Deconstructing 'Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny'
Deconstructing 'Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny'
An in-depth examination of why this movie doesn't work.
This post was originally published on July 5, 2023. AFD has since switched platforms, and for technical reasons, this post didn’t port over. Since Dial of Destiny is available on Disney+ as of tomorrow, this seemed like a good time to re-publish it. Enjoy!
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is bad. We can revisit the subject in a few years, but my hot take is that it's worse than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and I wouldn't have thought that possible (this franchise has now both set and followed the pattern for/of the Die Hard series - iconic original, decent sequel, excellent trilogy capper, a disappointing piece of crap, a really disappointing piece of crap). There's an argument to be made that director and co-writer James Mangold (taking over for traditional series director Steven Spielberg) very admirably took an unexpected approach to the material. But it's not quite a big enough swing to make me respect it despite its complete failure to connect with the ball.
What's so wrong with Dial of Destiny? As is often the case, there's not one big thing wrong with the movie - there's a whole ton of problematic little elements that compound to create an intensely boring slog.
So let's perform an autopsy and see what wrong here.
(LOTS OF SPOILERS TO FOLLOW.)
PART I: THE MANGOLD APPROACH
Harrison Ford, you may have noticed, is older than the Holy Grail. And so Mangold's approach to Dial of Destiny, as he explained in a recent interview, was to meet Ford's age head-on:
"This needed to be a movie about getting old... my star is pushing 80... he's an old guy. And that doesn't mean you make the movie about 'Oh, my back aches.' It means you make the movie about someone in the final chapter of their life and all that has happened and what is left to happen."
Putting aside the fact that the movie actually does have a gag that's akin to "Oh, my back aches," it's somewhat understandable why Mangold and his collaborators/financiers thought that "Regretful Old Man Indiana Jones" might be a viable framework. There's a long history of stories that are basically Wild Strawberries with violence. In the movies, it's a tradition that dates back at least as far as Shane. And Mangold himself had a lot of success doing something similar with 2017's Logan.
But the DNA of the Indiana Jones franchise fundamentally does not allow for this concept. Wolverine had already been through myriad interpretations and adaptations by the time Logan came out - like most comic book icons, the character is highly malleable. Additionally, the X-Men movies from which Logan sprang were often pretty dark: The original opens with a little boy losing his parents in a Nazi concentration camp, main characters get killed off with some regularity, and the entire conflict hinged on issues of bigotry and genocide (Indiana Jones has killed a lot of Nazis, but he's not Jewish, and he never encounters anyone in the camps or confronts the Holocaust in any meaningful way). And besides that, Wolverine was always presented as a guy suffering from severe psychological trauma, whereas Indy, however contentious some of he relationships may be, never seems caught in the throes of angst.
So when we find him in Dial of Destiny as a misanthropic, friendless alcoholic whose wife has served him divorce papers, we're not only in new territory, we're in new territory that never really seems appropriate for who this character actually is.
A far better expression of Indy's discontent is a scene where he’s giving a lecturing to a group of deeply-disinterested students; it provides a contrast with the lecture scenes in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where the students are all overly-eager, that is both stark and humorous. We get that things have really changed for Indy, but it doesn't instill us with the desire to reach for the Paxil. Tonally, it's much closer to what Dial of Destiny needed to be.
And speaking of tone...
PART II - THE TONE
So in keeping with Indy now being 127 years old, Mangold has brought in all kinds of real-world cruelties that, frankly, just do not work with a light, fun adventure. Like, remember when Indy's sidekick gets murdered at the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom?
Can you imagine what it would be like if in the next scene, after Indy and Willie (Kate Capshaw) and Short Round (Ke Huy Quan) narrowly manage a daring escape, Indy stopped everything not only to mourn his friend, but to scold Willie and Short Round for not doing the same?
Because that actually happens here, with a boat captain played by Antonio Banderas. Banderas is given nothing to do - his character feels less well-defined than Katanga, the captain from Raiders, fer Chrissakes - and until he was killed off, I couldn't understand why he was even in the movie. And the reason he's in the movie is, there's no character here, but Mangold needed someone charismatic and likable with whom the audience has a connection, so that they'd feel something when the guy dies. Because that, in turn, allows for a moment when Indy's god-daughter, Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), and her pseudo-Short Round, Teddy (Ethann Isidore), are celebrating their escape when Indy yells at them, "MY FRIEND WAS JUST MURDERED!" And everything gets quiet and awkward and sad, as it would in such a situation.
