Movie review: Intense, outrageous and funny – Indiana Jones pulls off one last adventure

Indiana Jones is back in the fifth and final movie in the franchise – fifteen years after the fourth movie came out. 

The movie is set in 1969, decades after Indiana Jones’ heyday as a young archaeologist.  A much older Indiana Jones finds himself struggling with his role in an ever-modernizing world that seems to have left him behind. 

His goddaughter Helena Shaw appears looking for a device called the Antikythera, which was rumored to help travel through time. Jones had stolen it from the Nazis during World War II, but quickly learns that Nazis are still around and seeking the dial – sending him on a wide-ranging adventure to keep the dial away from their hands. 

With Harrison Ford reprising his role as Indiana Jones, Phoebe Waller-Bridge playing his young, enthusiastic goddaughter, and Mads Mikkelsen playing the Nazi scientist Jürgen Voller, it’s a cast packed with notoriety and talent. 

Even though this is the first Indiana Jones movie without Stephen Spielberg as the director, it’s an action-packed adventure that plays to the franchise’s strengths and adds new life to the characters. 

One of the first things movie-viewers will notice is that Harrison Ford has been digitally de-aged in the opening sequence of the film. The story begins in the past, following Indiana Jones’ heist of the Antikythera from a Nazi train.

“They have used all of the footage that Lucas Film has acquired from since I started working with them many many years ago,” said Ford in an interview with Fandango. 

Ford said that animators are able to use this backlog of footage to find images of him 35 years ago to animate over his current-day acting to make him look younger. 

“So it’s not like a kind of … Photoshop kind of thing, it’s really my face. It’s spooky.”

Going into the movie knowing he’s digitally de-aged is a bit of a distraction. When you know it’s CGI, it’s easy to find yourself intently peering at the screen to see if you’re fooled or not. At some points, the CGI is pretty impressive and legitimately looks like it’s Harrison Ford in his forties. At others, he looks a little too smooth and plastic, and the words and mouth don’t always fit together perfectly.

Luckily, Ford doesn’t spend all of the movie as his newly youthful self. Most of it follows an older Indiana Jones – no animation required. 

Basing an action movie around an 80-year-old star is an interesting challenge. After all, an action movie’s bread and butter is based on running and jumping through various dangerous situations, generally with explosions in the background. “Dial of Destiny” works around this by putting Indiana Jones in horses, cars, carts, anything that helps him move without leg-power.

Unsurprisingly though, this film only loosely rooted in reality. “Dial of Destiny” doesn’t break the conventional Indiana Jones format, though it does take those elements and pushes them even further than they’ve been pushed before. There are far-out stunts that definitely would kill a regular person. There are mystic artifacts that make the movie turn from realism-adjacent to fantastical. 

While watching the movie, it’s hard not to think about the current trend in Hollywood these days of taking a long-standing popular character and killing them at the end of their character arc — just take a look at James Bond, Tony Stark, Wolverine and Han Solo. 

Sometimes a dramatic death is well executed and furthers the plot of the story, but with character deaths like these becoming so common, it’s begun to feel like a crutch. After all, why confront the idea of what a future beyond the narrative looks like for a character when it’s so easy to point a gun at them and shoot?

In the “Dial of Destiny,” Indiana Jones seems to have a much closer relationship to death than he did in the previous movies. When people die onscreen, it impacts him in a way it didn’t when he was far younger. He’s devastated, shaking, and often looking for help. Maybe it’s because he’s older, maybe it’s because of the life he’s led, but the Indiana Jones in this movie is a bit more mature – though still just as cranky and headstrong as he’s always been. 

When Indiana Jones himself comes close to death – as all action heroes must at some point in their movie – the film directly points to the main character death trope and subverts it. It’s refreshing to watch. 

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, director James Mangold said, “there really is no attraction to just getting thousands of people in a theater and hitting them in a head with a hammer ... Death is not an ending.”

“For Indiana Jones,” said Mangold, “it isn't about him dying. It had to be about him coming to terms with this period of his life and this period of the world. And in a way, coming to terms with whether Indiana Jones has relevance to ours."