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“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” is somehow both never boring and never really entertaining. It walks a line of modest interest in what’s going to happen next thanks to equal parts innovative story beats and the foundation of nostalgia that everyone brings to the theater. It’s an alternating series of frustrating choices, promising beats, and general goodwill for a legendary actor donning one of the most famous hats in movie history yet again. It should be better. It could have been worse. Both can be true. In an era of extreme online critical opinion, “The Dial of Destiny” is a hard movie to truly hate, which is nice. It’s also an Indiana Jones movie that's difficult to truly love, which makes this massive fan of the original trilogy a little sad.

The unsettling mix of good and bad starts in the first sequence, a flashback to the final days of World War II that features Indy ( Harrison Ford ) and a colleague named Basil Shaw ( Toby Jones ) trying to reclaim some of the historical artifacts being stolen by the fleeing Nazis. Jones looks normal, of course, but Ford here is an uncanny valley occupant, a figure of de-aged CGI that never looks quite human. He doesn't move or even sound quite right. It’s the first but not the last time in “The Dial of Destiny” in which it feels like you can’t really get your hands on what you’re watching. It sets up a standard of over-used effects that are the film’s greatest flaw. We’re watching Indiana Jones at the end of World War II, but the effects are distracting instead of enhancing.

It's a shame, too, because the structure of the prologue is solid. Indy escapes capture from a Nazi played by Thomas Kretschmann , but the important introduction here is that of a Nazi astrophysicist named Jurgen Voller (a de-aged Mads Mikkelsen ), who discovers that, while looking for something called the Lance of Longinus, the Nazis have stumbled upon half of the Antikythera, or Archimedes’ Dial. Based on a real Ancient Greek item that could reportedly predict astronomical positions for decades, the dial is given the magical Indy franchise treatment in ways that I won’t spoil other than to say it’s not as explicitly religious as items like the Ark of the Covenant of The Holy Grail other than, as Voller says, it almost makes its owner God.

After a cleverly staged sequence involving anti-aircraft fire and dozens of dead Nazis, “The Dial of Destiny” jumps to 1969. An elderly Indiana Jones is retiring from Hunter College, unsure of what comes next in part because he’s separated from Marion after the death of their son Mutt in the Vietnam War. The best thing about “The Dial of Destiny” starts here in the emotional undercurrents in Harrison Ford’s performance. He could have lazily walked through playing Indy again, but he very clearly asked where this man would be emotionally at this point in his life. Ford’s dramatic choices, especially in the film's back half, can be remarkable, reminding one how good he can be with the right material. His work here made me truly hope that he gets a brilliant drama again in his career, the kind he made more often in the ‘80s.

But back to the action/adventure stuff. Before he can put his retirement gift away, Indy is whisked off on an adventure with Helena Shaw ( Phoebe Waller-Bridge ), the daughter of Basil and goddaughter of Indy. It turns out that Basil became obsessed with the dial after their encounter with it a quarter-century ago, and Indy told him he would destroy the half of the dial they found. Of course, Indiana Jones doesn’t destroy historical artifacts. As they’re getting the dial from the storeroom, they’re attacked by Voller and his goons, leading to a horse chase through the subway during a parade. It’s a cluttered, awkward action sequence with power that’s purely nostalgic—an iconic hero riding a horse through a parade being thrown for someone else.

Before you know it, everyone is in Tangier, where Helena wants to sell her half of the dial, and the film injects its final major character into the action with a sidekick named Teddy ( Ethann Isidore ). From here, “The Dial of Destiny” becomes a traditional Indy chase movie with Jones and his team trying to stay ahead of the bad guys while leading them to what they’re trying to uncover.

James Mangold has delivered on “old-man hero action” before with the excellent “ Logan ,” but he gets lost on the journey here, unable to stage action sequences in a way that’s anywhere near as engaging as how Steven Spielberg does the same. Yes, we’re in a different era. CGI is more prevalent. But that doesn’t excuse clunky, awkward, incoherent action choreography. Look at films like “ John Wick: Chapter 4 ” or a little sequel that’s coming out in a few weeks that I’m not really supposed to talk about—even with the CGI enhancements, you know where the characters are at almost all times, what they’re trying to accomplish, and what stands in their way. 

That basic action structure often falls apart in “The Dial of Destiny.” There’s a car chase scene through Tangier that’s incredibly frustrating, a blur of activity that should work on paper but has no weight and no real stakes. A later scene in a shipwreck that should be claustrophobic is similarly clunky in terms of basic composition. I know not everyone can be Spielberg, but the simple framing of action sequences in “ Raiders of the Lost Ark ” and even “ Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ” is gone here, replaced by sequences that cost so much that they somehow elevated the budget to $300 million. I wished early and often to see this movie's $100 million version.

“The Dial of Destiny” works much better when it’s less worried about spending that massive budget. When Indy and Helena get to actual treasure-hunting, and John Williams ’ all-timer theme kicks in again, the movie clicks. And, without spoiling, it ends with a series of events and ideas that I wish had been foregrounded more in the 130 minutes that preceded it. Ultimately, “The Dial of Destiny” is about a man who wants to control history being thwarted by a man who wants to appreciate it but has arguably allowed himself to get stuck in it through regret or inaction. There’s a powerful emotional center here, but it comes too late to have the impact it could have with a stronger script. One senses that this script was sanded down so many times by producers and rewrites that it lost some of the rough edges it needed to work.

Spielberg reportedly gave Mangold some advice when he passed the whip to the director, telling him , “It’s a movie that’s a trailer from beginning to end—always be moving.” Sure. Trailers are rarely boring. But they’re never as entertaining as a great movie.

In theaters now.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, language and smoking.

154 minutes

Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones

Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Helena Shaw

Antonio Banderas as Renaldo

John Rhys-Davies as Sallah

Toby Jones as Basil Shaw

Boyd Holbrook as Klaber

Ethann Isidore as Teddy Kumar

Mads Mikkelsen as Dr. Jürgen Voller

Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood

Thomas Kretschmann as Colonel Weber

• James Mangold

Writer (based on characters created by)

• George Lucas
• Philip Kaufman
• David Koepp
• Jez Butterworth
• John-Henry Butterworth

Cinematographer

• Phedon Papamichael
• Michael McCusker
• Dirk Westervelt
• Andrew Buckland
• John Williams

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The indiana jones and the dial of destiny cast break down the morocco scene and discuss the franchise's journey, harrison ford, phoebe waller-bridge, mads mikkelsen, and more spill new details about indy's final adventure, including the making of one of its big set pieces..

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Indiana Jones is back and RT correspondent Nikki Novak sat down with Harrison Ford , James Mangold , Phoebe Waller-Bridge , Ethann Isidore , Mads Mikkelsen , Shaunette Renée Wilson , and Boyd Holbrook to break down the Morocco scene, discuss the franchise’s journey, spill new details about the film, and more.

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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Archaeologist Indiana Jones races against time to retrieve a legendary artifact that can change the course of history. Archaeologist Indiana Jones races against time to retrieve a legendary artifact that can change the course of history. Archaeologist Indiana Jones races against time to retrieve a legendary artifact that can change the course of history.

• James Mangold
• Jez Butterworth
• John-Henry Butterworth
• David Koepp
• Harrison Ford
• Phoebe Waller-Bridge
• Antonio Banderas
• 1.7K User reviews
• 359 Critic reviews
• 58 Metascore
• 7 wins & 33 nominations total

• Indiana Jones

• Colonel Weber

• Teddy Kumar

• Young SS Officer
• Italian Ticket Seller
• (as Alfonso Rosario Mandia)

• Larry - Beat Poet Guy

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

Who Makes Harrison Ford Laugh?

