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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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Film credits.

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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‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ Review: Turning Back the Clock

The gruff appeal of Harrison Ford, both de-aged and properly weathered, is the main draw in this generally silly entry in the long-running franchise.

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By Manohla Dargis

What makes Indy run? For years, the obvious answer was Steven Spielberg, who, starting in 1981 with “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” guided Harrison Ford’s hunky archaeologist, Dr. Henry Walton Jones Jr., in and out of gnarly escapades and ripped shirts in four box-office behemoths. By the time Spielberg directed Ford in their last outing, “ Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ” (2008), Indy was in his late 50s and fans were speculating that the character was immortal, even if the franchise itself had begun running on fumes.

As a longtime big Hollywood star and hitmaker, Ford had already achieved an immortality of a kind. Indy-ologists, though, were more focused on the eternal life that Indy might have been granted by the Holy Grail when he takes a healthy swig from it in his third outing, “The Last Crusade” (1989). It’s pretty clear from his newest venture, the overstuffed if not entirely charmless “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” that while Indy may not in fact be immortal, the brain trust overseeing this installment wishes he were. They haven’t simply brought the character back for another go, they have also given him a digital face-lift.

The face-lift is as weird and distracting as this kind of digital plastic surgery tends to be, though your mileage will vary as will your philosophical objections to the idea that Ford needed to be de-aged to draw an audience, even for a 42-year-old franchise that’s now older than most North American moviegoers. The results don’t have the spooky emptiness of uncanny-valley faces. That said, the altered Indy is cognitively dissonant; I kept wondering what they’d done to — or perhaps with — Ford. It turns out that when he wasn’t getting body doubled, he was on set hitting his marks before his face was sent out to be digitally refreshed.

The guy you’re familiar with eventually appears — with wrinkles and gray hair, though without a shirt or pants, huzzah — but first you need to get past the prolonged opener, which plays like a franchise highlight reel. These nods to the past are unsurprising for a series steeped in nostalgia. “Raiders” was created by Spielberg’s pal, George Lucas, who saw it as a homage to the serials that he’d loved as a kid. Lucas envisioned a hero along the lines of Humphrey Bogart in “Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” but with morals (more or less), while Spielberg was interested in making a Bond-style film without the hardware and gimmicks.

As soon as the younger Indy appears in “Dial of Destiny,” it’s clear that the nostalgic love for old Hollywood that defined and shaped the original film has been supplanted by an equally powerful nostalgia for the series itself. That helps explain why this movie finds Indy once again battling Nazis, who make conveniently disposable villains for a movie banking on international sales. After directing “Schindler’s List” (1993), Spielberg expressed reluctance to make Nazis “Saturday-matinee villains,” as he once put it . The team here, by contrast, knows no such hesitation, even if evoking Spielberg’s films inevitably raises comparisons that do no one any favors, particularly the franchise’s new director, James Mangold.

The movie opens in 1944 with Indy — wearing an enemy uniform as he did in “Raiders” — being held captive, a sack coyly obscuring his head while Nazi hordes scurry about. Once the sack comes off — ta-da! — the plot thickens with a mysterious antique (à la “Raiders”), nods to the Führer, the introduction of an Indy colleague (Toby Jones) and dastardly doings from a fanatic (Mads Mikkelsen, whose face has been similarly ironed out). There’s an explosion, a sprint to freedom, a zipping car, a zooming motorcycle (as in “The Last Crusade”) and a dash atop a moving train (ditto), a busy pileup that Mangold finesses with spatial coherency.

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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

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

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

Top cast 99+

• 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

• thejefflewis-92228
• Jun 30, 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 Reviews

Post-2016, Indy’s renown disgust over Nazis feels urgent and relevant, and the film does a subtle job of condemning the US for embracing and elevating Nazis over its now obsolete and forgotten heroes, WWII veterans and anyone who resisted the Nazis.

Full Review | May 25, 2024

Far too long, but a somewhat fun time at the movies

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Apr 24, 2024

But "better than Crystal Skull" is a miserably low bar to clear. Dial's plot is surprisingly dumb, considering it took four screenwriters (including David Koepp and director James Mangold) to write it.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jan 25, 2024

I think you can find fun here. I think you can find good here. It's just not going to turn you around if you come in thinking it's a bad idea.

Full Review | Jan 12, 2024

Dial of Destiny is a fun ride, especially for moviegoers like me who just want to enjoy some nostalgia as we contemplate a retirement full of watching all those films we’ve collected over the years.

Full Review | Dec 30, 2023

There's a lot that's fun here... but the more you look at the CG, the more it looks like The Polar Express.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 27, 2023

There wasn't a world wherein this film would capture the greatness of the original trilogy but it's nice to see Indy and his compatriots sent off in fine, if unspectacular, fashion.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Dec 27, 2023

At the end of the day, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny may not be the best installment of Indiana Jones, but it certainly fits perfectly within the saga, committing to its characters and its essence. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 26, 2023

A beautiful send-off for this character.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 20, 2023

He steps back into that fedora not like he’s never left it, which is the point. He meets his character where he actually is – old, alone, grieving.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 20, 2023

And while the story is bombastic, is still better than aliens. With that in mind, I'll give the film a B-, its not perfect, but if you settle in, you can enjoy one last adventure.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Nov 13, 2023

Despite the weirdly ambivalent headlines and mixed reviews dogging this film since its bow at Cannes, this is one of the most consistently enjoyable legacy sequels of recent years.

Full Review | Nov 10, 2023

It’s fun; it’s wacky; it works.

Full Review | Oct 25, 2023

The final Indiana Jones entry is actually near the top of what is a usually dismal filmic phenomenon: closing chapters of long-running action vehicles. But what's missing is any sense of urgency in the story, or any sense of charisma from Ford himself.

Full Review | Oct 16, 2023

has enough throwback charm, humor, and attention to character that it comes close to earning its spot in a franchise that frankly should have ended with Indy riding off into the sunset in Last Crusade

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 8, 2023

Without Spielberg, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is just a professional and innocuously pop-corn movie: a compilation of "greatest hits" by an emblematic character of a type of cinema that is fading away. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 3, 2023

It may have squiffy CG, a perhaps too extended opening, and repetitious set pieces of evasion and capture, but Mangold sticks the emotional and thematic landing ...

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 29, 2023

The acting throughout “Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny” is solid and the special effects are, as expected, state of the art. Composer John Williams is present for the musical thrills.

Full Review | Sep 25, 2023

This a movie for the nostalgia-minded. Between the score and extensive de-aging of Harrison Ford from 79 years to 37, it’s as if we weren’t 42 years from Raiders of the Lost Ark and we can almost feel like we’re watching installments filmed back to back.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 23, 2023

Dial of Destiny manages to be the complete opposite — the rare legacy sequel content with simply saying goodbye. Telling a poignant story about our relationship with nostalgia and how attempts to cling to the past prevent us from living in the present.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Sep 14, 2023

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‘indiana jones and the dial of destiny’ review: harrison ford cracks the whip one last time in a final chapter short on both thrills and fun.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Mads Mikkelsen also star in James Mangold’s globe-hopping adventure about the quest for an ancient gadget able to locate fissures in time.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Disney holds steady as top tv programming distributor in may, rising taiwanese editing studio cutting edge films keeps the festival hits coming, indiana jones and the dial of destiny.

What the new film — scripted by Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, David Koepp and Mangold, with the feel of something written by committee — does have is a sweet blast of pure nostalgia in the closing scene, a welcome reappearance foreshadowed with a couple visual clues early on. That heartening return is also suggested by a moment when Harrison Ford ’s Dr. Jones, yanked out of retirement after 10 years teaching at New York’s Hunter College, stops to reflect on the personal mistakes of his past. Which is pretty much the first time the movie pauses for breath, and it happens an hour and 20 minutes into the bloated 2½ hour run time.

Part of what dims the enjoyment of this concluding chapter is just how glaringly fake so much of it looks. Ford is digitally — and convincingly — de-aged in an opening sequence that finds him back among the Nazis at the end of World War II. Hitler has already fled to his bunker and Gestapo gold-diggers are preparing for defeat by loading up a plunder train full of priceless antiquities and various stolen loot.

