(courtesy IMP Awards)
Approaching the ending of anything feels fraught and emotionally difficult.
We all want and need goodbyes because open-ended anything isn’t good for the answers-hungry soul, unless it applies to indie and arthouse storytelling in which bring it on, but we dread them too because, for obvious reasons, it means the end of something we have loved and don’t want to relinquish if we don’t have to.
But in the case of the venerable escapist serialised storytelling funhouse that is the Indiana Jones franchise, saying goodbye is pretty the only course of action partly because the actor at the heart of the action, Harrison Ford, is 80 and while he seems as engaged as ever and pretty much up for anything, he can’t be running around and bashing Nazis forever and time has to therefore be called at some point.
So it is that it is being called with the promisingly titled Dial of Destiny, a short sharp name for a film that is also filled to the escapist brim with all kinds of adventure and mystery and the sense that fate, powerful, near-supernatural fate, is once again calling some fairly persuasive shots.
For a film committed to farewelling the series – though you suspect that Hollywood, being Hollywood with a dollar sign glinting in its eye, will find some way to bring it all back at some point – Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, to give the title its full form, goes all in at the start of its thrilling fun story with a race back to a World War Two-era story where Indy is once again coming up against Nazis hellbent on artefact-enhanced evilness.
This playful peace of narrative time travelling, which speaks to some wider themes in the film best left to the realm of spoiler preservation, is made possible by de-ageing, a digital sleight of hand which sees Ford as he is now taken back to the crisp, young actor of the early ’80s, and which works astonishingly effectively (save only for the fact that his voice sounds present age appropriate which is not hugely noticeable in an extended train chase scene where fighting and besting of opponents is the noisy order of the day).
This back-to-the-future piece of storytelling fun, which introduces the titular McGuffin of the piece which, like all the Indiana Jones artefacts before it has the power to do massively epic, time and life-changing things beyond the understanding of mortal man (well, most of them anyway; clearly not the Nazis and certainly not Indy’s buddy Basil Shaw, played by Toby Jones, who is obsessed with finding the dial of the title) and which cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of evil.
Which it does, repeatedly, with evil this time around back in the realm of the ever-nightmarish Nazis who take the form of Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), a former Nazi with whom Indy tangles in the treasure train sequence at the start of Dial of Destiny and who is determined to ensure, through the power of the artefact, that history very much does not repeat itself.
It’s the race to keep the Dial, better known throughout the movies as the Archimedes’ dial or the Antikythera mechanism, that powers the film and which sees Indy and Voller going head-to-toe with a more graphic body count that we might be used to in the series to seize control of it and either doom or save humanity, depending on who comes out on top.
Oh, who are we kidding? Of course Indy does; this is escapist, serialised storytelling as its riotously diversionary and beguiling best, and it will brook nothing other than good triumphing, with not a little wit, wisdom and affecting heart, over the scourge of destructive fascist evil.
But it’s the way Dial of Destiny gets us to this all-but-certain ending which makes it such a hoot to watch and which invests it with a tremendous number of moving moments, topped by a near-to-final-scene scene between Indy and his extrovertively wayward goddaughter Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) in extraordinary circumstances, and in a franchise incredulity-straining full of them, we mean EXTRAORDINARY, which establishes that much as it loves spectacle and gloriously over-the-top action that the franchise is at heart all about connection and family and what it means to find yourself in the midst of finding all kinds of wonderful historical bits and pieces.
Set primarily in 1969 but with jaunts to time periods before that, Dial of Destiny gives us everything from a race through a parade celebrating the just-completed Moon landing to crypts under museums and shipwrecks teetering on the brink of oblivion, all of them joined by trademark chase scenes including one atop a Nazi train full of looted treasure in 1944 and an aerial tussle that defies reality in the very best of ways, as the franchise has always done.
Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) is back, as is the derring-do that has led this character and Indy to face off against more bad guys, and here one very determined and eminently capable woman in the form of Mason (Shaunette Renée Wilson), than an ordinary movie plot could poke a stick at, but while Dial of Destiny does very much tip its hat to the tropes of a much-loved franchise, it’s very much its own startling adventure, ending in a way that puts all the other reality-defying endings that mark the films into the shade.
Again, what that ending is must be left to the viewing but its wondrously excessive in the very best of ways and its fits the storytelling chutzpah and playful thrust of the series like a glove and sends Indy off with the kind of emotional send-off that is as affecting as the storytelling is bombastically fun and impossibly, excitingly and enjoyably immersive.
Saying goodbye is never easy, especially to a character who has always been fallibly human and heroically superhuman all at once, but Dial of Destiny finds a way to make the farewell rich and sweet and fun and mischievous and full of the kind of deliriously escapist narrative fun that has defined it from the beginning and which leaves you feeling that if you have to say goodbye to a character you love so much, THIS is the way to do it.