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• Trivia In an interview on Harrison Ford/Vic Mensa (2023) , Harrison Ford explained how the filmmakers digitally de-aged him for the flashback sequence: "They have this artificial intelligence program that can go through every foot of film that Lucasfilm owns. Because I did a bunch of movies for them, they have all this footage, including film that wasn't printed. So they can mine it from where the light is coming from, from the expression. I don't know how they do it. But that's my actual face. Then I put little dots on my face and I say the words and they make [it]. It's fantastic." At 80, he is the oldest actor to be de-aged in a movie, surpassing Al Pacino , who was 79 when he was de-aged in The Irishman (2019) .
• Goofs Indy identifies the half lion half eagle creature carved on Archimedes' tomb as a Phoenix. The creature is actually a griffin and bears little or no resemblance to a Phoenix.

Dr. Voller : You should have stayed in New York.

Indiana Jones : You should have stayed out of Poland.

• Crazy credits The Paramount Pictures logo appears normally, and does not fade into a mountain-shaped opening shot, the only film in the Indiana Jones films to do so. Instead, the Lucasfilm logo fades into a lock on a door in 1944 Germany.
• Alternate versions On the International prints of the film, the original variant of Disney's 100th anniversary logo (with 100 YEARS OF WONDER tagline) was shown as the first logo instead of tagline-less variant of the same logo.
• Connections Featured in AniMat's Crazy Cartoon Cast: Changing of the Bobs (2020)
• Soundtracks Lili Marleen Written by Hans Leip and Norbert Schultze

User reviews 1.7K

• Jun 27, 2023

'Indiana Jones' Stars Through The Years

• How long is Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny? Powered by Alexa
• What year does the movie take place?
• How old is Indy supposed to be in this film?
• June 30, 2023 (United States)
• United States
• Official Disney (Australia)
• Official Facebook
• Greek, Ancient (to 1453)
• Indiana Jones 5
• North Yorkshire Moors Railway, 12 Park Street, Pickering, North Yorkshire, England, UK (German railway scenes)
• Walt Disney Pictures
• Paramount Pictures
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $294,700,000 (estimated)
• $174,480,468
• $60,368,101
• Jul 2, 2023
• $383,963,057

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 34 minutes
• Dolby Atmos
• D-Cinema 96kHz Dolby Surround 7.1
• Dolby Digital
• Dolby Surround 7.1
• 12-Track Digital Sound

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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny reminds you how much Hollywood has changed

The new Indiana Jones movie hits different in the IP age.

by Alissa Wilkinson

In 1981’s Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark , the mercenary archaeologist René Belloq looks his friend-turned-foe Indiana Jones square in the eye and tells him the absolute truth. “Indiana,” he says, “we are simply passing through history.” They’re discussing the treasure they seek: the Ark of the Covenant, which might be just a valuable old artifact or might be the home of the Hebrew God, who knows. “This — this is history.” 

Humans die. Civilizations pass away. Artifacts, however, remain. They tell us who we were, and who we still are.

History — the pursuit of it, the commodification of it, our universal fate to live inside of it — is Indiana Jones’s obsession, and that theme bleeds right off the screen and onto us. After all, Raiders was released 42 years ago, before I was born, and the fifth and final film (or so we’re told anyhow ), Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny , just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, due to arrive in theaters this summer. Watch it at this moment in time, and you’re reminded that you, too, are passing through history. Those movie stars are looking a lot older. 

This is a series preoccupied with time and its cousin, mortality, from the characters’ relentless pursuit of the ancient world’s secrets to the poignancy of Jones’s relationships. His adventures are frequently preceded by the revelation that someone or something in his life has died — a friend, a family member, a relationship. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade , released in 1989, makes the fact of death especially moving, with its plot point turning on immortality and the Holy Grail. More humorously, cobweb-draped skeletons are strewn liberally throughout the series, reminding us that other explorers and other civilizations have attempted what Indiana is trying to do. He’s just another in a string of adventurers, one who happens to be really good at throwing a punch. 

Dial of Destiny feels like an emphatic period at the end of a very long sentence, a sequel making its own case against some future further resurrection — not unlike last year’s Cannes blockbuster premiere, Top Gun: Maverick , or 2021’s fourth installment of The Matrix . That’s not just because Harrison Ford is turning 81 this summer. It’s in the text; Dial of Destiny argues, explicitly, that you have to leave the past in the past, that the only way to ensure the world continues is to put one foot down and then another, moving into the future. 

Ironic, yes, for a movie built on giant piles of nostalgia and made by a company that proudly spends most of its money nibbling its own tail . In fact, the entire Indiana Jones concept was nostalgia-driven even before the fedora made its big-screen debut. Harrison Ford’s whip-cracking adventurer descends from swashbuckling heroes of pulp stories and matinee serials that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg loved as kids; like that other franchise Ford launched, the Indy series is both original and pastiche, both contemporary-feeling and set in another time, another place, a world that’s far, far away. 

Dial of Destiny is loaded with related ironies, though they’re mostly extratextual. On the screen, it’s fairly straightforward: a sentimental vehicle, one that hits familiar beats and tells familiar jokes, comfort food to make you feel like a kid again for a little while. The Indiana Jones movies , even the bad ones, have always been pretty fun to watch in a cartoon-movie kind of way, while also being aggressively just fine as films — I mean that with fond enthusiasm — and Dial of Destiny fits the bill perfectly.  

This installment turns on pieces of a dial created by the Greek mathematician Archimedes, which, like most of the relics that pop up in Indy’s universe, may or may not bestow godlike powers on its wielder. Naturally, the Nazis want it, especially Hitler. So the film opens in 1944, with Indy (a de-aged Ford, though unfortunately nobody thought to sufficiently de-age his voice) fighting Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) to nab it while getting out of one of his signature high-octane scrapes via a familiar combo of costume changes, well-aimed punches, acrobatics, and dumb luck. Then we jump forward to 1969, to discover a very much not de-aged Indy collapsed into his armchair in front of the TV, shirtless and in boxers, snoozing and clutching the dregs of a beer. This is a movie about getting old, after all.

You can deduce the rest — old friends and new, tricks and turns, mysteries, maybe some time travel, the question of whether the magic is real. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is in this movie as Helena Shaw, Jones’s archaeologist goddaughter, and injects it with some much-needed joie de vivre. There are some fun chase scenes, though director James Mangold’s visual sense (richly demonstrated in previous films like Logan and Ford v Ferrari ) falls a little flat next to the memory of Steven Spielberg’s direction. But for the most part, it’s all here again. I don’t want to spoil your fun. 

Yet a thread that’s run through the whole four-decade series, with heightened irony every time it comes up, is the battle between Indy — who firmly believes that history’s relics ought to be in a museum for everyone to enjoy — and fortune-seeking mercenaries or power-seeking Nazis, who want to privately acquire those artifacts for their own reasons. (Leaving the artifact where it is, perhaps even among its people, still doesn’t really seem to be an option.) It’s a mirror for the very real theft of artifacts throughout history by invading or colonizing forces, the taking of someone else’s culture for your own use or to assert your own dominance. That battle crops up again in this installment, with both mercenaries and Nazis on offer. Shaw, voicing a darker archaeological aim, wryly insists that thieving is just capitalism, and that cash is the only thing worth believing in; Voller’s aims are much darker. 