Dial of Destiny is full of such instances of "realism" that severely undermines any sense of joy. Indy's son, Mutt (Shia LaBeouf, seen here only briefly in a still photo), was killed in Vietnam, a war for which he enlisted in order to "piss [Indy] off." The bad guy, Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), is a Nazi who has been recruited by the U.S. government to help with the space race. He gets an entire scene to taunt a Black veteran who is now working at a fancy hotel delivering room service, implying, not incorrectly, that America doesn't fully appreciate what Black men did in World War II. Later, he cruelly betrays and shoots a Black CIA operative (Shaunette Renée Wilson) who seems unaware that he was once a Nazi; the camera lingers on her face while she slowly bleeds out and he reveals his true identity, so that the last thing she ever hears, ostensibly, is "You helped a Nazi."
It's all very, very badly misguided.
One of the reasons we love Indiana Jones is because he fights Nazis, and Nazis make great villains because they are unequivocally shitheads. Not only is seeing Nazis get killed in a variety or horrifically violent ways not troublesome, it's fun.
But it's also why Indy really has no place outside of WWII. The ethical ambiguity that comes with other adversaries and other wars doesn't mesh particularly well with the rah-rah adventure tone of these films. It's hard to be asked to think about death and systemic racism and our government's moral compromise and then, like, immediately laugh and cheer for a big chase scene with a lot of wisecracks. And with the Voller stuff, you can't even argue it was necessary to make sure the audience despised him, because he's, y'know, a Nazi. We can just assume he's eminently despicable.
There's a reason Spielberg didn't introduce the Nazi Colonel Dietrich (Wolf Kohler) in Raiders via a scene where he surveys Auschwitz. These are meant to be light adventure films. Stark realism does not fit Indy as well as a fedora.
PART III - INDY'S MOTIVATION
For most of the movie, it's not entirely clear what Indy wants.
He gets sucked into the adventure when Helena steals half of the titular MacGuffin - which she does just as the Nazis are showing up to do the same thing. During the kerfuffle, some innocent people get killed by the Nazis, and Indy is framed for it. And so he decides that he has to find Helena and retrieve the MacGuffin.
Why? We see that Indy had the MacGuffin tucked away in a storage area - it doesn't seem like anyone else even knew it was there, let alone misses it now that it's gone. No one ever says Indy has been accused of theft. I don't know what retrieving the MacGuffin would do to prove his innocence.
Maybe Indy wants it back because he's aware of its power?
Well, no, that's not it - for most of the movie he doesn't even believe it has power.
Yet Indy says, repeatedly, "I just want the Dial back!"
In Last Crusade, it's worth noting, Indy isn't initially looking for the Holy Grail - he's looking for his father, Henry (Sean Connery), who has gone missing while looking for the Holy Grail. And because the Nazis want the Holy Grail, and because Henry does believe the Holy Grail has supernatural abilities, after Indy rescues him, HENRY is the one who insists that the quest must continue. If it were up to Indy, they'd get on the first plane back home.
Something like that really could have worked here. We'd understand if Indy followed Helena out of concern for her well-being ("My god-daughter has fallen into a life of crime and is being hunted by Nazis!") and things steamrolled from there. It would have given Indy an emotional connection to what was happening, too.
Instead, Indy is just kind there for unclear reasons.
PART IV - THE PROLOGUE
At 144 minutes, Dial of Destiny is definitely wayyyy too long (the second-longest movie in the franchise is Last Crusade, at 127 minutes; even Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was a mere 122 minutes). And there are multiple, and very clear, trims that could have been made here.
For starters, the entire prologue - which is twenty minutes! - can come out. Not sanded down. Not finessed. Just, WOOMPF!, chopped out of the story entirely.
What purpose does this prologue serve?
Is it necessary to introduce Voller? Not really. It's clear that this is the character's first encounter with Indy, and we 1,000% do not need to see that encounter.
One of the more brilliant conceits George Lucas and Steven Spielberg drew from the serials by which they were inspired was the idea that you could, and in fact often did, miss an episode, and still be able to more or less catch-up with the story regardless. All of the Indiana Jones movies commence in media res. Cinema has the capability of being the most efficient form of storytelling, and that efficiency really works in the favor of action/adventure movies, which depend on kineticism to generate excitement.
In Raiders of the Lost Ark, we don't know how Indy and Belloq (Paul Freeman) initially crossed paths and became adversaries, because we don't need to - we completely understand their relationship from their first moment together on screen.
Here's Belloq's introduction in Lawrence Kasdan's screenplay:
So introducing Mads doesn't justify the prologue.
But maybe the prologue is necessary to introduce Indy's new sidekick, Basil Shaw (Toby Jones)?