Scurrying to save himself and rescue his professorial Brit pal Basil Shaw (Toby Jones), Indy ends up in a death match with a Third Reich heavy on top of the train as it speeds through a long mountain pass. But any adrenaline rush that extended set-piece might have generated is killed by the ugly distraction of some truly terrible CG backgrounds. The foundations of this series are in Spielberg’s overgrown-kid playfulness with practical effects. The more the films have come to rely on a digital paintbrush, the less hair-raising their adventures have become.

The bulk of the action takes place in 1969, when Indiana feels the strain even getting up out of his recliner (and Ford commendably shrugs off vanity, making no effort to hide his age). The unexpected return into his life of the late Basil’s daughter Helena ( Phoebe Waller-Bridge ), whom Indy hasn’t seen since her childhood, revives thoughts of Archimedes’ golden double-discus gizmo and whether its purported properties might actually work. Helena claims to have chosen the legendary doodad as the subject of her doctorate thesis.

The dial was split in half by its inventor to avoid it slipping into the wrong hands — or to help flesh out a laborious new installment requiring multiple destinations — so half of it sits in an archeological vault, courtesy of Dr. Jones, and the other half lies in parts unknown. But Helena isn’t the only one interested.

It also brings Nazi physicist Dr. Jürgen Voller ( Mads Mikkelsen ), who had a previous brush with Indy 25 years ago, out of hiding. He’s been living under an alias and working for the NASA space program, developing the technology that took the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. Turns out he changed his name but not his political persuasion, so going back in time would allow him to “correct” history.

Mangold goes from one set-piece to another without much connective tissue. They include a chase on horseback and motorcycle through the streets of Manhattan that crashes through an anti-Vietnam protest and an Apollo 11 “Welcome Home” ticker-tape parade before continuing in the subway tunnels. There’s also a frantic flight in Moroccan tuk tuks and a dive to the bottom of the sea off the coast of Greece to find a coded guide to Archimedes’ tomb. By that time, you’ll likely have given up following the contorted plot mechanics and just be zoning in and out with each new location.

Or maybe you’ll spend time wondering what drew third-billed Antonio Banderas to such an insignificant role as Renaldo, Indy’s old fisherman buddy, whose diving expertise provides a crucial assist while getting Indy into a tangle with a bunch of outsize CG eels so sloppily rendered that Disney can relax about any Little Mermaid sniping. Renaldo has a crew stacked with male models who have bodies that didn’t exist in the late ‘60s, which seems an intriguing detail, though he’s not around long enough to shed light on it.

Mikkelsen can be a fabulously debonair villain (see: Casino Royale ), but any interesting idiosyncrasies the character might have exhibited are drowned in convoluted plot. This calls for a larger-than-life bad guy, and he’s somehow smaller. Filling the plucky young sidekick spot, Isidore’s Teddy is, well, let’s just say he’s no Short Round and leave it at that.

This is a big, bombastic movie that goes through the motions but never finds much joy in the process, despite John Williams’ hard-working score continuously pushing our nostalgia buttons and trying to convince us we’re on a wild ride. Indy ignores the inevitable jokes about his age and proves he can still handle himself in a tight spot. But Ford often seems disengaged, as if he’s weighing up whether this will restore the tarnished luster to his iconic action hero or reveal that he’s past his expiration date. Both the actor and the audience get a raw deal with this empty exercise in brand redemption.

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'Dial of Destiny': Harrison Ford's final 'Indiana Jones' plays it safe raiding past films

Harrison Ford ’s iconic whip-cracking archaeologist literally rode off into the sunset with his dad in the closing moments of 1989’s “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” So how do you wrap up what is actually the last adventure and somehow live up to an all-time great movie ending?

Therein lies the greatest struggle of “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” (★★★ out of four; rated PG-13; in theaters Friday). Director James Mangold ("Logan") takes over from Steven Spielberg in this fifth and final outing, following 2008’s underwhelming “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” Ford still wears the character’s signature fedora like nobody’s business, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s new Helena Shaw brings refreshing vigor and roguish attitude to a throwback story that feels both wildly bizarre and way too safe.

“Destiny” feels most like a thrilling “Indiana Jones” ride at the beginning, an opening sequence set in 1944 as World War II is coming to an end and the hero’s up to old tricks: slugging Nazis, trying to rescue historical artifacts from Hitler’s goons and lucking his way through perilous predicaments – in this case, saving partner Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) from a train and absconding with the mythical Archimedes Dial.

The film then shifts to 1969, and an older Indy who's more likely to raid a liquor cabinet than a hidden tomb. His globetrotting days now behind him, Indy weathers personal problems and an uncertain future. On the same day he retires from teaching – and a parade celebrating the recent moon landing rolls through New York City – his estranged goddaughter Helena shows up asking about the dial, which supposedly can find fissures in time. Indy retrieves it from storage, and to his surprise, Helena steals it to sell to the highest bidder, though they’re not the only interested parties: Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), an extremely punchable former Nazi scientist working with the American space program, is an old nemesis who wants to use the dial to change history.

Is Harrison Ford really retiring Indy? He might role play at home: 'Not your business!'

Of course, Indy catches up with Helena, but they only have one half of the dial, sparking a race between good and bad guys that tends to drag over the film's two-and-a-half-hour running time, even when propelled by a fabulous John Williams score. The film misses the Spielbergian twinkle and lightness of previous episodes while borrowing from past treasures, from specific “Raiders of the Lost Ark” callbacks to a Tangier tuk tuk chase reminiscent of the “Temple of Doom” mine cart sequence. One left-field choice is the Archimedes Dial (based on the real-life Antikythera mechanism) as this movie's prize MacGuffin, which lacks the cultural significance of the Ark of the Covenant or Holy Grail but ties in nicely with the ticking clock of time for Indy (and the guy playing him).

At 80, Ford remains a top-notch action hero, and gives the aging adventurer more gravitas this go-round as Indy's hit a low point in his life. The actor even gets de-aged for the 1944 opening using special effects: It's effective most of the time, less so in the busier action bits.

'Indiana Jones': Ke Huy Quan, Harrrison Ford all smiles at 'Dial of Destiny' red carpet

More often, though, Indy feels like a supporting player next to Helena in his own story. “Destiny” creates a wonderfully conflicting duality between the twosome, as Helena reflects the Jones of “Temple of Doom” who’s all about “fortune and glory” while old Indy’s on his “it belongs in a museum!” kick. But Waller-Bridge plays her ambitions and evolving character so well that she pops off the screen in a more dynamic way. (I would absolutely watch a 1970s-set Helena Shaw Disney+ spinoff series and buy the action figures.)

Mikkelsen’s an obvious choice for a Nazi villain but more than does the job, while Antonio Banderas has a too-small role as Renaldo, an old Indy ally who helps the heroes on a deep dive into a Greek shipwreck. Familiar faces from past movies also make an appearance, including a welcome return by loyal pal Sallah (John Rhys-Davies).

“Dial of Destiny” is a solid Indiana Jones adventure that ultimately dodges the giant boulder of expectations. But as a franchise closer, it’s an anticlimactic affair that, while not a memorably rousing last crusade, at least bids Indy adieu in an emotionally satisfying fashion.

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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Indiana jones and the dial of destiny, common sense media reviewers.

Entertaining fifth Indy movie has some shocking violence.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Ingenuity, courage, teamwork, and trying to do the

Indy is brave, resourceful, loyal, and smart, and

The two primary characters -- Indy (Harrison Ford)

Frequent peril/danger, lots of guns and shooting,

Woman spies shirtless man (one of a couple seen on

Occasional language includes uses of "damn" and "d

A character drinks a bottle of Coca-Cola. Coca-Col

Fairly frequent drinking: Indy spikes his morning

Parents need to know that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is the fifth and likely final movie in the blockbuster adventure franchise starring Harrison Ford. There's plenty of the series' usual peril and violence, though this one has more deaths that really feel like murders: Several characters,…

Positive Messages

Ingenuity, courage, teamwork, and trying to do the right thing are ultimately rewarded, though some of the heroes' methods and choices are iffy. Family is important here, especially found family; knowing that people care about you can be a calming/positive influence. Violence can be swift and brutal, but it's important to acknowledge and mourn your losses.