It’s all very fitting in a movie about an archaeologist set in the midcentury. But you have to notice the weird Hollywood resonance. When Raiders first hit the big screen, it was always intended to be the first in a series, much like Lucas and Spielberg’s beloved childhood serials. (The pair in fact made their initial Indiana Jones deal with Paramount for five movies.) But while some bits (and chunks) of the 1980s films have aged pretty badly, they endure in part because they’re remixes that are alive with imagination and even whimsy, the product so clearly of some guys who wanted to play around with the kinds of stories they loved as children.

Now, in the IP era , remixing is a fraught endeavor. The gatekeepers, owners and fans alike, are often very cranky. The producers bank on more of the same, not the risk of a new idea. The artifacts belong to them , and they call the shots, and tell you when you can have access or not. (The evening Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny opened at Cannes, Disney — already infamously known for locking its animation away in a vault and burying the work of companies it acquires — announced it would start removing dozens of its own series from its streamers.) Rather than move into the future and support some new sandboxes, the Hollywood of today mostly maniacally rehashes what it’s already done. It envisions a future where what’s on offer is mostly what we’ve already had before. 

In this I hear echoes of thinkers like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer — two men who fled the Nazis, incidentally — who proposed the culture industry was giving people the illusion of choice, but only the freedom to choose what they said was on offer. You can have infinite variations on the same thing.

It’s a sentiment strangely echoed in Dial of Destiny . One night, Shaw is doing a card trick for some sailors, who are astounded that when they call out the seven of clubs, that’s what they pull out of the deck. But she shows Indy how she does it — by forcing the card on them, without them realizing. “I offer the feeling of choice, but I ultimately make you pick the one I want,” she explains, with a wry grin. 

After 40 years and change, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny releases into a world where there’s more stuff than ever to watch, but somehow it feels like we have less choice, less chance of discovery. It is our moment in history — an artifact of what it was to be alive right now. When the historians of the future look back, I have to wonder what they’ll see, and thus who, in the end, they’ll think we really were.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and is playing in theaters worldwide.

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Why indiana jones' and the dial of destiny's rotten tomatoes score went up so much.

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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny debuted to mixed reviews and a "Rotten" score on Rotten Tomatoes, but its score has slowly gone up, becoming Fresh in time for its wide theatrical release. While the trend may be for blockbusters to see a decline in their Rotten Tomatoes score after their debut, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is doing the exact opposite, largely because of Disney and Lucasfilm's release strategy to debut the movie at Cannes Film Festival.

As the fifth theatrical installment of the Indiana Jones franchise, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny brings back Harrison Ford for one last hurrah as the titular character. Indiana Jones is one of the most popular characters and film history, and the franchise, so far, has maintained a perfect record in Rotten Tomatoes, with every movie earning a fresh score, even including Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, despite earning a Rotten score from audiences. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny looks like it'll maintain that streak, although its initial debut Rotten Tomatoes score was far lower.

Why Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Debuted to a Rotten Score on Rotten Tomatoes

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny first screened for critics on May 18th at the Cannes Film Festival and debuted at 52 percent on Rotten Tomatoes shortly after. Disney's decision to hold a Cannes premiere for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was likely a strategy to give the movie a more prestigious release and generate early buzz, but the choice clearly backfired with the first Rotten score for the Indiana Jones franchise.

Blockbusters like Top Gun: Maverick seeing huge success from a Cannes debut and Indiana Jones movies are historically well reviewed, but the decision to premiere at Cannes was still a big risk. The previous Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull earned 77 percent on Rotten Tomatoes in 2008, but a closer look at the score reveals a huge split with Rotten Tomatoes specially selected "Top Critics" scored it a full 10 percent lower at 66 percent. Since critics at Cannes primarily consist of Top Critics, a debut there doesn't start with the movie's best foot forward.

How Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny's Rotten Tomatoes Score Went Up So Much

While Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny debuted to a Rotten Score, there were only 14 negative reviews logged at the time, 12 of which were submitted by Top Critics. Since most blockbusters receive hundreds of total reviews, and Top Critics only account for a fraction of those reviews, the composition of the post-Cannes 52 percent score was in no way representative of the final score. In fact, excluding the Top Critic reviews from the post-Cannes score, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny 's Rotten Tomatoes score was actually closer to 80 percent .

With reviews flooding in for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny' s wide theatrical release, the score has already flipped to a Fresh status, climbing to 67 percent, and could go even higher. Despite the Fresh score from all Rotten Tomatoes critics, it still has a Rotten 55 percent score from Top Critics, who make up just 56 of the current 209 reviews submitted and 25 of 70 Rotten reviews. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skill had 308 total reviews submitted in 2008, and the site has grown even bigger since then, so Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny' s Rotten Tomatoes score could go even higher.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Has The Opposite Rotten Tomatoes Problem From Other Recent Blockbusters

Ironically, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny 's Rotten Tomatoes score going up is the exact opposite of the trend seen with many other big blockbuster movies in recent years. There's been a strong trend of movies seeing significant drop-off from their debut scores, sometimes even losing their Certified Fresh status or flipping to a Rotten score altogether. For example, in one of the most egregious examples, in December 2020, Wonder Woman 1984 debuted at 88 percent on Rotten Tomatoes before dropping precipitously to 58 percent where it stands today.

The reason most movies debut high and then drop is ironically similar to the reason for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny 's Rotten Tomatoes change. Most studios use a release strategy that puts their best foot forward by debuting their movies to the audience most predisposed to give it positive early buzz, meaning the earlier reviews tend to tilt more positive while later reviews tilt negative and bring the score down slightly. By debuting at Cannes, Disney hoped Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny would get an early stamp of approval, but instead, the Top Critics panned it when the strategy backfired.

How high will Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny's Rotten Tomatoes Score Go?

The Rotten Tomatoes score for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny has already gone up 14 points from 52 percent to 66 percent, so will it keep going up, and how high could it go? That depends on a few factors, but the calculation is very simple. Currently, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny 's 66 percent Rotten Tomatoes score is achieved because 149 of the 225 reviews submitted were marked as Fresh as of the time of this article's publishing. 149 is 66 percent of 225. The past 100 reviews submitted averaged 70 percent, so if that trend remains consistent, then the movie will cap out at around 68 percent anywhere north of 340 total reviews.

It'll need well over 500 reviews to move the needle anymore if it maintains an average of 70% for the remaining reviews, but if, hypothetically, it began trending at 75 percent, then the score could reach 70 percent overall so long as it received more than 360 reviews. Conversely, if the average trend drops to around 68 percent, then the overall score will reach a maximum 67 percent anywhere north of 267 total reviews submitted. The most likely outcome is the score will end up at 68 percent with at least 340 overall reviews based on current trends.

While Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny 's Cannes Film Festival release strategy may have backfired, resulting in an initially Rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes for the weeks leading up to release, the influx of reviews from the larger pool of Rotten Tomatoes critics has brought it up significantly into Fresh territory. While the score could keep going up, it likely won't go any higher than 70 percent, which still makes it the lowest-scoring Indiana Jones movie on Rotten Tomatoes .

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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny review: Disney whips up a lively (final?) adventure

If Indiana Jones does hang up his hat, the fifth film is a surprisingly emotional, diverting, and satisfying conclusion.