Again, no, it isn't. Basil shows up here and in one other brief (yet equally extraneous) flashback, and all we really learn about his relationship with Indy is that it's a good one. His primary function is actually to connect Indy to Helena, an entirely different new character, who is also Basil's daughter. In Raiders terms, then, Basil is Abner Ravenwood, and Helena is Marion (although she is not, mercifully, a love interest). And the thing about Abner Ravenwood is, WE NEVER ACTUALLY MEET HIM. He's referred to a few times in expository dialogue, but never shows up on screen. We simply don't need to see Indy's relationship with Basil to understand Indy's relationship with Helena (and even if we did, they could have easily said she was the daughter of Denholm Elliot's character, Dr. Marcus Brody, who we've already met in two other movies).
Maybe the prologue contains valuable information about the MacGuffin, though? Except it doesn't, really - we learn nothing particularly important here that isn't reiterated in later expositional scenes - and again, at least two, and arguably three, of the other Indy movies demonstrate that the MacGuffin doesn't need to be introduced right away (There's no mention of the Lost Ark or the magic rock things during the opening action sequences of Raiders and Temple of Doom; we get a quick look at Indy's father's diary at the start of Last Crusade, although that barely counts as a proper introduction for the tchotchke around which the movie centers).
Of course, all of these criticisms also apply to the prologue from Last Crusade... but then, the one in Last Crusade is eight minutes shorter and a billion times more entertaining.
So I ask again: What purpose does this prologue serve?
I'm just speculating here, but I think what happened is that someone pointed out a) they could lure audiences with the promise of a digitally de-aged Harrison Ford, and b) opening the movie with drunk, sad Indy probably wasn't a good idea. So we've got this twenty minute sequence purely for the sake of having a few shots of young Indy in the trailer, and to offset the misguided nature of the movie's very set-up.
Seems like time and money well-spent, right?
(And by the way, there's been a lot of talk in reviews of how the digital de-aging in this movie is "good." But it's not. It's good in those few trailer shots because they knew those shots were gonna be in the trailer and clearly put extra effort into them as a consequence. The rest of the digital de-aging isn't awful, but it does make both Ford and Mikkelsen, who is also made to look younger, appear to have shiny rubber skin. Additionally, they did nothing to alter Ford's voice, so every time Indy speaks, he noticeably sounds like an old man. Maybe one day this effect won't be distracting, but we ain't there yet.)
PART V - THE ACTION
Actually, I take it back. The prologue does serve one other important purpose: It establishes that we are firmly in Shia Laboeuf-swinging-through-the-jungle-with-digital-monkeys territory.
At the risk of sounding like an old man screaming at the clouds: One of the biggest problems with CGI is that it robs filmmakers of the necessity to be clever and stunt performers of the opportunity to really show their stuff. A lot of time, thought, and work went into figuring out things like how to safely put Harrison Ford face-to-face with a snake or in a tunnel full of rats, how to cut a shaky old bridge in half and convincingly make it appear as though people, and not just lifeless dummies, are falling to their death, or how to make a villain rapidly age after drinking from the wrong chalice. But here, when Indy encounters bugs, the bugs are patently fake (which invites very unflattering comparisons to much better sequences from both Temple of Doom and Last Crusade). Every single big set piece has the gloss of a PS5 cutscene.
Exacerbating this video game-level weightlessness further is that the violence is without stakes: Just during the prologue, Indy magically and without explanation survives a bomb explosion, and he gets shot in the hand but seems only mildly hurt or annoyed, and Voller, while hanging off the side of a speeding locomotive, gets whacked in the face by a post with force sufficient to throw him from the train, but he not only survives, he does so without acquiring so much as a scar.
Modern effects allow everything to move much faster, which, in theory, might make the action more exciting. But they're so weightless they end up being less exciting. Stuntman Vic Armstrong leaping from a horse onto a moving tank or actually run across the roof of a moving train in Last Crusade is a billion times more thrilling than digital Indy escaping a digital explosion by leaping from a digital train into a digital ocean, regardless of how fast the digital train is going at the time.
But the truth is, even if everything had been done practically, I'm not sure the action in this movie was ever going to be any good. Mangold is simply not the craftsman that Steven Spielberg is. Spielberg is just such an expert at making sure the audience understands the geography of a scene and setting up and paying off gags... it's always just, like, this Rube Goldberg machine of conflict, an ever-growing snowball of terrible things happening to Indy. Take, for example, the famous airfield fight in Raiders: Indy has to fight the giant dude, but the airplane pilot is gonna shoot Indy, so Marion (Karen Allen) shoots the airplane pilot, but he falls forwards and starts the engine going, so Marion jumps into the cockpit to turn the plane off, but in doing so the canopy gets knocked down and Marion gets locked in, and now Indy has to fight the giant dude and avoid getting chopped up by the propeller. And that's all filmed in bright daylight, with the fist fight portrayed mostly in wide and medium shots and each edit applied at a reasonable pace, so we always understand where everyone is in relation to everyone and everything else.
