answers are nothing and nothing, the scene is transport.
Your antagonist’s stated belief has to be load-bearing too. Voller wants to correct history, which is a genuine idea, and the film never lets that belief cause a single complication for the hero.
The Ending Throws Away Its Only Idea
The dial works. It opens a fissure in time and the aircraft flies through it into the siege of Syracuse in 212 BC, where Indy meets Archimedes.
Then Indy asks to stay. He is a man with nothing left in 1969, standing in the ancient world he spent his life studying, and he says he wants to remain there and die there. It is the one moment that suggests anybody involved had read their own first act.
And the film takes it away. Helena punches him, drags him back, and he wakes in his apartment where his estranged wife arrives and the marriage is repaired in about ninety seconds. A film about a man with nothing ends by handing him everything off screen.
That retreat is the moment any defense of the film collapses. The picture stumbles into one real idea in its final ten minutes and then knocks its own hero unconscious to avoid having it. A film that discovers what it is about and then refuses on the grounds of tone has earned nothing.
What It Cost Disney and Why
The film grossed three hundred and eighty-four million dollars worldwide against that three hundred and eighty-seven million budget. Filings later put Disney’s loss at a hundred and thirty-four million. It is the third most expensive film ever made by some counts.
It also opened badly on purpose. Disney premiered it at Cannes a month ahead of release, expecting acclaim, and got a rotten aggregate score that sat there for four weeks doing damage before the general reviews arrived.
The deeper miscalculation was about the audience. Crystal Skull had taken seven hundred and ninety million in 2008 on a hundred and eighty-five million budget, and that audience had already had its reunion. Fifteen more years is a long time to ask people to want the same thing again.
Audiences scored it higher than critics, at eighty-eight percent against seventy, which is the signature of people defending a purchase. Gods of Egypt at least had a design department and one committed performance. This has a de-aging invoice.
Sequels arriving after long gaps are betting that the audience’s appetite is stored and not spent. Usually it was spent on the last one.
When the bet is that large, the work has to justify itself to somebody who has never seen the originals. This film cannot. It assumes affection it has not earned within its own running time.
The narrower lesson: spend the money on the problem that matters. Nobody left this film complaining that the de-aging was insufficient. They left because the middle hour has no story in it.
Should you watch Dial of Destiny?
No. There is one line of dialogue in the last ten minutes worth hearing, when an old man asks to stay in the past he spent his life studying, and the film knocks him out instead of answering it. Everything around that line is the most expensive nothing the franchise has produced, and it finished the franchise off.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 3 of my film lists