Maureen Lee Lenker is a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly with over seven years of experience in the entertainment industry. An award-winning journalist, she's written for Turner Classic Movies, Ms. Magazine , The Hollywood Reporter , and more. She's worked at EW for six years covering film, TV, theater, music, and books. The author of EW's quarterly romance review column, "Hot Stuff," Maureen holds Master's degrees from both the University of Southern California and the University of Oxford. Her debut novel, It Happened One Fight , is now available. Follow her for all things related to classic Hollywood, musicals, the romance genre, and Bruce Springsteen.

It's not the years, it's the mileage… and in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, out June 30, the titular hero racks up plenty of thrilling miles in what is supposedly his farewell to the big screen.

We open on a younger Indy (a de-aged Harrison Ford in the best use of the often questionable technology to date) running for his life amidst the death throes of the Third Reich. Infiltrating a Nazi treasure trove, he and fellow academic/archaeologist Basil Shaw ( Toby Jones ) attempt to recover priceless historical artifacts from the retreating Nazis. On board a train, Indy encounters Jürgen Voller ( Mads Mikkelsen ), a Nazi mathematician intent on locating the Dial of Destiny, more formally known as Archimedes' antikythera, a cosmological device with potentially world-altering powers.

Flash forward to 1969 and the celebration of the moon landing in New York City. Indiana Jones is living alone. He mourns his son Mutt, who died in combat in the Vietnam War (an expedient end to the problematic specter of what to do about Shia LaBeouf 's existence within the franchise); he's separated from Marion ( Karen Allen ); and he's now preparing to retire from Hunter College where he's been a professor for over a decade.

His lonely life is interrupted by the arrival of Helena Shaw ( Phoebe Waller-Bridge ), his goddaughter, who is on the hunt for the antikythera with questionable motives. Helena's appearance and bid for the dial thrusts Indy into a new adventure where he must once again face off against Voller, who now goes by the name of Professor Schmitt, and stop his quest to return the Nazi regime to power.

Ford returns as Indy, but he's not merely a guy with a cool hat and a bullwhip with a few more lines on his face. Just as James Mangold did for Hugh Jackman's Wolverine in Logan , he presents an Indiana Jones weathered by life — a man who has spent decades chasing down ancient artifacts and fighting Nazis.

Indiana Jones has always been a world-weary guy, cynical and full of wise cracks in the face of danger, but here, he feels like he's finally earned it. Ford's soulful, craggy face is the cipher for the lifetime of adventure, physical pain, and loss that Indy has endured. There's humor in that, as when Indy lists off some of the more ridiculous things he has done while scaling a wall with Helena. But there's sadness too, in the friends he's lost and the tragedy he has faced.

Ford has always lent Indy a humanity and depth that is too often ignored in favor of celebrating his capacity for dry one-liners and his rugged good looks (both well-deserving of the praise they've received). Here, he gets to unleash the emotional side of Indy, his reverence for history and love for those he holds dear visibly weighing him down. In 1969, as humanity looks to the future, Indiana Jones, a man dedicated to protecting the past, is a man out of place in his own time. Ford's curmudgeonly restraint barely conceals the open wounds of his losses.

Dial of Destiny is often best in its moments of quiet resonance, but it doesn't leave enough breathing room to maximize the impact of Ford's performance. Instead, the film volleys from one action sequence to the next, whether it be a dangerous dive into deep ocean waters, a horse race through New York City streets and subways(!), or a perilous car chase through Tangiers. Mangold crafts these scenes with precision, building them to a fever pitch and then throttling the accelerator when it seems the scene has peaked. This makes the pacing wonky, and more scenes of introspective Indy would have been welcome in exchange for shaving a few minutes off the nonstop danger. But that doesn't make the sequences any less exciting or nerve-wracking, generating an old-school adventure energy reminiscent of the original trilogy.

Unlike the monkey swinging or the infamous nuclear explosion refrigerator nonsense of Crystal Skull, the action here also feels utterly believable. The physical toll it takes on an older Indy is palpable, the stakes higher because of the acknowledgement of his mortality. At his best, Indiana Jones has always been a hero that feels utterly human. Maybe a little smarter than the rest of us, but no less earthbound. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, when he takes a punch to the jaw, we feel it — and Dial remembers that Indy's greatest asset is his conspicuous humanity in the face of peril.

Waller-Bridge, who leaped from Fleabag 's critical acclaim to writing for James Bond and starring in an Indiana Jones flick, is a saucy, slippery foil to Ford. Where Marion was feisty and reckless, and Dr. Henry Jones ( Sean Connery) was persnickety and gruff, Helena is whimsical and brash. Her loyalties shift faster than sand in an hourglass, keeping Indiana Jones, and by extension, the audience, on their toes. Waller-Bridge has a winking sense of humor as a performer that imbues her natural ability to make the audience believe they're her confidantes while remaining delightfully unpredictable.

Mikkelsen, a prince of silver-tongued, elegant villainy, is under-used. Jürgen Voller lacks distinction as a villain, possessing neither the naked ambition of Belloq (Paul Freeman) from Raiders or the self-serving sycophancy of Walter Donovan (Julian Glover) in Last Crusade. While his goons are outright unhinged, Voller is chilled cardboard, a Nazi who lacks any personality besides his commitment to the ideals of Nazism. His villainy lacks teeth, but perhaps that's because the notion of bringing fascism back feels like a day-to-day occurrence in our world. He's not half so frightening as anything on the nightly news.

Dial of Destiny is 85 percent of a delightful return to form for the franchise and 15 percent absolutely ludicrous climax. We won't spoil the reveal, but suffice it to say it leans too heavily into a plot point that Marvel and DC have exhausted in recent years — and the temporal, geographical place it decides to take its climactic sequence is both outlandish and entirely too on-the-nose.

It's not that Indiana Jones hasn't always built its stories around fantastical ancient artifacts. (See: the Ark of the Covenant, the Sankara Stones, the Holy Grail, and, sigh, the Crystal Skull.) The antikythera is as good a McGuffin as any other (and it is based on a real scientific device from ancient Greece). But while the mystical, inexplicable power of objects like the Ark and the Grail have the capacity to shock and awe, the antikythera is merely a tool for a tired trope with a payoff that verges on tritely absurd.

One can understand the allegorical impulse of the storytelling device. This older, probably not wiser version of Indiana Jones is one who feels as much a relic as the artifacts he's dedicated his life to studying and preserving. It's hard to resist literalizing the metaphor in a story where the hero is made to feel like time has passed him by. But it doesn't land the way the filmmakers intended, instead undercutting Indy's reckoning with history and his place in it.

It's a testament to Ford's performance and the movie's overall effectiveness that this disappointing climax doesn't outweigh how much fun it all is. Much like the entries of the original trilogy, at its heart, Dial is a rip-roaring adventure that borrows more from the cinematic language of golden age swashbucklers than modern blockbusters.

In a sense, Indiana Jones has always been about nostalgia. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas set out to make movies that evoked the 1940s serials they loved growing up. That operates on two levels in Dial of Destiny, both in the film's historical setting and our own yen for the way the original movies made us feel.

Dial uses nostalgia as an appetizer, not a main course, and it's absolutely delicious for it. Nothing feels pandering, but rather each nod to the past is welcome in its measured distribution, as cozy and familiar as a favorite sweater or reconnecting with an old friend. Speaking of, Sallah ( John Rhys-Davis ) is back, but mainly as a vestige of the life Indy feels he's lost. Sallah too yearns for their shared past.

