BLOCKBUSTER ONE

INDIANA JONES SWEET ON AMERICAN DESTINY

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Indiana Jones steps under the spotlight again after decades bouncing around memories in the ever broadening global consciousness.

Director James Mangold folds the secret narrative device of the film into the romantic but illusive and ultimately irrevocably spent time in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023), co-starring Harrison Ford and Phoebe Waller-Bridge as the heroes. Mads Mikkelsen plays the villain.

Mangold blends in a bit of Computer Generated Imaging into the opening scenes to briefly turn back the clock thirty or so years to a time on a train, of all psychotropic devices, with characters streaming forward from the always inescapable past into the ever illusive present.

Computer imaging de-ages Ford in these introductory scenes. In Indian Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), River Phoenix plays a young Indiana Jones, in that distinctly American Boy Scout mask, rescuing Coronado’s lost crucifix from a treasure hunter in Utah. These early references to a younger protagonist connect the movie franchise with a subsequently younger audience while maintaining Ford cast in the title role.

The director also utilizes a franchise convention of merging a preliminary action sequence of a short narrative with the main narrative and thereby subtly updating the audience about the adventures occurring in the back story between films.

The search for an important piece of archeological treasure again gives way to the more elaborate adventure embarked upon by the protagonist for a much more significant relic imbued with metaphysical importance.

Indiana Jones and Star Wars creator George Lucas illustrates a pre-occupation with who we are and where we are going after his supped-up car got t-boned into a walnut tree near the entrance to the family’s acreage in Modesto, California in 1962.

Star Wars has the Force. And Indiana Jones has this mystical temporal metaphysical transcendence that disrupts time to quite often change the future.

Like Lucas finding his destiny from this near death experience as a teenager just a few days before high school graduation, Indiana Jones is continually brought to a place in time when his life course is altered in the briefest of moments.

For franchise fanatics, Mangold’s opening action sequence is similar to those first scenes in the previous films that reintroduce the characters and the John Williams music score before embarking on a truly original adventure.

Jones scrambles for his life from a collapsing cave in the Peruvian jungle carrying a golden fertility idol (Raiders of the Lost Arc (1981), swims in the crowd of the Shanghai nightclub to find the antidote (Temple of Doom (1984), and survives the radiation from a nuclear weapons test behind the led lining of a refrigerator in the Nevada desert (Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008).

Time is ever after moving backward into history while also moving forward with the chase for eternity being meted out in the city streets.

The narrative also triggers movie memories with intertextual references to previous franchise films as a kind of franchise wraparound.

The sword fight scene when Indiana pulls out a gun and the boat scene with Indiana and Marion struggling to find common ground to kiss, in Raiders of the Lost Arc (1981), are turned upside down for a younger generation in the fifth installment, Dial of Destiny (2023).

Director Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood also get a nod with an intertextual reference to the hanging scene when an errant cannon ball blows up the executioner’s platform inside a hotel during the Civil War as the Yankees march into town in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966).

Jones, afterall, is about to find himself in the 1960s.

The archeologist is somewhat cold and calculating after having read history and found that the fate of the good part of humanity and the fate of the ugly part of humanity may at anytime disappear in the same instant. And the destructive nature of humanity that inevitably results in war leaves no time for tears and other more tangible regrets.

This first joint Disney and Lucasfilm installment of the Indian Jones franchise also keeps within the mold of Americana established by the original creators, Lucas and filmmaker Steven Spielberg, for the first film in the series released in 1981.

Lucas created the franchise in collaboration with Spielberg. And Spielberg directed the first four franchise films, getting for his effort and creative contributions the decision-making powers on the final cut of the theatrical release. Mangold directs, but Lucas and Spielberg co-produce the Dial of Destiny in association with Disney Pictures and Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy.

The story of Indiana Jones is ultimately the story of a victorious underdog. The decidedly American archeologist finds, then loses and ultimately regains possession of the archeological treasures that behold historical significance predating the American civilization.

The spear that pierced the side of Christ while being crucified is fought over in a train only for the audience to discover that the director is hiding a more significant artifact that predates the birth of Jesus Christ.

The Archimedes Dial is part fact and part fiction, like American historical revisionism, desperately shaping from real events and the biographies of real people the national destiny of the greatest of empires.

Lucas and Spielberg emerged as film auteurs from the Vietnam War generation, an era of youth growing up independent from the previous unwavering monolithic message about American power and influence that was created by the victors of World War II.

To say that the franchise is just entertaining would be trite commentary for established filmmakers made more so independent by the fantastical box office receipts earned from their movies in a ruthlessly competitive, financially draining film industry. Lucas at one point in time only survived bankruptcy by living off the licensing fees earned from Star Wars merchandize.

This ruthlessness of capitalism is underscored in the franchise by the competition involved in the private market for antiquities. Historical relics are valuable, yes, but they are also stolen from historical sites, at much cost to past civilizations.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge plays Jones’ goddaughter, Helena Shaw, caught in mid-sentence betraying Jones during a private auction of an artifact taken from Jones’ college storeroom.

Helena eventually cedes to a moral compromise and takes on a central role as hero fighting established evil alongside Jones.

