After scoring box-office bullseyes with Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Steven Spielberg blotted his Hollywood wunderkind copybook with 1941 (1979). A “comedy spectacular” set in the wake of the Pearl Harbor bombing (yes, really), 1941 cost nearly twice as much as Spielberg’s previous outing yet took less than a third of its box office. Chastised, the director teamed up with George Lucas on a project inspired by the serial cheapies of the 1930s and 40s. The result was the moderately priced Raiders of the Lost Ark, which promptly became the highest-grossing film of 1981, and which Spielberg later told me helped him get back to his crowd-pleasing roots.
Four decades and as many sequels/prequels later, the Indiana Jones franchise is still a money-spinner, although exponentially soaring budgets (this latest instalment cost close to $300m) have put paid to the original’s comparatively cheap and cheerful ethos. In its place we have a strange combination of cutting-edge, computer-enhanced nostalgia (Harrison Ford is digitally de-aged for flashbacks to second world war-era Europe) mixed with a string of old-but-new action set pieces involving big trains, small cars and nippy bikes – sequences that weirdly mirror this summer’s other massively expensive action franchise release, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. The difference is that while MI7 looks machine-tooled to keep you on the edge of your seat, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny just wants you to sit back and wallow in it.
With Spielberg no longer directing, it’s left to safe pair of hands James Mangold to crack the whip, with the help of his Le Mans 66 (AKA Ferrari v Ford) co-writers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth. Thankfully, Shia LaBeouf’s insufferable Mutt Williams, whom Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) had clumsily attempted to lineup as a successor to Dr Jones, is gone, his absence handily explaining why Indy finds himself alone again, naturally.
It’s the late 1960s, and the good doctor has become a bone-aching grouch, a live-action cinematic cousin of the old guy from Up. While Indy growls at retirement, the US co-opts former Nazi Jürgen Voller (a scenery-sucking Mads Mikkelsen) to aid Nasa’s moon landing efforts. But Voller has his sights on a bigger prize – the titular magical MacGuffin, which he last laid hands on back in 1944. Here, young(er) Indy and the oddball Prof Basil Shaw (Toby Jones, stealing every scene) do knockabout battle with Voller’s Nazi henchman for possession of Archimedes’s Antikythera mechanism; a two-piece contraption (crucially, you need both pieces) that can not only predict but perhaps control temporal anomalies… or something. Think Ark of the Covenant meets the Tardis. But smaller. And in two bits.
Meanwhile, back in the 60s, Basil’s daughter Helena (a clearly delighted Phoebe Waller-Bridge) has her own monetary designs on the dial. Helena is Indy’s goddaughter, setting the stage for much lively quasi-familial bickering as everyone hotfoots it around the globe, racing to find the ancient artefact with mysterious powers that will change the course of blah, blah, blah…
According to the British Board of Film Classification’s splendidly straight-faced consumer advice, “those familiar with the series will not be surprised by the violence and the threat”, to which it might well have added: “Or indeed anything else.” There’s literally nothing here to frighten the horses or upset any applecarts, save for those knocked over during the crowded-street chase scenes. Even the preposterousness of the final act (not so much WTF? as OFFS!) seems par for the course in a series that started with Nazi faces being melted by scary angels and most recently had Dr Jones and co communing with space aliens through a multidimensional portal in the mythical city of Akator.
Instead, you’re invited to feel warm and fuzzy about reuniting with old friends (even those whose reappearance has proved divisive) and to marvel at the scenic vistas and passably unremarkable popcorn adventures, all played out to sturdy John Williams themes. Hats off to Ford, who continues a winning streak of later-life role reprisals (Han Solo, Rick Deckard), proving that whatever gruff genre appeal he possessed in his heyday has aged better than Indy’s knees. He may be 80, but Ford carries the weight of the film, which, for all its gargantuan expense, feels a bit like those throwaway serials that first inspired Lucas – fun while it lasts, but wholly forgettable on exit.
• This article was amended on 5 July 2023. In an earlier version, the reference to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull had mistakenly become “Temple” of the Crystal Skull.