There are nods to our hero's well cataloged hatred of snakes, a cheeky reversal of the Raiders bringing a knife (or whip) to a gunfight, plenty of traveling by map, and a tear-jerking return to kissing where it doesn't hurt, all set to the core memory sounds of John Williams ' inimitable score (including a new theme for Helena!).

Much has been made of the fact that Dial will be Ford's last outing in the franchise. The movie has been billed as a send-off for Indiana Jones, but it doesn't feel definitive, particularly when the film's final shot makes a very decisive point about Ford/Indy hanging up the hat.

If it is indeed the last we'll see of Ford's Indiana Jones, it's a far more satisfying goodbye than where we last left him. But Dial makes one thing clear: whatever happens next, this franchise still has fresh skullduggery left to explore. Indiana Jones does not (and will never) belong in a museum. He's far too vital for that; his mileage, as a character and a pop culture icon, is infinite. Grade : B+

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Movie Reviews

'dial of destiny' proves indiana jones' days of derring-do aren't quite derring-done.

Bob Mondello

Harrison Ford — who's about to turn 81 — stars again as the intrepid archaeologist in this fifth (and possibly final) adventure. It's directed not by Steven Spielberg, but by James Mangold. Lucasfilm Ltd. hide caption

Harrison Ford — who's about to turn 81 — stars again as the intrepid archaeologist in this fifth (and possibly final) adventure. It's directed not by Steven Spielberg, but by James Mangold.

It's been 42 years since Raiders of the Lost Ark introduced audiences to a boulder-dodging, globe-trotting, bullwhip-snapping archaeologist played by Harrison Ford. The boulder was real back then (or at any rate, it was a practical effect made of wood, fiberglass and plastic).

Very little in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny , Indy's rousingly ridiculous fifth and possibly final adventure, is concrete and actual. And that includes, in the opening moments, its star.

Ford turns 81 next week, but as the film begins in Germany 1944, with the Third Reich in retreat, soldiers frantically loading plunder on a train, the audience is treated to a sight as gratifying and wish-fullfilling as it is impossible. A hostage with a sack over his head gets dragged before a Nazi officer and when the bag is removed, it's Indy looking so persuasively 40-something, you may suspect you're watching an outtake from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

A digitally de-aged Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Lucasfilm Ltd. hide caption

A digitally de-aged Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Ford has been digitally de-aged through some rearrangement of pixels that qualifies as the most effective use yet of a technology that could theoretically let blockbusters hang in there forever with ageless original performers.

Happily, the filmmakers have a different sort of time travel in mind here. After establishing that Ford's days of derring-do aren't yet derring-done, they flash-forward a bit to 1969, where a creaky, cranky, older Indiana Jones is boring what appears to be his last class at Hunter College before retirement. Long-haired, tie-dyed and listening to the Rolling Stones, his students are awaiting the tickertape parade for astronauts returning from the moon, and his talk of ancient artifacts hasn't the remotest chance of distracting them.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Helena Jonathan Olley/Lucasfilm Ltd. hide caption

But a figure lurking in the back of the class is intrigued — Helena ( Phoebe Waller-Bridge ), the daughter of archeologist Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) who was with Indy back on that plunder train in 1944. Like her father before her, she's obsessed with the title gizmo — a device Archimedes fashioned in ancient Greece to exploit fissures in time — "a dial," says Helena "that could change the course of history."

Yeah, well, every adventure needs its MacGuffin. This one's also being sought by Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), who was also on that plunder train back in 1944, and plans to use it to fix the "mistakes" made by Hitler, and they're all soon zipping off to antiquity auctions in Tangier, shipwrecks in the Mediterranean, and ... well, shouldn't say too much about the rest.

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Director James Mangold, who knows something about bidding farewell to aging heroes — he helped Wolverine shuffle off to glory in Logan — finds ways to check off a lot of Indy touchstones in Dial of Destiny: booby-trapped caves that require problem-solving, airplane flights across maps to exotic locales, ancient relics with supernatural properties, endearing old pals (John Rhys Davies' Sallah, Karen Allen's Marion), and inexplicably underused new ones (Antonio Banderas' sea captain). Also tuk-tuk races, diminutive sidekicks (Ethann Isidore's Teddy) and critters (no snakes, but lots of snake-adjacents), and, of course, Nazis.

Mangold's action sequences may not have the lightness Steven Spielberg gave the ones in Indy's four previous adventures, but they're still madcap and decently exciting. And though in plot terms, the big climax feels ill-advised, the filmmaker clearly knows what he has: a hero beloved for being human in an era when so many film heroes are superhuman.

Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones Jonathan Olley/Lucasfilm Ltd. hide caption

Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones

So he lets Ford show us what the ravages of time have done to Indy — the aches and pains, the creases and sags, the bone-weariness of a hero who's given up too much including a marriage, and child — to follow artifacts where they've led him.

Then he gives us the thing Indy fans (and Harrison Ford fans) want, and in Dial of Destiny's final moments, he dials up the emotion.

• Indiana Jones

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Review

We didn’t realize how good we had it with kingdom of the crystal skull..

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny opens in theaters on June 30, 2023

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is very much about trying to recapture the series’ lost spark, both in its filmmaking and within the world of the story, but these impulses are set at odds. It’s the tale of a former adventurer who needs to stop living in the past, but the only way it works is by firmly rooting itself in nostalgia. Indiana Jones, the character, needs to move on, but Indiana Jones the franchise won’t let him.

The Dial of Destiny begins with a de-aged Harrison Ford trying to retrieve an artifact from Nazi plunderers in 1945, alongside his previously unseen colleague, the floundering Basil Shaw (Toby Jones), only to find that an entirely different artifact – the titular dial, said to be a creation of Greek physicist Archimedes – is now in play. Shaw’s role, while small, is a fun one, but he’s given the unenviable task of quipping opposite a positively dead-eyed Ford. His digital face-lift may look fine in photos, but when it comes to motion and delivering lines of dialogue there’s no life behind young Indy’s face.

This robotic retread of a familiar icon – one that’s become unfortunately emblematic of Disney, between the Lion King remake and Luke Skywalker’s appearance in The Book of Boba Fett – sets the tone for much of The Dial of Destiny. Its opening action scene reads like a typical Indy adventure on paper, with smooth maneuvers aboard moving vehicles to evade goose-stepping, treasure-hunting baddies. However, the action presented by director and co-writer James Mangold is immediately missing the visual clarity and rhythm that Steven Spielberg and series editor Michael Kahn brought to each of the first four movies. Granted, as with Star Wars, perhaps the case can be made that this fictional universe transcends a single group of storytellers, but Dial of Destiny isn’t so much familiar iconography told through new cinematic language as it is a poor imitation of what came before it.

Everything feels ever-so-slightly wrong in its 25-minute opening sequence, with cuts and shot selections ordered “correctly” enough to convey a sequence of events, but never fine-tuned enough to make its images land with any impact. Add to this the sheer murkiness of what’s on screen (much of the CG-heavy action is obscured by nightfall, or natural elements like fog) and what you’re left with is a spectacle you can barely see, and an adventure movie that feels distinctly un-adventurous in its creation.

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On the plus side, the story at least begins in an interesting place once the prologue finally comes to a close. The year is 1969 and the Apollo 11 astronauts have just returned from the Moon, but while the whole world looks towards the stars, and to the future, a drunk and miserable Indy remains stuck in the past – which is to say, he still teaches archeology. There are also major regrets keeping him from living in the present or looking beyond it, but these warrant only a passing mention over an hour into the story (even though they answer pressing questions that might be on the minds of long-time fans).