Positive Role Models

Indy is brave, resourceful, loyal, and smart, and he's dedicated to preserving historical artifacts and protecting them from those who would misuse them. That said, you probably don't want your kids imitating him, especially given the violence he's forced to use. Helena is smart and proactive, even if her motives are questionable at best. Enemies are portrayed one-dimensionally, as purely evil. Lots of bickering. Two main characters find themselves drawn to doing illicit or unwise things because they think no one will care. When they do realize that someone cares, it settles them.

Diverse Representations

The two primary characters -- Indy (Harrison Ford) and Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) -- are White. Helena is smart and resourceful and has agency; she needs no rescuing. And Indy is now 80 but still active and tenacious. Movie is set in several places, including Manhattan, Sicily, and Morocco; many characters of color in background, but some locations still feel exoticized. Antonio Banderas plays a Spanish diver who helps the heroes. Helena has a young, fearless Moroccan sidekick (Ethann Bergua-Isidore, who's of Franco-Mauritian-Brazilian descent). U.S. Agent Mason (Shaunette Renée Wilson) is Black and is important to the plot, but her story arc plays into some stereotypes. Egyptian character Sallah (Welsh actor John Rhys-Davies) says that he wants his children and grandchildren to understand what it's like to be both American and Egyptian. A minor character uses crutches. Indy makes brief references to having drunk the Blood of Kali and been the target of "voodoo." An African American bellhop has a run-in with the Nazi villain, who says racist things to him (asking him where he's "really" from and making reference to "your people"). The villains are Nazis and all White.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Frequent peril/danger, lots of guns and shooting, sometimes in crowded places (including an anti-war protest). Several characters are shot and killed, sometimes very abruptly/execution style by bloodthirsty villains (more deaths feel like murders here than in previous Indy films). Characters are thrown from moving trains and in-flight airplanes and jump/fall from heights. Knives. Fighting, punching. Woman punched in face. Burned/charred corpse in plane wreckage. Child taken captive/in peril. Two characters handcuffed together fall into the water; one escapes and leaves the other trapped, sure to drown. Threats, bloody wounds. Mace or similar sprayed on villains. Blood on hand leaves bloody prints on a phone receiver. Several action-packed car/train/vehicle chases, crashes. Plane crash. Noose put around character's neck; he barely escapes being hung, and swings from the rope for a bit. Explosions: bombs, dynamite, more. Characters held prisoner. Vicious attacking eels, creepy centipedes. Skeletons. Depiction of a large battle includes ships attacking, firing deadly weapons, ships on fire, etc. Yelling, arguing. Characters mourn the loss of loved ones.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Woman spies shirtless man (one of a couple seen on a boat), says to herself: "promising!" Indy shown wearing just boxer briefs. Tender kiss.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Occasional language includes uses of "damn" and "dammit," "crap," "hell" and "what the hell," "stupid," "pissed off," "shut up," and "cracker." Exclamatory use of "Jesus" and "my God."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

A character drinks a bottle of Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola sign. An old Levi's ad is seen on a subway train. Pan Am logo on airplane; ConEd, Brillo logos seen.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Fairly frequent drinking: Indy spikes his morning coffee, has whiskey in a bar, Scotch on airplane, whiskeys on boat, etc. Characters drink from a flask before doing something dangerous. A character says "you've had too many whiskeys." Cigarette smoking. Character sucks on a cigar stub; another has a pipe. Ashtrays shown.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is the fifth and likely final movie in the blockbuster adventure franchise starring Harrison Ford . There's plenty of the series' usual peril and violence, though this one has more deaths that really feel like murders: Several characters, including innocent bystanders, are abruptly, shockingly shot and killed. Heroes and villains alike use guns and other weapons (Indy has his trusty whip, of course) throughout the movie, and there's fighting and punching, big explosions, high-stakes chases, people being thrown from trains and planes, a villain left to presumably drown, some blood (wounds, on hands, etc.), a burned/charred corpse, vicious eels, creepy bugs, and more. Occasional mild language ranges from "damn" and "crap" to "Jesus" and "hell." A woman briefly indicates sexual attraction to a shirtless man, Indy is shown in his boxer briefs, and a couple kisses tenderly. Characters drink -- mostly whiskey/Scotch fairly frequently, and there's some cigarette smoking. Ingenuity, courage, teamwork, and trying to do the right thing are ultimately rewarded, and family -- especially found family -- is important. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (17)
• Kids say (18)

Based on 17 parent reviews

Classic Indy movie but skip the previews

Fun family movie for tweens and up, what's the story.

INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY opens with a sequence set at the end of World War II, with Indiana Jones ( Harrison Ford ) and his friend Basil ( Toby Jones ) trying to rescue an ancient religious artifact from the Nazis. What they find instead is half of Archimedes' Antikythera mechanism, a mechanical dial that's said to bring untold power to whoever possesses and masters it. Indy tangles with sinister Nazi scientist Voller ( Mads Mikkelsen ), but he and Basil manage to escape with the dial. Years later, in 1969, Dr. Jones is freshly retired from teaching when he receives a visit from Basil's daughter, Helena ( Phoebe Waller-Bridge ), who's eager to get her hands on the dial. But why, exactly? Indy quickly finds himself caught up in yet another adventure as the truth unfolds.

Is It Any Good?

This satisfying fifth (and presumably final) Indiana Jones adventure hits all the right beats, understanding that these movies have always been about more than just chases and fights. Directed by James Mangold , Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny has some of the same flavor that he brought to his earlier movies about seasoned adventurers ( 3:10 to Yuma , Logan ), and plenty of soul. Ford, 80 at the time of the movie's release, is allowed to look and feel his age (while climbing a stone wall in a cave, he complains about his aches and pains). And yet the stunts and action are all very much still exciting, with Waller-Bridge more than holding her own. A pair of flashbacks that use de-aging digital technology to give us a younger Indy are nearly seamless, too.

One of the best things about the Indy movies is that they revel in scenes set in musty old libraries or storage rooms and delight in the piecing together of 1,000-year-old puzzles -- and this one is no different. These beats provide rests between chases and build the characters. Even though Mangold goes long with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny , at 154 minutes, the pacing largely feels right. We really get the sense of just who Indiana Jones is here, what his history is, and how he feels about things. Now that his story is well and truly told, he's still our hero, but we feel like part of his family.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

Do you agree with Indy that historic artifacts belong in museums? What are today's best practices around preserving cultural treasures?

How are drinking and smoking portrayed here? Are they used casually? Are they glamorized? Are there consequences? Why does that matter?

How does this film compare to the previous Indy movies in terms of positive diverse representations ?

If you had a Dial of Destiny, how would you use it?

Movie Details

• In theaters : December 5, 2023
• On DVD or streaming : December 5, 2023
• Cast : Harrison Ford , Phoebe Waller-Bridge , Mads Mikkelsen
• Director : James Mangold
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
• Genre : Action/Adventure
• Topics : Adventures , History
• Character Strengths : Courage , Perseverance , Teamwork
• Run time : 154 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : sequences of violence and action, language and smoking
• Last updated : December 6, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

• Action/Adventure , Drama , Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Content Caution

In Theaters

• June 30, 2023
• Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones; Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Helena; Ethann Bergua-Isidore as Teddy; Mads Mikkelsen as Dr. Voller; Karen Allen as Marion; Boyd Holbrook as Klaber; Antonio Banderas as Renaldo; John Rhys-Davies as Sallah; Toby Jones as Basil Shaw; Olivier Richters as Hauke; Shaunette Renée Wilson as Mason

Home Release Date

• August 29, 2023
• James Mangold

Distributor

• Walt Disny Studios Motion Pictures

Movie Review

It’s 1936, and a youngish archaeologist named Indiana Jones is about to be buried alive in an ancient Egyptian tomb. His nemesis, Belloq, gloats from above. Recalling an earlier conversation they had over the value of a dime-store pocket watch after a thousand years, Belloq offers a cutting quip.

“You’re about to become a permanent addition to this archeological find,” Belloq says. “Who knows? In a thousand years, even you may be worth something.”

It’s 1969, and luckily, Indiana Jones wasn’t buried alive after all. He is, however, getting—and feeling—older by the day. Only he doesn’t feel like he’s gaining value. He feels as though he’s losing it.

