The man with the hat is back and this time, he's old.
After 15 years since the last Indiana Jones and over 30 years since the last good one, Harrison Ford finally agreed to come back for one final adventure.
The film is centred around the search for the Antikythera, a search for which drove Indy's friend mad. The heretofore unseen goddaughter of Indiana Jones, Helena Shaw, shows up and seeks the Antikythera purely for financial gain, while the Nazis of 1969 want to regain power. Once again, Indy is caught up in the middle of all this.
There are a couple of characters returning for the film, but it's mostly populated by newcomers. Phoebe Waller-Bridge plays the aforementioned Helena Shaw, Mads Mikkelsen stars as the villain and bit parts are shared around between the likes of Boyd Holbrook, Antonio Banderas, Toby Jones and Shaunette Renée Wilson.
In Kingdom of the Crystal Skull we had Shia LaBeouf as Mutt Williams, who unsurprisingly doesn't return for this film. Mutt felt a lot more like a character supposed to take the reins of the franchise over from Ford, whereas the supporting cast of Dial of Destiny mesh a lot better as a supporting cast and fit into the world much better.
Director James Mangold has taken over for Steven Spielberg, who helmed the previous four entries in the series. After Mangold's 2017 film Logan, which was an R-rated, gritty farewell to Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, the internet was abound with talk of which characters deserved a "Logan-style" send-off. So when Mangold got the job there was a certain expectation that came with it about the tone the film may have.
Dial of Destiny feels much more like an attempt to recapture the magic of Spielberg than it does to emulate Logan. While this may be disappointing for some people, it makes the film fit in much neater to the established universe. Very few directors are able to bring the same sense of fun and adventure to film as Spielberg, but Mangold does a servicable job with the globe-trotting elements.
I remember watching Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008 and being unable to believe how this decrepit old man was still standing, let alone able to pull off action scenes. Well I'm now twice the age I was then and have a much clearer understanding of how the human body ages normally and watching an 80-year-old Ford in 2023, I think he looks great.
More care is taken in Dial of Destiny to work the plot and the action around what Ford is capable of – there's no CGI-supported vine swinging or outrunning rolling boulders. Indy is certainly still put through the ringer, but I believe that this mere mortal man is capable of what's happening on screen.
The film begins with a 25-minute scene set during the end of World War II, in which Ford is digitally de-aged by new technology from Industrial Light and Magic. This form of de-aging uses hours and hours of footage of Ford at the right age, which LucasFilm had access to from his time in Star Wars and the original Indy trilogy. This is then essentially deepfaked onto present-day Ford, who acted out the scene with dots all over his face.
It's obviously a lot more technical than that, but you get the idea.
The result is one of the best de-aging effects I've ever seen. The technology is 99% of the way there and the characters look so close to human it's amazing. However, when you put something that looks 99% human in a scene with people who are 100% human, that 1% difference is staggering and at times incredibly distracting. It looks like the best, most groundbreaking, lifelike video game graphics you've ever seen, but still video game graphics.
All of the above ends up making a pretty decent Indiana Jones movie. It's not the groundbreaking, gritty farewell you may have expected, but it's also not the disappointment that was the fourth one.
If anyone's interested, my ranking goes as follows:
1. Last Crusade
2. Raiders of the Lost Ark
3. Dial of Destiny
4. Temple of Doom
5. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
And for the record, I actually revisited Kingdom of the Crystal Skull last year and it's not as bad as I remember.
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