Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the last adventure for Harrison Ford in the title role, checks all the boxes that made the series great over the past 42 years.
More than 40 years after its release, Raiders of the Lost Ark is still my No. 1 argument for seeing a movie in a movie theater. It’s the best example of bona fide Hollywood movie magic, the kind that becomes a lifelong memory. I saw Raiders in its first week of release back in 1981, when I was 7 years old. Raiders, for me, doesn’t begin with Indiana Jones running away from a rolling boulder, or grabbing a seaplane’s pontoon under a hail of arrows and blowgun darts. It begins with my dad cooking round steak in an electric skillet on a late-spring Saturday evening, with Siskel and Ebert on PBS at 6:30, raving about this revival of amazing high adventure inspired by 1950s serials.
Dad clapped his hands and told me and my brother, “Hot damn! Boys, we are gonna go see that.” Mom dressed us in church clothes to see Raiders and then go to a nice dinner in a bigger city. We wore the same jackets and ties to Sunday school the next day. (And after Raiders’ Old Testament finale, I sat ramrod straight when the church lady read us the story of Job, the only dude to survive being called out by God.)
The real catalyst of an Indiana Jones movie has always been what viewers bring to the theater before the opening credits roll. So I was one of the fans walking into Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny shouldering some preemptive resentment about how the franchise was exploiting my childhood nostalgia by bringing Indy back to the screen one more time. But when Dial’s credits rolled, I had only a nonplussed, middle-distance stare as my best friend asked what I thought.
“That was… actually good?” I finally said.
“Yeah… I think it was,” he replied.
With the understanding that nothing overcomes the nostalgia of the first time you watched a treasured movie hero do their thing, I can accept that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny still checks all the boxes on my menu of demands for a proper Indy movie.
It sure didn’t sound like it would, heading into its premiere weekend. Reviews, particularly after the film premiered at Cannes, bagged on it for leaning too hard into cameos and callbacks. Redditors and YouTubers, knives drawn as always for any culture-war topic, complained that Harrison Ford portrayed a sad, broken man, and that new character Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) was a detestable sociopath whose only point was to emasculate Jones.
I strongly disagree on both points. Waller-Bridge’s character may not be admirable, but crucially, she returns the series to where it began: As archaeologists, she and Indy are technically grave robbers of questionable methodology. Director James Mangold and writers Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, and David Koepp kept this arc from any problematic colonialism/cultural-theft angle by putting the McGuffins in Nazi hands and in an ancient Greek tomb. Thus we get the same cynical, borderline antiheroic fortune-and-glory motivation that begins Raiders, without the kind of sociological squeamishness that provokes online duels. Points to Mangold and his team.
That’s important, because even action heroes have to take some kind of emotional journey, if their characters are going to be worth a damn. The journey Indiana Jones must make in every movie is one from nonbeliever to believer. That’s what earns the happy ending as John Williams’ classic Raiders march builds up and soars.
