Updated Indy mired in the sands of time

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/07/2023 (878 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny hits theatres, the original Raiders of the Lost Ark movie is both a boost and a burden. The franchise’s familiar past brings in audiences. But that 1981 movie also evokes a more innocent time, before Intellectual Property and Extended Universes took over the multiplex.

Those then-and-now comparisons can feel a little melancholy, which might be why Dial of Destiny’s box office has been OK but not boffo, the reviews solid but somewhat withholding, using phrases like “serviceable” and “more than adequate.” (Ouch.)

Dial of Destiny is in a tricky spot: the fifth film in a franchise built on nostalgia for old-timey movie serials is now nostalgic for itself. The film never figures out what to do with all that Indiana Jones cultural heritage, wanting to be both an affectionate homage and a contemporary course-correction, wanting to warn against living in the past while lingering there itself.

This new-old Indy adventure starts by taking us back to the swashbuckling archeologist’s glory days. Indy is in war-torn Europe doing classic Indy stuff — cheating death with his wits and his whip, fighting on the top of a speeding train, punching Nazis.

Indy ends up scooping up a lost artifact from the Germans — the Antikythera, a mechanism created by the Greek mathematician and engineer Archimedes. But the biggest reclaimed artifact here is the young, fresh Harrison Ford, who is unearthed for audiences using a digital de-aging process that is both genuinely impressive and deeply unsettling. (Really, this is Black Mirror-level stuff.)

The Antikythera can supposedly predict fissures in time, and the story ends up spinning toward a time-travelling finish. But underneath that literal subplot, the movie is dealing with the notion that the best mechanism for time travel is cinema itself. What to do with that extraordinary power? Dial of Destiny is never quite sure.

After that undeniably satisfying bit of ’40s-era fan service, we fast-forward to the turbulent 1960s in New York City. Indy is now a gruff, scruffy old guy who has fallen asleep in front of the TV in his boxer shorts, only to be rudely awakened by the hippies in the apartment below blasting the Beatles.

His family is broken up, Marion (Karen Allen) now just a photo on the fridge.

His students are bored and disaffected. (They think the siege of Syracuse in 212 BCE took place in upstate New York.) His colleagues throw him a rather perfunctory retirement party.

Perhaps the toughest thing, though, for a member of the Greatest Generation, is that the Nazis he once battled, including Mads Mikkelsen’s sinister scientist, Dr. Schmidt, are now working for Indy’s own government, helping the U.S. win the space race.

To Ford’s credit, he is absolutely unafraid about acting his age here. Indy complains about his “crumbling vertebrae.” He shrugs off a joke about his famous fedora making him look “at least two years younger.” When his friend Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) gets wistful about the old times, Indy replies, “Those days have come and gone.”

But, no, they seem to have come back again, and Indy and his dodgy vertebrae are once more in action. There are constant callbacks to the earlier movies. Indy’s allies include a venturesome young woman, his goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge, bringing some of that fabulous Fleabag energy), and a street-smart kid, Teddy (Ethann Isidore). There are elaborate chases through the markets of distant countries and much destruction of their fruit stands.

The bad guys include Nazis, some original and some more recently recruited. Obstacles include a whole sequence featuring eels, which are basically the snakes of the sea.

There are also indications the franchise has been updated, not just to the ’60s but to our present era, which doesn’t really hold with Indy’s habit of plundering artifacts from other cultures with the justification that these things “belong in a museum.” A callous sword-versus-gun scene from the original Raiders gets an implicit reproach with a guns-versus-whip scene in which Indy is clearly, comically disadvantaged.

As well, there’s a genuine emotional poignance carried by Harrison’s craggy face and by a storyline that speaks to the need to live in the present, to face time and age and change and loss head-on.

“The world no longer cares for men like us,” Dr. Schmidt tells Indy at one point. The fact these words are spoken by a Nazi who dreams of his lost Reich suggests this is a dire warning about the dangers of nostalgia.

But this is a warning the movie doesn’t always heed, and Dial of Destiny ends up not just fighting Nazis, but battling itself.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca

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