History Retreating: Memory, Purpose and the Future in Dial of Destiny

Harrison Ford rides into the sunset in style with a final flourish that speaks powerfully to the lure of memory and the defining value of the future.

This review contains spoilers. Leg it like you’re fleeing a runaway boulder if you’ve not seen Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

The past and future are irrevocably intertwined. History has repeatedly, tragically, proven that. It's why the Nazis put such a focus on rose-tinted stories of German traditions while at the same time promising a ‘great and glorious’ Thousand-Year Reich. History will only get you so far; a cosy past has value only if you can promise a future that's as good as or better than it.

Perhaps the first of the series to truly be about history, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny brings past, present and future crashing together, literally in its daring final act. It presents its hero as a man at a crossroads as he approaches his final years in the hazy, transitional summer of '69. Ignored by his students, forced into retiring from his job, and hopelessly lost in a world of magical mystery tours, Indy is a man out of time - in every possible way. 

Unlike other his adventures, there’s no intent to our hero’s actions here. The film opens with an extended prologue set in Germany at the end of the war, but the first time we see him in the film's present day, he's sleeping in his underpants, almost forgotten amongst the debris of a cramped and shabby apartment. He’s looking for nothing more than a bit of peace and quiet, certainly not the adventure that bursts into his life when long-lost god-daughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) and former Nazi scientist Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) burst into his life in hot pursuit of Archimedes’ Dial. 

Taking over from Steven Spielberg in the director’s chair, James Mangold makes great sport out of this hesitance and Indy's old-world sensibilities crashing into the new. The truck and tank chases we've seen in the past are replaced by collisions between cabs and telecom company vans. At one point, Indy commanders a police horse like most heroes would hotwire a car, before he and the beast are chased by trains in the subway. In a cheeky nod Spielberg would be proud of, he even passes Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins as New York celebrates their return to earth. Old frontier: meet new frontier.

Such dissonance has always been a key part of the franchise, but it’s typically been used to humanise our hero and bring him closer to us. We instantly like Indy because for all the heroic posturing of Raiders of the Lost Ark’s opening he’s basically like us, getting in over his head and legging it as a desperate last resort. Here, the dissonance distances him and pushes him towards something the series has never taken particularly seriously: death. 

Dial of Destiny is fundamentally about death: the literal death of those passed (there are plenty in Indy’s life by 1969) and the more figurative death suffered by those who age, drift and lose their sense of purpose. This isn’t a film that pokes fun at the hero’s age and nor is it one in which Indy can accidentally shoot three Nazis with one bullet and look at his gun with comic surprise. It plays for keeps and when innocent civilians die, their bodies lie in university halls, their blood staining telephone receivers. Indy, too old and too out of practice, can only look on helpless, a hero who didn't even bring a knife to the gunfight.

At the centre of all this, Ford delivers one of his great performances. Indy has always brought out something extra in the actor and each film tested him in different ways: he’s the romantic adventurer in Raiders, the dark mercenary in Temple, the vulnerable comedian in Last Crusade. In Dial, he brings that vulnerability back, finding the character's loneliness in small grace notes that rise subtly to the surface. Look, for example, at the early moment when Helena catches up with him as he sips an afternoon whiskey at a local bar. A flash of shame comes across Ford's face, a realisation that he's been caught doing something he probably shouldn't be.

Played with the right amount of bravado by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Helena brings a new dynamic to Indy's life. Beyond her own motivations and drives, she’s a three-pronged character: a surrogate daughter who Indy looks to protect, a suitable replacement who excels in the improvised battle of wits her godfather mastered, and a double of his former flame, Marion, who's filing for divorce by the time the movie starts. It's to the film's credit that it doesn't overplay these connections, Mangold and his writing team giving her a look and attitude reminiscent of Karen Allen but being subtle enough to ensure she’s a ghost, a shadowy reflection of people and places Indy's known but who exist now only in memory.

Such memories are all he has now. Dial of Destiny filters modern culture's fascination with nostalgia through profound statements on memory, bringing in two (sadly not entirely convincing) de-aged Indys and making subtle callbacks throughout. Helena and her assistant Teddy's relationship echoes Indy's with Short Round, a watch theft brings up a pained mention of Henry Snr that Ford delivers with genuine heartache, and in a particularly poignant moment it's revealed that Mutt fought and died in Vietnam, leaving Marion (who’s seen through the majority of the film only in photographs) inconsolable and Indy powerless to help. Again, these moments are fleeting; they slip through our fingers rather than being thrust down our throats.

If Kingdom of the Crystal Skull found Indy reflecting on a time when life "stops giving us things and starts taking them away" Dial of Destiny wonders what happens when memory is the only thing left to take. Its thematic interests come to a head in its brave and genuinely thrilling final act when Voller's plan is revealed: he intends to travel back to 1939, assassinate Hitler (whose ‘mistakes’ Voller believes cost Germany the war) and lead his country to victory. "Yesterday belongs to us," he tells Indy, but what he really means is that the future belongs to him. Again, the two are inseparable and Voller's plan gives him something that Indy lacks: a sense of purpose to go with his memory of the 'glorious' Third Reich. Indy, shot in the shoulder and slowly bleeding to death, can only watch with scorn. 

Naturally, the plan goes awry. Voller and Indy don’t end up in 1930s Germany but rather 212 BC during the Siege of Syracuse, their journey there a carefully plotted scheme by Archimedes to complete his dial and help him win the battle. Voller and his men are ultimately killed in the conflict and Indy is presented with an opportunity he finds too good to resist: to stay with Archimedes and live through the history he could previously only study. 

It sounds like an insane plan and Indy's desire to stay (indeed, the whole time travel concept) may alienate audiences already sensitive after some of Crystal Skull’s more outlandish concepts. But why wouldn’t he stay? He has nothing to return for. His noble war has been replaced by his son’s corrupt one, his dusty deserts outdone by the metallic sheen of rocket ships. Here, finally, at the very start of history, he has purpose, value and the sense of future that those things deliver. 

Helena snaps him out of it with a swift punch to the face and the pair escape through the time rift back to 1969, where Marion is waiting for him. A few awkward beats lead to an homage to their famous exchange on the Bantu Wind in Raiders, Indy now playing the nurse by gently placing kisses on Marion. It’s a lovely reference, but it’d be a mistake to see it as empty nostalgia. Mangold doesn’t simply recreate the moment; he remixes it. The pain isn’t physical any more, but emotional, the moment not a prelude to romantic love, but something grander: acceptance, forgiveness, the genuine care that two people in love with one another share. 

Memory has been made real again, the past restored in the present to pave the way for a future (brief though it may be considering their years) that’ll be much happier for Indy and Marion. It’s a perfect way for this entry to end and, maybe, the only way for the series to end. From Raiders to Dial, Indy’s adventures have always been about the juxtaposition between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the battle to remain human against the power of history and its wonders. As the film irises out and Indy snatches his famous fedora from the approaching blackness, Dial of Destiny is smart enough to remind us what he’s always been and what we’ve always loved him for: a hero, yes, but also just a man with a hat.