Forget the days when underclassmen would write “love you” on their eyelids and blink slowly in the handsome Dr. Jones’ direction. When his students shut their eyes these days, it’s to take a quick nap. Forget the years when he came back to a home filled with love and family: His only son, Mutt, died in Vietnam. His relationship with wife, Marion, was wrecked by the grief, and she left him.

The man who survived the blood of Kali? Who braved the most devious of medieval traps? Who ran pell-mell from a gigantic boulder and nonchalantly brushed tarantulas from his leather coat? That man is 30 years gone. A big adventure these days might be more fairly called Indiana Jones and the Afternoon Nap .

Or so it would seem.

But then, on the day of his retirement, a familiar figure walks through his classroom door: Helena Shaw, Indy’s goddaughter. She’s after the Antikythera, an ancient Greek construct that was her father’s obsession. What does it do? No one really knows. The technology it represents shouldn’t, technically, exist for another thousand years. But Helena’s dad—in his crazed, waning days—thought that it might be able to manipulate time . 

Whatever it does, its Greek creator (the famed Archimedes) thought it was so powerful that he broke the thing in half.

Indy has one part of the Antikythera: Helena wants his help in finding the rest. Or so she says.

But she’s not the only one after the fabled mechanism: Dr. Voller, once-and-future Nazi, has his eyes on the prize, too. And you can guarantee that the bespectacled baddie has his own plans for it.

Nazis. We hate those guys.

Positive Elements

We can’t quibble with stopping Nazis. And, as we all know, Indiana Jones (for all his faults and occasionally questionable choices) has stopped more than his fair share. The stakes are high this time around, because even though Germany lost the war, Dr. Voller is scheming to make everything … Reich.

Helena’s not the do-gooder that Indy is. She’s on this particular quest for (as Indiana Jones himself once said) fortune and glory. Or so she says, at least. Indy sees something more in her, though: A desire to connect with her late father. She develops a real attachment to her godfather, too.

Helena also serves as a guardian/friend/mentor to a teen named Teddy. Now, their relationship is hardly perfect, given that it’s based on stealing and cheating and all sorts of bad behavior. But Helena has managed to keep Teddy relatively safe and off the streets, and she might be the closest thing to a mother/friend that Teddy’s ever had. And when things get particularly dangerous, we see the lengths that they’ll all go to save one another.

We also see some nice messages about friendship, marriage and reconciliation.

Spiritual Elements

When the movie opens in flashback (during the final days of World War II) we see that Indiana and his friend, Basil Shaw, are after another biblical relic. The Nazis have in their possession the Lance of Longinus—the spearhead that pierced Jesus’ side during His crucifixion—and Indy and Basil are attempting to liberate it.

The spear is revealed to be fake (though we see it again in a later scene).

The Antikythera, meanwhile, is very much real and (again in flashback) very much in Nazi hands. We hear that if the ancient dial finds its way into Hitler’s hands, “He will be God.”

We hear that Archimedes was a “mathematician, not a magician.” Indy says that he doesn’t believe in magic, but he does allude to his many experiences that he can’t explain. He’s come to the conclusion that “It’s not so much what you believe; it’s how hard you believe it.”

A picture of Christ is seen hanging on a wall. A Bible reference (Philippians 22) is scrawled on a subway wall. A Catholic statue makes its way through a Sicilian street. Indy alludes to earlier adventures, including drinking the blood of Kali. (The name refers to the Hindu goddess of death, and the blood itself apparently held magical powers.)

Sexual Content

Helena wears a top that reveals a bit of midriff. She was also engaged to a violently lovelorn mafia don. Indy walks around shirtless and in his skivvies. A couple shares a kiss or two.

Violent Content

The violence in Dial of Destiny isn’t as gross as we’ve seen in previous Indiana Jones adventures: No melting faces, no monkey brains, no one gets chopped up by airplane propellers. But the body count is quite high.

We can “thank” the opening flashback for a great many fatalities. Cars and motorcycles crash and fly around, killing and sometimes throwing free their occupants. On a train, a huge machine gun goes haywire (thanks to the sudden demise of its operator) and shoots dozens of people (most of whom fall off the train). Several folks are killed via handgun, too. A guy is killed a bit grotesquely while on the top of said train.

Several people—many of them entirely innocent—are flat-out murdered in the film. One or two are shot in the back as they try to run. One man is handcuffed to something underwater and presumably drowns. Another person nearly drowns, as well. Bullet lead flies frequently, often finding fleshy termination. (Not everyone dies from these gunshot wounds, but many do.)

People are killed via arrows and (more grotesquely) gigantic harpoons. Cars crash. Planes crash. Trains crash. Bridges collapse. Boats are dynamited. We see several corpses. Punches upon punches are thrown. People are threatened. Various vehicles careen in disturbingly unsafe ways. Indy says that he’s been shot nine times. We hear that Indy’s son died in the war.

Characters must brave eels (which can, and do, issue a painful bite), tarantulas and giant centipedes.

Crude or Profane Language

We hear several misuses each of “d–n” and “h—.” Language such as “crap” and “p-ss” is also used. God’s name is misused three times, once with the word “d–n,” and Jesus’ name is abused once. A racial slur is used.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Indiana’s first scene in 1969 finds him in his apartment, empty bottles strewn about. After Indiana retires, Helena finds him in a nearby bar, drinking. She joins him, and she tries to encourage him to join her quest over glasses of whiskey. He spikes his coffee with a bit of liquor from a flask. The consumption of liquor is fairly common throughout.

Characters—especially Nazis—also smoke. Voller often puffs on cigarettes, while another character chomps on a cigar.

Other Negative Elements

Teddy is a skilled thief. Helena tells Indy that they actually met when Teddy tried to steal her purse. He swipes several possessions during the film, including some money from a couple of Italian kids who made fun of his clothes. While he’s often forced to give the stuff he steals back, he uses that money to buy ice cream.

Helena lies frequently and steals the Antikythera. (She calls it “capitalism.”) She also calls out Indy for his questionable archaeology—saying he’s more a tomb robber than noble scholar. We hear that Indy broke a promise to a friend.

We learn that the American government has shielded an ex-Nazi from prosecution and put him on the payroll, using his expertise to help win the Space Race. (It seems that they’re willing to let a great many things slide when it comes to the behavior of him and his ever-present attaches, but his CIA handler will only go so far for him.)

There are references to blackjack and gambling debts.

Indiana Jones’ adventures have always been, in a way, about time. A 3,000-year-old ark. A 2,000-year-old cup. Stones too ancient to guess. With each new exotic setting, Indy and his friends dive into the dirt of history, peeling away pages of time.

Paradoxically, time has always seemed on the verge of running out on Indy, too. The torch fades. The tank trundles to the edge of the cliff. Even though he’s after such timeless artifacts, Indy always needs to do something right now , before the boulder catches up to him.

On one hand, Indy deals in eons. In the other, seconds.

It seems altogether fitting that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny deals so explicitly with time and the desire to turn it back. Here, we can feel the weight of time not just on Indiana Jones’ adventure, but on Indy himself.

Turns out, he didn’t need to worry about the careening boulder. The thing that threatens to crush Indiana Jones is the sands dropping through the hourglass, one grain at a time.

And yet he still has something to say. And do.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is no Raiders of the Lost Ark . Like Indy himself, the franchise is well past its prime. But it is a reasonably entertaining adventure story that is far better than Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (the franchise’s midlife crisis, perhaps?) and comes with, if not a treasure, at least a keepsake. A bittersweet poignancy at its core. And while it loses its way sometimes in its own convoluted story, it still boasts heart.

Of course, any archeological dig turns up plenty of unwanted detritus, and Dial of Destiny is no different. You’ll turn up shovelfuls of muck: foul language, irresponsible behavior, drinking, smoking and, of course, tons of violence. Nope, the Indiana Jones franchise didn’t turn all sweet and innocent while you weren’t looking.

But compared to some of the previous installments, the Dial of Destiny does dial the content back—just a touch. So maybe Dr. Jones did mellow in his old age.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is an entertaining final outing for Indy

It finally out in cinemas.

Finales are always tricky to get right, especially so when the previous instalment of a series wasn't exactly well received by fans. Do you go back to basics and just repeat past glories, or do you double down and try to change up the formula one final time?