These are all half-hearted attempts at contrasting Indy with the central antagonist, Dr. Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), a former Nazi and current U.S. government scientist under Operation Paperclip . Mikkelsen delivers a straightforward performance in line with the by-the-numbers material he’s given, but despite there being little to remember about his embodiment of Voller, the character stands out as an Indy nemesis whose own obsession with past failures has led him back to his old foe.

But where Voller's fixation with the past leads to unsavory outcomes, Indy’s similar perspective on his personal failures is one the film largely accepts, and never really brings into conflict with Voller's. They’re two sides to a coin in theory, but Dial of Destiny never tempts this sad, broken version of Indiana Jones with the power to instantly fix his problems – a power the mysterious Dial may very well possess – so it foregoes the catharsis it seems to crave from having Indy eventually look beyond what’s been shackling him to events gone by.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Gallery

Ford gives it his all, carrying Indy with a mournful sense of reflection, but the rest of the film never rises to his level. It comes ever so close to making the Dial of Destiny mean something in the grand scheme of things, especially as the climax approaches. But a last-second swerve renders the symbolic idea of the Dial – a clock-like artifact representing time itself – little more than wasted potential.

With the help of Basil’s now-adult daughter, Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), Indy once again ends up on a global treasure hunt in competition with his Nazi enemies. But Dial of Destiny lumbers from scene to scene, with action that never quite manages to be exciting. There was a glimmer of mischief to the fights and stunts in Spielberg’s Indiana Jones movies, which quickly established their stakes and physical geography before hitting swashbuckling highs. The action in Dial of Destiny is dull by comparison, whizzing by too quickly to land, and with physics too cartoony to leave a lasting impact. At one point Indy runs atop a row of train cars, and the exaggerated movements of his digital stunt double are indistinguishable from those of Woody from Toy Story (fitting, perhaps, since he’s more children’s action figure than flesh & blood human being in this movie).

Just as unclear as the action is the character of Helena, who is framed as a pseudo Indiana Jones successor – a Bond-esque adventurer with a roguish streak, and even her own kid sidekick – though it never quite figures out what to do with her. On one hand, her money-above-all-else motive clashes with Indy’s more altruistic “It belongs in a museum!” approach to ancient artifacts. On the other hand, her father’s past obsession with the Dial is just as much of a driving factor in her involvement with the plot. These warring motives don’t so much clash or cause personal drama as they simply exist in separate scenes, as if entirely different drafts of the story had been smashed together. She’s never torn between selling an artifact and using it to fulfill her father’s lifelong work; she simply feels one way in one scene, and feels another way in the next.

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This fracturing of Helena’s character is more passing annoyance than central flaw – more plot convenience than plot hole – but it represents the way Dial of Destiny is made from the ground up. Its drama is cobbled together from ideas that are meaningful in isolation – Indy, Helena, and Voller all have complicated outlooks on the past – but they rarely come into contact (let alone in ways that drive the story). Similarly, its action is the result of borderline-functional filmmaking that presents events in sequence, each in their own individual shots, but it seldom presents a causal relationship between them (let alone one where two consecutive images, or the cut connecting them, result in added emphasis or impact). Haphazardly strung-together close ups drive the action, but a wider picture almost never emerges (if it does, it’s barely comprehensible).

A returning John Williams remains a saving grace, providing grand musical motifs and familiar tunes at just the right moments. However, the camera rarely creates meaning on its own, except when there’s a familiar brown fedora somewhere on screen, at which point it charges towards it like a happy pup reuniting with its owner – a shot that repeats on at least four separate occasions. But there are only so many times it can say “Look! It’s that iconic hat you recognize!” before the well runs dry. Nostalgia is the one trick Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny has, and it isn’t a trick it performs particularly well in the first place.

By yanking Indiana Jones out of retirement yet again, for a fifth (and hopefully final) movie, Disney proves that some things should be allowed to end. Or, at the very least, it proves that a franchise resurrection should spend at least some of its 154 minutes doing something other than trying desperately to justify its own existence. Earnest final efforts from Harrison Ford and John Williams couldn’t rescue a movie so directionless and haphazard, or action that fails to recapture the swashbuckling joys of the originals. By asking why Indy is on this adventure in the first place, and what the character gains on the other side of it, Dial of Destiny concocts paradoxical answers that fail to meet in the middle. It’s a film about letting go of the past and moving forward, but one that refuses to do the same.

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‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ Review: Harrison Ford Plays the Aging Indy in a Sequel That Serves Up Nostalgic Hokum Minus the Thrill

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“ Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny ” is a dutifully eager but ultimately rather joyless piece of nostalgic hokum. It’s the fifth installment of the “Indiana Jones” franchise, and though it has its quota of “relentless” action, it rarely tries to match (let alone top) the ingeniously staged kinetic bravura of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” How could it? “Raiders,” whatever one thinks of it as a movie (I always found it a trace impersonal in its ’40s-action-serial-on-steroids excitement), is arguably the most influential blockbuster of the last 45 years, even more so than “Star Wars.”

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In the prologue, Indy is racing to get hold of the device before Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), a mad-dog Nazi scientist, can steal it for himself. Mangold does a winning homage to the playful rhythms of early-’80s Spielberg, as Indy disentangles his neck from a hanging noose and finds himself in a car-vs.-motorcycle chase, only to wind up, along with his British archaeologist associate Basil Shaw (Toby Jones), dueling with Voller on top of a speeding train.

Have you ever seen an action sequence set atop a speeding train? We’ve all seen 10,000 of them, and this one, while efficiently executed, is brought off with just enough CGI that you can see the digital seams. It’s worth noting how audacious the action sequences in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” were, a sensation expanded upon in the darker, spookier, unfairly maligned “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” But by the late ’80s, when Spielberg gave us “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” as A-okay as that movie was it was already (except for Sean Connery) a revamp on autopilot. And “Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull” (2008) was the rehash of the revamp, reducing Indy’s antics to tepid formula.

“The Dial of Destiny” at least tosses the series in a new direction, by being the first “Indiana Jones” movie built around the impressive fact of Harrison Ford’s age. He’s 80 now, and a vibrant 80, still handsome and lean, with a scruff of gray hair and a slower, more gravelly voice as well as a combative physicality that now feels more rote than compulsive. After Indy and Basil leap off that train into a river and retrieve the Antikythera (though the other half of it must still be found!), the film cuts to 1969, where Indy himself is now a relic: an old man living in a cruddy New York apartment, waking up to his hippie neighbors blasting “Magical Mystery Tour,” pouring a shot of whiskey into his instant coffee as he glances over his divorce papers.

Mangold sketches in the period well, so that it stands in for the present day ­— not literally, but as a signifier of the idea that Professor Henry “Indiana” Jones has been yanked into the modern world. He’s teaching at Hunter College, where he’s getting ready to retire and keeps that one-half of the Antikythera stashed in the archaeology stacks. Then his goddaughter, Helena Shaw ( Phoebe Waller-Bridge ), shows up (they haven’t seen each other for 18 years), announcing that she’s an archaeologist too and would like to team up with Indy to locate the other half of the Antikythera.

It turns out that Helena has mercenary motives. And while Phoebe Waller-Bridge, of “Fleabag” fame, makes her saucy, spiky, and duplicitous in a cheeky way (she’s like the young Maggie Smith with a boatload of attitude), we never feel in our guts that Helena is a chip off the old Indy block. So while it feels like the film is setting her up to become the “new Indy Jones,” I wouldn’t bet the farm on that happening.

