Months after it bombed out of theaters with critics and audiences alike, I finally gave Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny a cursory viewing last week out of sheer morbid curiosity.
At this point, Harrison Ford has spent over a decade reviving some of the most iconic roles of his early-career in decades-delayed sequels, and the only one that turned out half-way interesting was Blade Runner: 2049. Even more so than his Han Solo revival in The Force Awakens, The Dial of Destiny is only a half-hearted re-enactment, an empty cipher of a performance, forgettable and rote, and in no danger of getting anyone stop referring to the Indiana Jones franchise as a trilogy. Even Kingdom of the Crystal Skull at least had that memorably-bad nuking-the-fridge scene that became a meme back in 2008.
Speaking of memes: you are doubtless familiar with the one (which even the bottom-feeding Big Bang Theory once circulated) that argues Indiana Jones is irrelevant to the plot of the original Raiders of the Lost Ark, since the Nazis still end up with the ark regardless, and then get their faces melted off anyways. Such, of course, is an unfair characterization of his role; Jones is essential for ensuring his old flame Mariam isn’t killed or kidnapped by the Nazis in Nepal or Egypt, which relationship turns out to be the true emotional center of the film, and the only thing of value he walks away with after the Ark turns out to be inaccessible to anyone. The Dial of Destiny by contrast makes that meme literal, since Indiana Jones really is utterly inessential to defeating the Nazis this time around, as their own incompetence and hubris is what finally does them in yet again. Dr. Jones really could have just stayed home in his Manhattan apartment all film long and it wouldn’t have made a lick of difference.
Likewise, the digitally de-aged Harrison Ford in the flashback opener, set during the final days of WWII, only had the effect of making the entire film and plot feel utterly weightless.
They also completely dropped the plot thread about Jones being framed for murder in New York (not that it was all that promising a thread to begin with). This dropped thread was distractingly annoying, because a feature of the original trilogy was how efficiently all the moving pieces of the plot fit and flowed together like a well-oiled machine. Here, however, it took producers 15 years to make yet another old-man Indiana Jones film, and in the end it still needed to go through at least a few more revisions.
What, then, is missing from either of these long-delayed Indiana Jones sequels, that made them both feel so immediately inessential and alienated from the original trilogy? I don’t think it’s just that Harrison Ford has aged out of the part; Sean Connery in 1989 had largely aged out of action roles too, but his casting as Indie’s father was the most inspired part of The Last Crusade. And it’s not like the original films were all that big on continuity or accuracy either—whether historical, cultural, or even theological.
But now that I mention it, this utter lack of any theological perspective–even if it was the purely pulp theology of the original trilogy–is what I think has sunk these last two sequels the most. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull famously featured space aliens in its big reveal; Dial of Destiny centers upon the Antikythera as an ancient time-traveling mechanism. On the face of it, there is nothing any less outlandish about space-ships and time-gears than there were about the Ark of the Covenant, Hindu stones, and the Holy Grail.
However, I am willing to argue that the sheer fact that all the Macguffin’s in the original trilogy were religious in nature is exactly what animates those old films to such a much more memorable degree. This site has quoted before Andrew Kay’s visit to the final Hill Cumorah Pageant in 2019, wherein he writes: “In order for people to abandon their self-interest and commit to a grand cause, writes Jane Bennett in The Enchantment of Modern Life, something has to happen to their aesthetic being—that part of them that is sensory and emotional. They have to fall in love. ‘One must be enamored with existence,’ she writes, ‘to be capable of donating some of one’s scarce mortal resources to the service of others.’ Put baldly, ‘You have to love life before you can care about anything.’ Enchantment turns out to be the precondition for committed political life together — a way of charming people toward self-transcendence with a vision of existence that pulses with animacy and purpose. Ethical codes are stillborn without such visions; they can’t catch unless people are inflamed by some story of their lives capable of drawing from them, again and again, virtuous performances.”
As bastardized and (frankly) culturally-insensitive as the Judaism, Hinduism, and Christianity of the ’80s Indiana Jones may have been, what all three intuitively understood is how religion tends to generate enchantment in a manner that even the most outlandish mechanisms do not. Alien space-craft and ancient gears have their own interest and fascination, yes, but both ultimately still argue for a strictly mechanistic understanding for how our universe functions. Even if the math and science involved is well beyond our current understanding, it is still ultimately based upon rationale and rather mundane principles.
But religion at its best insinuates a world beyond our own mortal understanding, something that can be revealed but not comprehended. That’s why even the orthodox tend to distrust it, quite frankly. We try and regulate religion to be something more mechanistic and grounded, too; hence our endless checklists and dress & grooming standards and For Strength of Youth pamphlets and Bibles-made-easy translations and “inspirational” literature, and so on and so forth. (There’s a reason why the Methodist preacher rebuked Joseph Smith after the First Vision).
But true religion–the sort of thing that moves your soul–always hints that there is something so much larger than you going on at all times. Indiana Jones meeting Archimedes during the Roman Siege of Syracuse in 212 BC in the Dial of Destiny finale may have perhaps sounded great on paper, but in execution came of as rather perfunctory, underwhelming, as just one more thing that happened; they merely say hello, complete the two halves of the Antikythera gears, and then everyone moves on with their day. History continues on uninterrupted, machine-like. Certainly the scene had nothing on the vengeful spirits swirling out of the Ark of the Covenant in the night, or the Sankara stones bursting into flames as Jones invokes Shiva, or the divine judgments of the Holy Grail deep within Al-Khazneh of Petra. In these memorable climaxes, even at their hokiest and most sensationalist, there nevertheless still remains the distinct feeling that something much greater than ourselves–something genuinely divine–has interceded, if only briefly, into our mortal plain, and hinted at something far grander beyond us.
Which can be genuinely terrifying! It can also be animating and inspiring. And it is missing from both 21st century Indiana Jones sequels–and it is missing from us whenever we treat our religion as rote, checklisty, and mechanistic as well.