Despite the poor reception out of its Cannes premiere , the approach should be enough to satisfy Indiana Jones fans. Fittingly, Dial of Destiny digs into the past to play more like a greatest-hits package of what you expect from an Indy movie.

It won't end up as anybody's favourite Indiana Jones movie, but with Harrison Ford as good as ever in the role, it's a decent send-off.

Where Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull had Indiana Jones dealing with unexpected fatherhood, the new movie sees him entering retirement and pondering his own mortality. (Not in a deep way, this is a blockbuster, after all.)

His fedora, whip and leather jacket are gathering dust and his adventuring days are behind him, at least until his goddaughter Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) shows up asking about a rare artefact, the Archimedes Dial, which her father (Toby Jones) entrusted to Indy years earlier.

Helena isn't reminiscing about the past, though, and has no desire to follow in her godfather's footsteps. She's all about the money and when she gets her hands on the Dial, she plans to sell it to the highest bidder.

Indy knows that the Nazis were once after it and when his old nemesis Jürgen Voller ( Mads Mikkelsen ) resurfaces, now working as a physicist in the US space program, Indy must set off on one final adventure to protect Helena, the Dial and, potentially, history as we know it.

You can't go wrong with Nazis in an Indiana Jones movie, and director James Mangold – who also wrote the script with Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth and David Koepp – sticks with what he knows the fans want.

Even the movie's opening allows Mangold to go back to the classic Indy era as he comes across the dial for the first time in 1944. Deploying some surprisingly effective de-aging , it's a rip-roaring beginning to the movie that starts in a castle occupied by Nazis and ends with an extended chase sequence on board a moving train.

If it feels familiar, that appears to be the point. It might be an homage to the series' past but, when it's done well, a bit of familiarity isn't an issue. Dial of Destiny continues in this vein when it switches to 1969, almost feeling like there's a checklist being ticked off, from MacGuffins and tombs to creepy-crawlies and on-screen maps.

Lip service is paid to Indy being older and thankfully we get minimal old-timer jokes, but otherwise you wouldn't really know. He can still do everything we want to see him doing in several well-staged set pieces which feel classically Indy due to the decision to shoot on location and practically, where possible.

If anything, it's not the familiarity that holds the movie back. The one 'tradition' that's not held over from previous movies is the runtime. Gone is the rough 2-hour template, replaced by a runtime over two and a half hours – and it feels it.

Mangold tries to keep the energy up to make Dial of Destiny an old-fashioned romp, but the formulaic plot often halts it in its tracks. When the plot boils down to getting one MacGuffin to get another MacGuffin on the way to the ultimate MacGuffin, there's not enough to justify the extended runtime and it ends up being repetitive.

The cast manage to see the movie through its lulls though. We know how good Harrison Ford is in the role, it's one that fits him better arguably than any of his others, but unlike in Crystal Skull , he has stronger supporting characters on his journey.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge brings an unpredictability and expert comic timing to Helena, while Mads Mikkelsen is sinister and charismatic in a way that marks Voller out from the usual Nazis in Indiana Jones movies. Other characters, such as Ethann Isidore's Teddy and Boyd Holbrook's Klaber, don't feel as fully rounded as there is tomb raiding to be done instead.

While Crystal Skull has been re-evaluated somewhat in recent years, its finale was certainly divisive at the time. Dial of Destiny 's wild final act is set to be a big talking point too, although perhaps not as much as the aliens.

It's here where Mangold manages to blend Indy tradition with something new and, thematically, it works as an affecting finale for the character. It strikes you as a missed opportunity for similar ambition throughout to really make the movie stand out as much as you can understand the 'back-to-basics' approach.

The result is that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny might not feel particularly innovative, but it is well-made blockbuster entertainment that will deliver what Indiana Jones fans want.

And, sometimes, that's good enough.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is out now in cinemas.

Indiana Jones: The Complete Adventures [Blu-ray] [1981] [Region Free]

Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, Volume 1 [DVD](1992)

The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones Vol.2 (9 Disc Box Set) [1992] [DVD]

The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones Vol.3 (10-Disc-Set) [DVD]

Movies Editor, Digital Spy  Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor.  Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies , attending genre festivals around the world.   After moving to Digital Spy , initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.  

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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: Harrison Ford's last hurrah in iconic role tangles with Nazis, nostalgia and aging

For a pop series in which coveting treasure invariably leads to certain doom, the prospect of a fifth and supposedly final Indiana Jones movie – with a now 80-year-old Harrison Ford in the lead, and without Steven Spielberg behind the camera – may well constitute one cliffhanger too many; a last lunge for the Holy Grail that brings the whole temple crashing down.

Forty-two years after Raiders of the Lost Ark, the series has become as nostalgic for its own blockbuster heyday as its creator George Lucas once was for the serialised adventures of his childhood; the original film's seat-of-its-pants charm, roguish one-upmanship and spooky practical effects are now as talismanic as ancient relics.

It also means the franchise, now under the aegis of Disney, has backed itself into something of a creative corner.

Having tangled with atomic-age aliens in Spielberg's flawed-but-fascinating Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), our globe-trotting hero is back to doing what his current minders, at least, think he does best: punching Nazis. As the traitorous American villain once sneered at Indy, in 1989's cheerfully self-reflexive Raiders redux, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: "The Nazis? Is that the limit of your vision?"

Directed by James Mangold ( Ford v Ferrari ; Logan ), who has the unenviable task of stepping into Spielberg's sneakers (Spielberg and Lucas remain as executive producers), the Nazi-heavy Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a sincerely mounted, often gripping action movie that also runs up against the limits of its own vision.

It's a film that wants to swing big, reckoning with an aging pulp hero out of his time, and questioning the perils of living for the past, but one whose ultimately tame execution – and, you might argue, very existence – serves to refute its thesis.

Without the playfulness of the old Paramount logo dissolve , the movie begins in gloomy media res, with Indy – played by a digitally de-aged Ford – deep behind German lines in 1944, just as the tide of the war is turning against the Nazis. He and his stuffy archaeologist colleague, Basil Shaw (Toby Jones), are trying to stop a train full of antiquities bound for Berlin (seems failing to nab both the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail hasn't dimmed the Führer's enthusiasm), when they stumble upon half of the Antikythera, an ancient dial rumoured to generate fissures in time, and run afoul of a Nazi commander, Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), determined to wield the mechanism for his own power.

"Whoever has it," Voller threatens, "will be God."

It's a long, muddy-looking sequence that, like too much of the movie's action, misses Spielberg's spatial dynamism and visual wit. But the film gathers some steam and personality in 1969, where we meet a now 70-year-old Indy, stuck in a cluttered New York apartment and snoozing on a recliner in front of psychedelic kids' show H.R. Pufnstuf, and about to be abruptly awoken by the downstairs neighbours blasting The Beatles. (The song: Magical Mystery Tour, of course.)

The crumpled professor is in the middle of a divorce and a thankless teaching job at Hunter College, where the bored, bubble-gum-popping students are more excited by the recent Moon landing than they are by ancient artefacts.

"Going to the Moon is like going to Reno," Indy grumbles, with every right of a guy who's seen extra-dimensional UFOs and Biblical phantasms.

The only person not looking to the future, it seems, is the now middle-aged Voller, who's been biding his time as a NASA physicist on the Apollo project, but whose real dream is to get his hands on the dial and turn back time, using his advanced knowledge to help the Nazis win the war.

Luckily, Indy's 30-something goddaughter, and Basil's kid, the spirited, whip-smart Helena Shaw (Fleabag's Phoebe Waller-Bridge), gets to it first. She's soon whisked the dial away to Tangier, where she's holding a black market antique auction alongside her teenage offsider, Teddy (a lively, if underused, Ethann Isidore).

With Indy joining them, it's an old-fashioned, international jaunt that takes our heroes across North Africa and into Europe by land and sea, with Voller and his goons – a moustachioed American stooge (Boyd Holbrook), presumably standing in for a contemporary Proud Boy – in hot pursuit.

Powered by Mangold's reliable craft and John Williams's typically baroque score, it all motors along at a pretty rousing clip, from an improbable horseback chase through a subway to a knockabout, Italian Job-inspired escape in tuktuks, with bugs, eels (the film's amusing variation on Indy's reptile phobia) and a salty Spanish sea captain (an all-too-brief Antonio Banderas) thrown in for good measure.