Indy and Helena are going after the Grafikos, the missing other half of the Antikythera, a journey that will take them from New York to Tangier, where Helena tries to unload the piece they already have at an auction for stolen artifacts. Then it’s on to Greece and Sicily, to caves and ruins and giant wriggling caterpillars. Voller is right behind them, along with three assistants: one (Olivier Richters) gigantic, one (Mark Killeen) who will shoot anybody on sight, and one (Shaunette Renée Wilson) who styles herself like a Black Panther. A chase through a ticker-tape parade for the Apollo 11 astronauts, with Indy leaping onto a police horse and riding it into the subway, is grabby in its very absurdity, and a car chase through Tangier, with Indy driving a three-wheel taxi, has enough comic dash to evoke what we cherish about this series. I laughed out loud when Indy leaps into another 3-wheeler at the very moment the one he was driving gets smashed to smithereens.

But those early high points aren’t really followed through on. Mostly, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” works by translating Indy’s old daredevil kick-ass fervor into the pure will with which he’s now hunting for the artifact. As the film leaps international locations, the action starts to feel more conventional and less “Indiana Jones”-y. Did I mention that the reason the Antikythera is so valuable is that it can create fissures in time that will theoretically allow one to time travel? The film actually tests this out, with spectacularly preposterous results. But time travel, in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” is really an unconscious metaphor, since it’s the movie that wants to go back in time, completing our love affair with the defining action-movie-star role of Harrison Ford. In the abstract, at least, it accomplishes that, right down to the emotional diagram of a touching finale, but only by reminding you that even if you re-stage the action ethos of the past, recapturing the thrill is much harder.  

Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition), May 18, 2023. MPA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 142 MIN.

• Production: A Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures release of a LucasFilm Ltd. Production. Producers: Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall, Simon Emanuel. Executive producers: Steven Spielberg, George Lucas.
• Crew: Director: James Mangold. Screenplay: Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, David Koepp, James Mangold. Camera: Phedon Papamichael. Editors: Michael McCusker, Andrew Buckland, Dirk Westervelt. Music: John Williams.
• With: Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Antonio Banderas, John Rhys-Davies, Shaunette Renée Wilson, Thomas Kretschmann, Toby Jones, Boyd Holbrook, Olivier Richters, Ethann Isidore, Mads Mikkelsen, Martin McDougall, Alaa Safi.

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Review: With the messy but poignant ‘Dial of Destiny,’ a franchise strains to keep up with the Joneses

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The first time Harrison Ford appears in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” you can’t take your eyes off him, and not really in a good way. It’s 1944, and Indy, captured while trying to plunder a Nazi stronghold, doesn’t look a day over 46, an illusion that director James Mangold and his 80-year-old star have fostered with the latest and uncanniest in digital de-aging technology. The effects are fairly astonishing, and all the more spookily disorienting for it (why does this Indy look so young but sound so gravelly?). If this is movie magic, it strikes me as magic of a decidedly dark vintage, and not just because of the dim haze that seems to cloud the finer details of cinematographer Phedon Papamichael’s images.

Who or what exactly are we looking at here and why? As Indy hurls himself into a familiar round of death-defying high jinks, you may find yourself scanning the lightly scruffed but artificially smoothed contours of Ford’s mug and wondering precisely that question. It’s still a beautiful mug, of course, and it’s one of the reasons this well-worn series, originally conceived by director Steven Spielberg and creator George Lucas as a kind of parodic homage to the weekend action-adventure serials they loved as children, is still chugging along in its fourth decade. But there’s something jarring about seeing Ford’s face turned, even briefly, into a special effect — an amalgam of images yanked from deep within the Lucasfilm vault, in the latest example of artificial intelligence’s incursion into big-budget moviemaking.

If you find these matters in any way ethically or aesthetically troubling, Mangold (one of the script’s four credited writers, along with Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth and David Koepp) trusts that you’ll be too caught up in the action to give them more than a passing thought. And maybe caught up in your own nostalgia too: The runaway train that backgrounds the first of Indy’s many high-speed melees also means to transport us swiftly and fondly down memory lane. Here, despite the phony-looking digital scenery, the busy, tension-free action and Spielberg’s absence from the director’s chair, the movie aims to serve up a smorgasbord of familiar Indy blockbuster pleasures. There are jokes to be cracked, Nazis to be punched, explosives to be detonated and ancient artifacts to be discovered and purloined — none more coveted than the Antikythera, a.k.a. the Dial of Destiny, a clock-like instrument that dates back to the time of Archimedes and is rumored to be capable of detecting “fissures in time.”

Cinema being its own nifty time machine, the movie then cuts World War II short and zips ahead to 1969, landing on the sad-sack spectacle of Indy (Ford, now sans digital airbrushing) drinking and languishing away in his New York City apartment. Regret and loss are apparent in every crease in Indy’s weathered face, every fold of his sagging frame. His long career in academia is coming to an end, as is his marriage to his longtime love and fellow explorer, Marion (Karen Allen). As Vietnam War protesters and moon-landing revelers flood the streets beneath his window, his predicament becomes clear: In a world increasingly consumed by present-day perils and future frontiers, what place is there for Dr. Henry Jones, who has always found his greatest excitement, fulfillment and meaning in the past?

It’s an existential question whose cultural and commercial implications can’t help but rebound on this beleaguered franchise: More than four decades after “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981) became a smash hit and helped set the template for the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster, is there still a place on our superhero-clogged, action-overloaded movie landscape for the handsome charmer with the fedora, the whip and the dyspeptic grimace? “Dial of Destiny” clearly wants us to believe there is, even if the evidence it marshals over the next 2½ hours proves inconclusive at best and unpersuasive at worst. Funnily enough, the picture is at its best when it casts its own argument into doubt, when it leans poignantly and even self-critically into the notion that time and the movies themselves may well have passed Indy by.

Spielberg had already entertained that possibility — and orchestrated a symbolic passing of the underground-cavern torch — in “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” the lucrative but unfondly remembered 2008 film that introduced Shia LaBeouf as Indy’s impetuous long-lost son, Mutt. With Mutt pointedly absent here, the role of quarrelsome foil and possible heir apparent falls to Indy’s goddaughter, Helena Shaw (“Fleabag’s” Phoebe Waller-Bridge), a fast-talking, light-fingered dynamo who shares Indy’s jones for archaeology but has her own playfully duplicitous, mercenary agenda. Before long, Indy and Helena are tossing off second-rate quips and mapping their way from New York to Tangier to the Aegean Sea — all as part of a quest to recover the Dial of Destiny and keep its potentially history-altering powers from falling into the wrong hands.

No hands could be wronger than those of Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen, solid but predictable), an embittered SS officer who’s determined to rewrite the ending of World War II. Nazis have, of course, long been Indy’s most reliable nemeses, and if their front-and-center villainy here feels like a somewhat rote gesture, it also supplies one of the story’s few points of contact with the real world. (A brief scene in which Voller dresses down a Black hotel worker carries an insinuating chill that the rest of the film doesn’t quite know how to handle.) Mostly, though, the use of Nazis signals an ostensible return to basics, if that’s the word for an elaborate, often tortured series of winks and callbacks to the original Indiana Jones trilogy.

