‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ movie review: Harrison Ford’s farewell to the franchise is a delightful exercise
The Hindu
With the requisite running and jumping, the fedora and bull whip, time-travelling Nazis and eye-popping CGI, apart from the rousing signature Raiders’ theme, the archaeologist-adventurer’s probable last hurrah is a delightful exercise in unbridled excitement
Yes, nostalgia is toxic, but Alan Moore must have been talking of the mindless variety, that blindly insists the good old days were the best. It cannot be such a bad thing to immerse oneself in a world and with characters who gave us so much joy and thrills in the past.
So it is with James Mangold’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the fifth movie in the franchise that started with 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, which introduced Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), an archaeologist who goes all over the world saving artefacts from the bad guys. The movie, directed by Steven Spielberg from a George Lucas story was supposed to be based on matinee serials, which, incidentally, none of us in India had ever watched. We were nevertheless awestruck by the bouncing boulder and the melting face.
Raiders was followed by 1984’s Temple of Doom, replete with chilled monkey’s brains and Amrish Puri, Last Crusade (1989) where Sean Connery has immense fun as Indy’s Grail-obsessed father, and the vaguely inconclusive Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008. There have been talks of an Indiana Jones 5, for the longest, apparently from the late 70s, and the wait, my friends, is definitely worth it.
Dial of Destiny, starting with the 25-minute gob-smacking opening sequence, featuring a de-aged Indy fighting the old faithfuls, the Nazis, in a crumbling building, a train and sundry locomotives, and ending in a battle 2000 years ago, is so full of fun and poignancy as to be absolutely irresistible.
In the prologue, in 1944, we meet the villainous Nazi astrophysicist, Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), who wants to use a dial fashioned by Greek mathematician, Archimedes to locate fissures in time, for dastardly purposes. Indy and his friend and colleague, Basil Shaw (Toby Jones), thwart Voller (atop train and bridge and all).
We then move ahead to the moon landing in 1969 and Indy’s retirement party. Indy is a lonely, broken man having lost his son in the Vietnam War and divorced his wife, Marion (Karen Allen). In a bar, he meets Shaw’s daughter, Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who asks his help to recover the dial and we are off to Morocco, Spain and Greece — yay.
Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) who helped Indy with the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail is now in America with his many children and grandchildren and continues to help Indy with logistics as well as his costume. Sallah also packs his passport — just in case as he wistfully tells Indy.
No room for complacency till counting is completed, Chandrababu Naidu tells TDP-BJP-JSP contestants. The TDP-BJP-JSP alliance will register a comfortable victory in the general elections over the YSRCP, he says. Alleging that the YSRCP has conspired to create disturbances on the counting day, the TDP national president advises the chief counting agents and their teams to see to it that the officials adhere to norms related to counting.