The lanky, mischievous Waller-Bridge is the animating spark for much of the adventure; as the mercenary, ethically dubious Helena, she's a ghost of Indy's own past, and the actor brings out a lovely, cross-generational rapport with Ford that occasionally evokes his double act with Sean Connery in The Last Crusade.

Her presence also suggests a scrambled moral complexity: In an era when Indy's old mantra, "It belongs in a museum," carries a whiff of institutional colonialism, who's to say Helena's black market capitalism is any less noble a pursuit?

Dial of Destiny is at its best when it tips its fedora towards these grey areas, when Mangold's sense of fraught American idealism – previously glimpsed in his intermittently compelling Ford v Ferrari – rises to the fore.

But while Mangold is a dependable action filmmaker with a steady command of the frame, the Indiana Jones films were never merely about great action; what he can't quite summon is the ineffable magic that the original films possessed, that strange alchemy that resulted from the synchronicity of – and sometimes, friction between – their creators.

Whether reanimating their movie-matinee childhoods in Raiders, pouring their post-divorce angst into the series' exhilarating 1984 highpoint, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, or teasing out daddy issues in The Last Crusade, Lucas and Spielberg brought a deeply personal vision to their populist escapades.

Even Crystal Skull, in which Lucas's loopy digital futurism clashed with Spielberg's late-career classicism, bore out a rich creative tension, yielding one of the series' most memorable images: The aging hero framed against the modern threat of a nuclear mushroom cloud (itself a direct line to Spielberg's 50s childhood, as seen in The Fabelmans ).

Put bluntly: No Spielberg, no Lucas – no Indiana Jones.

Dial of Destiny can't help but be a simulacrum of the series' past glories; even with its admirable attempts to wrestle with time and legacy, the film's lack of imagination undoes its ambition.

Given the wild possibilities afforded by this $295-million movie's magical time-travel MacGuffin – not to mention the digital de-aging toolkit at its disposal – the big climax plays it dispiritingly safe: catnip for history buffs, perhaps, but minus the nutty lunacy of the previous films' supernatural finales. (Imagine the perverse thrill of, say, seeing old Indy watch his youthful exploits serialised on screen in 1981. No such luck here.)

By the time the movie is quoting dialogue verbatim from Raiders, it's clear that it has nothing much to add to the legacy.

Through it all, it's possible to be moved by Ford, who continues to relish Indy like no other character in his 50-year stardom.

He's still capable of summoning that wry, crooked smile and schoolboy giddiness, but here, that cavalier spirit is tempered with a sense of time and loss. There's an incredibly touching moment, midway through the film, in which Indy opens up about his regret over a tragedy he wishes he could change, and Ford plays it with the kind of rare, unguarded tenderness that's escaped so many of his other legacy franchise roles in the last decade.

Dial of Destiny may not be the send-off that Indy deserves, but in those moments – and in the weight of Ford's presence – there's a flicker of the film it might have been.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is in cinemas now.

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Movie Review: Harrison Ford gets a swashbuckling sendoff in ‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’

This image released by Lucasfilm shows Harrison Ford in a scene from “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” (Lucasfilm Ltd. via AP)

This image released by Lucasfilm shows Phoebe Waller-Bridge, left, and Harrison Ford in a scene from “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” (Lucasfilm Ltd. via AP)

This image released by Lucasfilm shows Mads Mikkelsen, left, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge in a scene from “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” (Lucasfilm Ltd. via AP)

This image released by Lucasfilm shows Mads Mikkelsen in a scene from “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” (Lucasfilm Ltd. via AP)

This image released by Lucasfilm shows Boyd Holbrook in a scene from “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” (Lucasfilm Ltd. via AP)

This image released by Lucasfilm shows Antonio Banderas in a scene from “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” (Lucasfilm Ltd. via AP)

This image released by Lucasfilm shows Ethann Isidore, from left, Harrison Ford and Phoebe Waller-Bridge in a scene from “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” (Lucasfilm Ltd. via AP)

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Goodbyes don’t tend to mean much in the Hollywood franchise system. Death isn’t a reliable end for characters or, lately, even actors. Technology, nostalgia and the often-inflated value of brands and IP have created a nightmarish cycle of resurrection and regurgitation, curdling what we love most.

And yet when someone like Harrison Ford says he’s hanging up Indiana Jones’ fedora , for better or worse, you believe him. “Indiana Jones” producer Frank Marshall has also said that they won’t recast the character, which seems more dubious and, though well-intentioned, something he won’t be able to guarantee. All it takes is a new executive demanding a reboot.

Not that it would ever really work, though. Any self-respecting movie fan knows the truth: The magic of Indiana Jones belongs wholly to Harrison Ford. Apparently, he doesn’t even necessarily need Steven Spielberg behind the camera, though, to be fair, the foundation was well-laid for a veteran like James Mangold to step in . But there is no Indy — none that we care about anyway —without Ford.

In this way, it’s hard not to go into “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” in theaters Friday, without a sense of melancholy — not exactly the ideal state of mind for what should be, and mostly is, a fun summer blockbuster. But it certainly adds a poignancy to the whole endeavor whether the film merits it or not.

If only it didn’t start with that pesky de-aging technology (the best it’s ever looked but it remains unsettling), giving us a 45-year-old Indiana Jones doing some of the wildest stunts we’ve ever seen our beloved archeology professor attempt — atop a speeding train to boot. This sequence is ostensibly there to introduce the film’s MacGuffin, Archimedes Antikythera, a real celestial calculation machine with extraordinary predictive capabilities that in the film is bestowed with some otherworldly powers.

But we know the real reason: It’s there to let us gaze at that familiar face and to go on one last adventure with the Indy we grew up with, before being thrust back reality with a nearly 80-year-old Ford (he’s 81 in July) playing a 70-something Indy.

This isn’t inherently sad, but Dr. Jones is certainly reintroduced in the most unglamorous way possible: Sleeping on a reclining chair in a sad New York apartment, a glass of something alcoholic in his hand and threadbare boxer shorts on his person. He’s depression personified, retiring from the university where the kids barely pay attention to him anyway (long gone are the “I love you” eyelids), estranged from Karen Allen’s Marion and watching the world go space crazy around him.

We’ll have to see him work back up to his adventuresome self. No training montages required, thankfully, just a plane ticket, his classic uniform (still fits!) and his old improvisational spirit. The cumbersome plot (script is credited to Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, David Koepp and Mangold) strains to justify and give meaning to the search for the Antikythera: The FBI is on the hunt for it, as is Nazi scientist Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) for whom the war hasn’t ended, and the daughter (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) of Indy’s late partner Basil (Toby Jones) who was driven mad by the gadget. It’s a bit much, as are many of the overly elaborate and strangely murky-looking action sequences from the train in 1944 to a deep-sea diving sequence with killer eels. The movie hits its action high notes when it sticks to the tactile classics, like a brilliantly executed rickshaw chase in Tangier.

Waller-Bridge’s Helena is an enormously enjoyable character, too — a brilliant archeologist herself who’s chosen a more glamorous, dangerous and decidedly black market kind of existence, selling stolen antiquities to the world’s wealthiest and working her way out of debt. She’s introduced as a wild card and a lot of the tension is derived from whether Indy should trust her. It’s a very good non-romantic pairing of sharp-witted old souls, a generation apart. But you’d think in an almost two-and-a-half-hour film there might have been more time for one of our returning favorites, like John Rhys-Davies Sallah (he does get a few good moments).

I’m not sure anyone had an especially burning need to know what Indiana Jones was up to lately, but at least it gives everyone a chance to end on a higher note than “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” Or maybe Ford just needed some closure on one of his iconic characters so that everyone will stop asking him about them.

“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” might not be “Raiders” or “The Last Crusade” but it’s solid, swashbuckling summer fare and a dignified sendoff to one of cinema’s most flawless castings.

“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” a Walt Disney Co. release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for, “language, action, sequences of violence, smoking.” Running time: 144 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.

MPA Definition of PG-13: Parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.

Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr .

‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ Does Harrison Ford’s Indy Dirty

• By David Fear

Indiana Jones has fought a lot of screen villains: Nazis , assassins, evil high priests, corrupt rich douchebags, Cate Blanchett, Cate Blanchett’s hair . Yet Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny — the fifth movie to feature Harrison Ford’s globetrotting, snake-hating, whip-cracking, fedora-rocking archeology professor — pits our man Indy against the single greatest nemesis he’s ever faced: time.