Nearly every beat, every quip, every character dynamic and every outbreak of fisticuffs has its clear antecedent. Teddy (Ethann Isidore), Helena’s plucky juvenile sidekick, is this movie’s version of Ke Huy Quan’s Short Round. Toby Jones does typically fine work as one of Indy’s archaeologist allies, one whose incipient madness sounds an echo of John Hurt’s character from “Crystal Skull.” John Rhys-Davies returns in a few welcome scenes as Sallah, Indy’s faithful pal from “Raiders” and “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989). There are the expected diversionary battles, skittering creepy-crawlies and a fresh reminder of Indy’s horror of snakes. There’s also a strangely uncomfortable echo of one of “Raiders’” most famous moments, when a jealous, scimitar-wielding ex-fiancé tries to have his vengeful way with Helena in Tangier.

For the most part, “Dial of Destiny” tries to steer clear of the exoticizing First World gaze and monkey-brained racist stereotyping that has so often marred the series, especially 1984’s “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” The new picture might have also done well to apply the brakes on its many endlessly attenuated car chases, which, like most heavily green-screened action sequences, are at once high-speed and low-stakes. Only George Miller in full-throttle “Mad Max” mode can really rival Spielberg for this kind of vehicle-hopping mayhem, and Mangold — a solid Hollywood craftsman who’s done strong, genre-straddling work (“3:10 to Yuma,” “The Wolverine,” “Ford v Ferrari”) — never makes the overused action-movie signature his own.

That’s hardly his fault, given the general thanklessness of trying to put a personal stamp on an industrial product as mechanized and fan service-driven as an Indiana Jones sequel. In a way, Indy has been swallowed up by not only the very action-comedy movie formula he helped normalize but also by the dispiriting, depersonalizing trends in 21st-century studio filmmaking. The greatness of “Raiders” and parts of the original trilogy lay in qualities you rarely encounter in movies anymore: their jaunty exuberance, the arresting physicality of their action and the tactile creepiness of their practical effects. And, of course, it also lay, most of all, with Ford, whose persistent stubbornness and equally persistent likability made you want to follow Indy into every booby-trapped fortress, every spider-infested cave and, yes, every underwhelming sequel he came across.

Ford’s sheer movie-star charisma is the one flame this film can’t extinguish. As throwback entertainment, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” engages only in fits and starts; its workmanlike script bogs down in tedious treasure hunts and gives mind-boggling short shrift to some of its more intriguing supporting players (Antonio Banderas as a fisherman friend of Indy’s, Shaunette Renée Wilson as a government agent on Helena’s tail). But as a meditation on Indy’s (and Ford’s) mortality, on the passage of time and the plasticity of the motion-picture medium, it’s an unexpectedly, even accidentally resonant piece of work, especially as it gradually finds its footing in the final stretch and sprints toward a loopily audacious climax.

I don’t think it’s entirely coincidental that the fabled Antikythera looks, from certain angles, like a dusty old film-reel canister (talk about rare antiquities). I also can’t deny having shed a few tears over a crucial scene in which Indy, like many an aging movie protagonist, learns to embrace his moment — and to realize that moment was always destined to be fleeting.

His pop-cultural immortality, of course, is more than assured, and it’s in that tension that the sneaky poignancy of “Dial of Destiny” emerges. It’s worth remembering that Spielberg and Lucas dreamed up Indiana Jones, a consummate man of history, as a means of keeping their own favorite chapters of movie history alive, only to wind up making some not-insignificant movie history of their own.

“Dial of Destiny” may wind up little more than a footnote to that history, but that’s not nothing. It’s a muddled if on-brand addendum, a tarnished curio, a not-bad epilogue and, intentionally or not, a lament for the film industry that used to be. Its seamless, largely soulless digital wizardry reminds us of everything Hollywood can do now, and also everything it can’t do anymore and maybe will never do again. It belongs in a museum — which is to say, a movie theater.

‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’

Rating: PG-13, for sequences of violence and action, language and smoking Running time: 2 hours, 34 minutes Playing: Starts June 30 in general release

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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The Bikeriders Rotten Tomatoes Score Revealed, Tom Hardy Movie Lands in Theaters This Week

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• The Bikeriders is finally hitting theaters after delays, with an impressive 85% on Rotten Tomatoes.
• The film explores the evolution of a Midwestern motorcycle club, praised for its ensemble cast.
• Despite a strong rating, critics note the movie's style over substance, with a lackluster plot despite a captivating cast.

Jeff Nichols' The Bikeriders is revving up for its theatrical release on June 21, following months and months of delays , and countless reviews are being released online. Inspired by true events, The Bikeriders follows the founding and growth of a Midwestern motorcycle club as it transforms from a collective of outsiders, to a fully-fledged gang. The film stars Austin Butler, Jodie Comer, Tom Hardy , Mike Faist, Norman Reedus, Michael Shannon, and Boyd Holbrook.

Audiences have been nervous about The Bikeriders , assuming the numerous delays to be the result of the film's quality. However, those worriers can rest easy, as T he Bikeriders currently sits at a strong 85% on Rotten Tomatoes . The reviews are quick to praise the movie's incredible ensemble cast, who carry the film through its slower moments. Little White Lies wrote:

"The ensemble cast is enticing but the tried-and-true story arc isn’t injected with enough rigour to make this the classic it could be."

The Bikeriders

MovieWeb's own review rated the film 4/5 and praised the film's exploration of complex masculinity , uniquely told through the female lens of Comer's narrator. Our review read:

"Comer puts in a career-defining display, guiding this picture with wit, charm, and a killer Northeastern accent reminiscent of a mob-boss’ wife. These weekend offenders are a contradiction, a confusion of men in crisis, with their alpha-male stance and mega-macho outlook, yet plagued by the fragility of the male ego."

The San Francisco Chronicle also loved The Bikeriders . Their review gave the film a 3/4 rating, and praised the film's dissection of power. Their review read:

"Ultimately, “The Bikeriders” becomes a movie about the corruptive influence of power, but it’s also about the difficulty of creating and maintaining something beautiful."

The Bikeriders Is a 'Familiar' but Entertaining Ride

Among the reviews, both the overwhelmingly positive, and the disdainfully negative, there is a common theme: The Bikeriders runs out of gas in its closing act . According to many of the critics, the movie can only be carried so far by its amazing cast, and its lack of cohesive plot dampens what would otherwise be an incredible film. The Observer expressed this opinion in their review, writing:

"The attitude and the vibe are pitch perfect, even if the story itself sometimes feels like less of a story and more a series of images."

The True Story Behind The Bikeriders, Explained

To capture the culture of criminal bike clubs in the 1960s, director Jeff Nichols drew influence from a real source.

Empire holds a similar opinion in their review, saying that The Bikeriders favors style over substance. Their review wrote:

"More of a slow burn than a thrill-ride, this study of bygone motorhead mentality at its most visceral and violent is gorgeously shot — but only nicks the surface."

Finally, The Daily Beast holds a very similar opinion in their review. As the trailers have showcased, The Bikeriders is a beautifully shot movie , but it fails to truly examine and explore beyond the surface of its own subject matter. Their review said:

"Unabashedly romanticizing its subjects as paragons of strength and style, it doesn’t have much substance lurking beneath its surface—but then, with a surface like this, it doesn’t really need any."

The Bikeriders cruises into theaters on June 21, 2024. Check out the latest trailer below:

• Jeff Nichols

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'Indiana Jones 5' Becomes Lowest-Rated Movie In Franchise on Rotten Tomatoes