Waller-Bridge is cast well with Ford, performing in parallel instead of underwriting or outshining the marque star of the show. Helena has been surviving a while off the grid without a father figure, but the truth of kinship pulls her toward the right path.

Helena also personifies the recurring theme of fragmented families within the Americana elements present in the Indian Jones franchise films. Toby Jones plays Basil Shaw, Jones’ fellow archeologist in the opening scenes, but when time catches up to Jones in the beginning of the main narrative, Helena’s father has died, and she has begun to use her generational knowledge of archeology to profit in the black market for antiquities. This life course is antithetical to the moral compass of her father, Basil, and her godfather, Indiana.

Jones identifies the danger of Helena becoming marginalized, and instead of letting her go, he reaches out to her and ultimately recruits her to work for the side of good over evil.

This dynamic ultimately is how the American story has become characterized with actions being taken somehow in the name of good over evil while embarking on risky adventures around the globe that quite often result in a lot of destruction and mayhem. The American underdog seldom obtains the penultimate victory. The protagonist instead resolves a crisis through much destruction, surviving only to having to fight another day.

From the onset, The Dial of Destiny is compelled forward down the timeline with frantic chase scenes that become metaphors for escape and the need to experience freedom, only to discover the futility of the freedom project.

The ‘escaping on a train scene sequence’ has only finite opportunities to experience freedom, forcing Jones and Shaw to jump from the train into the cold running waters. The camera catches up to Jones woken by the sound of the rock and roll music of 1969.

Indiana becomes involved in an intertextual reference to Ford’s filmography by only escaping the villains by disrupting the New York ticker tape parade for the Apollo 11 astronauts recently back from the Moon. These scenes reference Ford intertextually as Dr. Richard Kimble in the Fugitive (1993) escaping the United States Marshall Service by meandering through a parade.

Rather than these intertextual and self-referential scenes being examples of pastiche or cliché, the references to other films underscores that the fifth installment in the film franchise is more art to the collective consciousness and not just another adventure film.

Freedom comes at great cost with Jones rarely getting to keep for long his hard fought for, precious piece of antiquity.

The Dial of Destiny is figuratively and literally an artifact in two pieces that enables travel through a fissure in time. The initial part of the story involves finding the second piece of Archimedes’ time travel device, with the second part of the story becoming about using the dial to affect time travel itself.

The villain, Ethan Isidore, is a NASA rocket scientist recruited by the Americans from Germany at the end of World War II. Isidore wants to change American history by traveling back in time. Jones and Shaw just want to stop him from doing so.

Mikkelsen has played unassuming evil before in such roles as Le Chiffre, the arms dealer ruining Africa in Casino Royal (2006) and as Galen Erso, the software tech building the Death Star weapon, in Rogue One (2016). Mikkelsen has the demeanor to be easily cast as the hero. And the talented actor utilizes this duality of his screen persona to create a kind of passive aggressive villain of the worst sort.

La Chiffre loses a great gamble on the stock exchange that jeopardizes his own future. And Isidore profits from technological innovations, but he doesn’t quite get the end product working like he had expected, while Erso has designed the Death Star weapon system with a self-destruct mechanism meant only for the Rebellion leaders to discover.

For Lucas, technology has been a problem since trying to get the futuristic robotic droids to work in the Nefta Valley of the Tunisian desert during the 84 days of filming of Star Wars – which were 20 days over schedule to the great dismay of the studio executives fronting the production costs.

Anthony Daniels, as the golden boy protocol droid C-3PO, exemplifies the stubbornness of tech to operate on demand in a way that met expectations for the designer and the consumer. This stubbornness would persists for another five decades.

R2-D2 too fell over one too many times for the cost conscious producers. Lucas would have to splice together film that was shot before and after the malfunction to complete the scene sequence in the final cut. And in this way, Lucas had come to personify the copy machines sold by his father, George Lucas Sr, at the family stationary store in 1956.

Indiana Jones too is a bit of trial and error production number, imbuing the many chase scenes with a Chaplinesque tragic comedy quality, while Jones has to periodically pick himself off the ground and dust himself off as a sort of well-meaning underachiever like Chaplin’s character, The Tramp. The archeologist often destroys more cultural artifacts than he rescues for display at the college museum, but he never gets caught in the act for very long.

The franchise also presents the complicated depth of humanity when the adventurer simultaneously subtly underscores in his travels existential themes about who we are, where did we come from and where are we going.

These existential themes are often explored more with images than words in a type of comic book treatment just short of stripping the characters of everything but their superpowers and singular rationalizations captured in graphic images and dialogue bubbles.

The modern spirituality and then the voodoo science of the ancients’ seeps through the relics like the destructive nature of the white demons released from the Ark of the Covenant, and the transcendental mysticism of the lost stones, the eternity offered by Christ’s Chalice and then of course the infinite mysterious expanses of the alien intellect.

Time has always been just as illusive for each new generation.

Above all else, Ford finds his best acting art with the role by creating this most endearing character that has become a cultural icon smart enough to search the world for something other than the truth.

George Lucas: A Life, by Brian Jay Jones, New York, Little, Brown and Company, 2016