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But first, we’re whisked back to 1944. A guy in a German military uniform is being led to an interrogation room, as bombs are being dropped all over Berlin. The bag over his head is lifted, and voila! There’s Indiana Jones, looking as if he’d just watched the Ark of the Covenant take out a bunch of vintage no-goodniks mere hours before. The archeologist is after the Lance of Longinus, the spear that pierced the side of Christ and has been “liberated” by a Nazi colonel (Thomas Kretschmann) who believes it’s got magical powers. Jones clocks it as a fake; so does Professor Jürgen Voller ( Mads Mikkelsen ). They both know there’s something else in this batch of stolen goods that is a big deal, however: the Antikythera, a.k.a. Archimedes’ Dial. Or half of it, at least. Whoever nabs this and finds the other half may determine who wins the war.

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Should you try to escape the creeping sensation of familiar-face cameos and callbacks — Easter eggs! Why’d it have to be Easter eggs!?! — showing up at the expense of untangling plot complications or connecting the dots between chase scenes, however, you may find yourself wondering why all this business feels so frenetic without feeling like it’s that fun. There are needs being met here, but they aren’t storytelling-based so much as stoking-the-fanbase and meeting-the-bottom-line ones. Ford still has the fortitude to play the part. But just having him show up to crack whips and crack wise in the name of bringing back that old Indy thrills-spills-chills magic isn’t enough of an excuse to have him don the fedora one last time. “Things move forward,” one character tells Jones. “And sometimes, they move backward.” Someone may have turned the dial a little too much on the latter’s side this time around.

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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Is Too Entertaining to Dismiss

This review was originally published in May, out of the Cannes Film Festival. We are recirculating it now timed to Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny ’s theatrical release.

For about 20 minutes, there he is. The opening sequence of James Mangold’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny takes place during World War II, and my eyes marveled at the sight of Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones, as fresh-faced as he was back in Raiders of the Lost Ark , jumping through, around, and atop a speeding German train, walloping Nazis while trying to retrieve an ancient artifact known as the Antikythera. Digital de-aging has grown by leaps and bounds over the years, but the directors who’ve used it best up until now have found ways to lean into the slightly artificial look of the technology . Dial of Destiny is the first time I believed I was seeing the real thing. This movie about going back in time turns out to be something of a time machine itself.

Of course, the film isn’t about the young Indiana Jones but about the aging Dr. Henry Jones, now on the verge of retirement from teaching archeology to sleepy Hunter College students, drinking himself silly in a grubby New York apartment. The year is 1969, man has just walked on the moon, and Indy’s been served divorce papers. Into his life enters his goddaughter Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), the adventurous offspring of his old colleague Basil Shaw (Toby Jones, whom we saw with Indy in that opening sequence). She wants to drag him along on a chase for the Antikythera, which is allegedly part of a contraption built by the Greek philosopher Archimedes to predict fissures in the very fabric of time, thereby allowing travel into the past; Helena’s dad, we’re told, became obsessed with it toward the end of his life. Also chasing after it (and, by extension, them) is Jurgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), a former Nazi who has since become a prized scientist in the U.S. space program. He may be former, but he’s not repentant: Voller hopes to use Archimedes’ dial to go back in time to stop Germany from losing the war.

It’s not long before we’re off to the races, hopping continents and seas in ways that might seem familiar. Not unlike The Force Awakens did with the original Star Wars , the Dial of Destiny feels at times like a remix, offering variations on elements from earlier Indiana Jones movies. Helena could be a cross between Marion Ravenwood and Henry Jones Sr. There’s Teddy (Ethann Isidore), a young thief and driver who will prompt memories of Short Round. There are moments that evoke the Ark of the Covenant, the Well of the Souls, and that creepy little tunnel in Temple of Doom with all the gnarly bugs. And instead of a tomb filled with skeletons and snakes, this time around we get an underwater shipwreck filled with skeletons and moray eels, with Antonio Banderas as a vivacious Spanish diver thrown in for good measure. Meanwhile, the process of reassembling Archimedes’ dial involves solving a variety of puzzles and retrieving objects that themselves feel like they came out of a spontaneous Indiana Jones MacGuffin generator.

Still, the damn thing is fun. Mangold may not have the young Spielberg’s musical flair for extravagant action choreography (who does?), but he is a tougher, leaner director, using a tighter frame and keeping his camera close. That may shortchange the escapist atmosphere and evocative exotica of the material (which is, after all, one of the pleasures of Indiana Jones movies), but it does bring a ground-level immediacy to the action. Mangold is also a fiend for vehicular mayhem, which probably suits this older, slower version of Indy, who fights less but often finds himself in the middle of any number of “wouldn’t it be cool if” chases: motorcycles and tuk-tuks and trains and Jaguars and horses and planes in all manner of arrangements and rearrangements, as well as one delirious final sequence that had me giggling with delight.

Sometimes I wonder if the worst thing to happen to the Indiana Jones franchise was Raiders of the Lost Ark itself, which kicked off these films but also set a standard so high that no movie has been able to match it over the years. (I still think it’s probably the best film Spielberg ever made.) The warm light of nostalgia now bathes Temple of Doom and The Last Crusade , but those films were also found wanting by many back in their day, with elements that attempted to recapture that old Raiders magic. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny might prompt similar complaints, some of it warranted. But it’s also too entertaining to dismiss. You may not lose yourself in this one the way so many of us once did with the earlier Indiana Jones movies, but you’ll certainly have a good time.

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Indiana Jones and the Losing Battle Against Mortality

By Anthony Lane

New York, 1969. Asleep in a chair, Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is awoken not by an explosion, or by gunfire, but by a blast of “Magical Mystery Tour” from a nearby apartment. As he rises to remonstrate, he is shown naked to the waist, visibly worn, and stripped of both mystery and magic. The years have taken their usual withering revenge. Having spent his life hunting antiquities, Jones is at risk of becoming one himself. He pours a slug of booze into his coffee, and a document, glimpsed in passing, reveals that he is divorced from his wife, Marion (Karen Allen). Soon afterward, we see him teaching at Hunter College, where the students doze through his lecture. In honor of his years of service, he receives a clock, which he gives to a homeless man in the street. Time be damned.

These sorry scenes come from the fifth and almost certainly final chapter of a franchise that began in 1981. The new film is directed by James Mangold rather than by Steven Spielberg, and the title is not, as you might expect, “Indiana Jones and the Bathroom Break of Doom” or “Raiders of the Lost Slipper” but “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” It’s a movie of two minds, marked with hints of the hero’s mortality—“Everything hurts,” he says near the end—and yet determined to convince itself, and us, that he is the exception to the rule of universal entropy. Once Jones gets going, his exploits acquire a desperate edge that wasn’t there in the earlier movies. Maybe he fears that, were he to pause for breath, he might expire.

Every quest needs a whatchamacallit, be it the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail, and the latest object of desire is the Dial of Destiny—also known as the Antikythera or, as Jones calls it, “an ancient hunk of gears.” (It bears only the flimsiest relation to the actual Antikythera mechanism, discovered in 1901 in a sunken Roman ship.) Devised long ago by Archimedes, we are told, it comes in two parts, which, once meshed together, enable the user to scoot through time. The dial was an obsession for Basil Shaw (Toby Jones), an Oxford professor, and his daughter, Helena, has inherited the craving. As played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Helena is spirited, game, and happy-go-plucky, with a saving touch of goofiness. On and off, she joins forces with Indy, who is her godfather, but here’s the catch: unlike him, Helena is scruple-free. She treasures nothing grander than hard cash and gaily scorns the idea that the dial, like other rarities, belongs in a museum. She also refers to Jones as “an aging grave robber.” Is she wrong?

There is an argument that the entire chronicle of Indiana Jones has been a canny exercise in the art of looting, all the more brazen for being wrapped in the principle of noble and disinterested valor. Because we love and trust Harrison Ford, construing even his grumpiness as a shield against the lure of low motives, we are primed to assume that he is a better custodian of exotic bounty than anyone who dwells in the deserts, jungles, and monuments where he roams. The Ark may wind up in a crate, but, by God, at least it’s an American crate; what safer haven, for the holy of holies, than the Xanadu of the West? For a while, I wondered if the villains, in the new film, would turn out to be daredevil agents of a covert restitutions squad, snatching scarabs and cuneiform tablets out of the Met and smuggling them back to their rightful homes, with Indy in scandalized pursuit. It would make a change from Nazis.

But no. It’s Nazis. Here they come again. The baddest is Dr. Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), who, in the wake of the war, has reinvented himself as a mastermind of the U.S. space program. Shades of Wernher von Braun, although I doubt whether von Braun would have remarked to an American waiter, as Voller does, “You didn’t win the war. Hitler lost it.” Sure that he can improve on the Führer’s feeble efforts, Voller needs only the dial to bring his plans to fruition. We meet him, festooned with henchmen, in New York, where the astronauts of Apollo 11 are being welcomed back from the moon with a ticker-tape parade. They are overtaken by Jones, who, stirred from senescence, thunders down the avenue on a horse, with Nazis on his—and its—tail. He rides into the subway, at Fifty-ninth Street, and canters along the tracks. If, like me, you are bucked up by horse-out-of-water sequences, you are bound to thrill to this jape, the best of its breed since 1994, when Arnold Schwarzenegger rode his steed through a hotel and into an elevator, in “True Lies.”

From here, the new movie, like its predecessors, trots the globe, insuring that we are never in one place long enough to get a feel for it. We are whisked off to Morocco, and then to Greece, where Jones teams up with an old pal, played by Antonio Banderas and described as “Spain’s greatest frogman.” There is no higher accolade. Next is Syracuse, in Sicily, and the Ear of Dionysius, a real-life cave with a fictional tomb inside. Last, a visit to the sacred realms of the downright ridiculous, on which I shall not expand. Wherever Jones and Helena go, Voller and the gang seem to be one step behind, and the pattern grows oddly monotonous. Even deadly peril can be rote.

You should, nonetheless, make a date to watch Mangold’s film, and, if you have to duck out after an hour because you’ve left something in the oven, no matter. The story is front-loaded with good stuff—not least a combustible prelude, set at the butt end of the Second World War, in which a youthful Jones escapes hanging, dodges innumerable bullets, and leaps from a car to a motorbike to a train, which then attacks itself . (A machine-gun emplacement, near the front, set ablaze by an Allied bomb, fires on its own rear carriages as the train rounds a bend. Hell yeah.) And how, you may ask, is the youthfulness achieved? By digital trickery, with Ford’s face rejuvenated before our eyes. To be honest, he was never boyish, so the transfiguration is hardly extreme, and I found it surprisingly moving. If you really want to rove back and forth through time, you don’t need the Antikythera at all. Forget the myth. Screw Archimedes. All you need is the movies.

All of Mel Eslyn’s début movie, “Biosphere,” takes place in what might be called the Dome of Destiny. It’s a cozy sphere, sealed and self-sustaining, in which a former Republican President of the United States, Billy (Mark Duplass), and one of his senior advisers, Ray (Sterling K. Brown), eke out what remains of their lives. They share the space with tomato plants, copies of Shakespeare (no beach reads, much to Billy’s chagrin), and a pond stocked with nutritious fish, named for characters from “Cheers.” There’s a Diane, a Woody, and a Sam, one of whom is cooked and consumed near the start of the film. If there was a Norm and a Cliff, I guess they got eaten long ago.

As far as one can gather, Billy and Ray are the last two people on earth. We never quite learn what befell the rest of mankind, though Billy does hint, now and then, that he was to blame. “That was me,” he says, raising his hand as if confessing to a coffee spill. He seems a decent guy, if none too bright, and emotionally far from equable. “I do not freak out!” he exclaims, totally freaking out, and he’s disconcerted when Ray, a scientist by training, uses words such as “palatable” or “purview.” They’ve been friends since childhood, and they often still behave like kids, squabbling over the TV remote. By way of leisure, they watch “Lethal Weapon 2” (1989)—“Best movie ever,” according to Ray—and play Super Mario Bros.

Note that both of those products, the buddy-cop flick and the video game, rely upon a central male pairing. “Biosphere,” though sometimes larky in tone, is also a frowningly intense venture that never stops being about itself. There are no stray cultural references here, nothing casual or loose; every detail is rigged to beef up the main dramatic predicament. The only novel that we see Billy read is Manuel Puig’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” which tells of two cellmates in an Argentinean jail, and of sexual stirrings in their relationship. Sure enough, Eslyn’s film—which she wrote with Duplass—proceeds to chart the blundering onset of homoerotic tension between Billy and Ray. One describes the other as his secret sauce. Game on.

The list of themes that “Biosphere” does not address is impressively long. Aside from the lack of interest in the apocalypse, nuclear or pestilential, there’s nothing about politics, unless you count Ray’s admission that he was a registered Democrat, or Billy’s crowing cry of “Dude, I ran the fucking country”; no discussion of race, although, as in the “Lethal Weapon” saga, one hero is Black and one is white; no ravening aliens or maleficent computers; and not a crumb of metaphysical awe. Instead, the whole emphasis of the film is on gender. Billy says, “I am way more masculine than you.” Ray says, “That mold of men and of manliness—it is so ingrained in me, bro.” The mold breaks. We hear talk of “accelerated evolution.” The plot drifts into areas of bio-fantasy that will strike some viewers as whimsically hopeful and others as modishly comical. You reckon that the fish, at least, will wriggle free of this ideological net? Think again. ♦

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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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Harrison Ford Takes on Creepy Crawlies in New 'Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny' TV Spot

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It has been an incredible summer movie season thus far, and it’s only going to get better with the release of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny . The fifth and final Indiana Jones adventure for Harrison Ford hits theaters this coming week. There has been so much anticipation for the film with Dial of Destiny’s marketing rightfully focusing on the historic finale to this classic action-adventure series. With just days to go till “X” marks the spot for moviegoers around the world, a new TV spot for Dial of Destiny has Ford and co-star Phoebe Waller-Bridge coming face-to-face with a staple Indiana Jones trope.

While the 30-second teaser mainly focuses on previously seen footage of Indy and his goddaughter Helena (Waller-Bridge) as they plunder a tomb looking for clues towards the fabled Dial of Destiny’s location, there are a few new shots of Ford’s seasoned adventure along with additional snippets of dialog. However, the last new scene of the latest teaser is its main hook. In it, we see Indy and Helena trying to squeeze through a narrow gap in a wall only for a ton of bugs to fall on to them. This is to the dismay of Helena who’s channeling her inner Willie Scott from Temple of Doom .

While snakes are the Indiana Jones franchise’s main animal of choice, any fan will know the series loves to have a gross out scene or two in each film featuring other scary creatures. In Raiders of the Lost Ark it was the previously mentioned snakes, in Temple of Doom it was bugs, in Last Crusade it was rats, and in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull it was ants. This particular scene in Dial of Destiny seems to be a callback to the creepy crawlies of Temple of Doom . That darker second film had a scene of Indy trapped in a deadly booby trap. It looks like Indy and Helena will find themselves in a similar dilemma in the upcoming adventure. Dial of Destiny is going to be a thrilling love letter to the entire franchise and, although it may make your skin crawl, it’s nice to see the new film keep Indy's more grotesque traditions alive.

RELATED: ‘Indiana Jones’ Build-A-Bear Unveiled Ahead of ‘Dial of Destiny’s Release

What’s Dial of Destiny About?

Dial of Destiny will pick up with a 70-year-old Indiana Jones in 1969 on the verge of retirement. However, when his goddaughter Helena comes back into his life tracking down the Dial of Destiny, Indy must go on one final adventure to stop a former Nazi turned NASA scientist, Voller ( Mads Mikkelsen ), from getting the Dial before they do. If Voller gets the dial, he’ll turn back the clock on Hitler’s biggest “mistake”. This new villainous character is also someone from Indy’s past and fans will see flashbacks to the famous adventurer in his prime using a de-aged Ford .

When Does Dial of Destiny Release?

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny swings into theaters this Friday, June 30. While we anxiously wait for Ford’s final Indiana Jones adventure on the big screen, you can view the new bug-filled TV spot down below.

• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)
• Harrison Ford