Mangold really only ever gives us fleeting moments of that Spielbergian cleverness, and often seems to kind of do things "just because." For example, there's a sequence where Indy and Helena and Antonio Banderas have to dive to the bottom of the ocean to retrieve part of the MacGuffin from a sunken ship. They see something splashing around before they dive, and Antonio Banderas warns them against getting too close to eels. He also says they need to resurface within three minutes, or they'll get the bends. And so they dive and Teddy stays back on the deck of the boat to keep time, ostensibly providing the audience with a literal ticking clock. And when his friends have been down in the water for about a minute, Teddy looks up and sees the Nazis fast approaching in their own ship.
Now, in Spielberg's hands, they would have gone down to the ship and gotten attacked by eels, delaying their return to the surface and creating a ticking tock situation. Indy would have figured out a clever way to save them, but then they'd see the Nazi boat and now they'd have a whole other obstacle to tackle before they succumb to decompression sickness.
But in Dial of Destiny, the (very obviously CGI) eels attack, and Indy just kinda flails around a bunch until he makes it to a pre-existing hole in the ship from which he can escape, which he does, with Helena's aid. The issue of the ticking clock is basically dropped. They see the Nazi boat up top, but they go back up anyway, which I realize is what they'd have to do in real life, but nobody comes to an Indiana Jones movie looking for real life. It's like Mangold understood that they can't just go down to the sunken ship and retrieve the thing and reascend without conflict, but he couldn't figure out how to set up all those dominoes to fall in just the right way at just the right time, and so he just kinda, like, ended the scene.
Just as bad, most of his action is filmed in close-up and edited into oblivion and not-infrequently takes place in the dark, further obfuscating our ability to see what's happening. Consequently, most of the "exciting" parts come out as just a dull, overlong mush of stuff happening.
Naturally, the sloppy action would be less troublesome in a movie with some emotional stakes - but Dial of Destiny doesn't have those, either, because they completely botched...
PART VI - THE RELATIONSHIP WITH HELENA
I quite liked Helena's introduction. Not so much the stuff in the lecture hall where she's the only one who can answer Indy's questions - that's a cliché moment we've seen in movies about a billion times now - but when she goes to see Indy at the bar after. Helena, deliberately, has a lot in common with a young Indiana Jones: She basically raised herself, and her interest in archaeology has mostly to do with fame and money and less to do with academia and a desire to preserve history. Mangold is surprisingly self-restrained here, too - he doesn't beat us over the head with the parallels between young Indy and Helena, he just allows us to observe them. There's a moment where Indy asks Helena why she'd want to "chase the thing that drove your father crazy," and Helena replies, "Wouldn't you?" And we, of course, know that Indy did, in fact, do this very thing. But because Helena says "Wouldn't you?" and not "Didn't you?", it doesn't feel overbearingly dumb.
But then the relationship never actually goes anywhere.
As is always the case with Indy and his partners, he and Helena do not really get along for most of the movie. The difference with Dial of Destiny is, there's never a moment when you feel the vibe between them start to turn - they just kinda decide they care about one another after all. We see Indy and Marion gradually fall back in love over the course of Raiders, or Indy and Willie gradually fall in lust over the course of Temple of Doom. Maybe even more importantly, we experience the maddening ups and downs of Indy and his dad's relationship in Last Crusade, where they clearly love each other so much that they just cannot help but drive one another nuts.
There's always a scene in these movies that's really cements the change in the relationship, too: Indy and Marion's whole "Where does it not hurt?" thing on the boat, Indy bringing Willie an apple to eat after she's too disgusted to have dinner at the palace, both Indy's reaction to his father’s cleverly-improvised method of killing Nazis and then Indy's father believing his son has died, etc.
There's really none of that here. They're constantly bickering, and it's made clear, on multiple occasions, that Helena understandably holds a grudge against Indy because he never visited her after her dad died, even though he's her godfather. And then, at the end, for no discernible reason other than it's a movie and she's one of the good guys, Helena just decides she cares about Indy so much she has to risk her life to save his.
They needed a scene where Indy implicitly or explicitly apologizes to Helena for abandoning her (which would have worked well thematically, given what ends up happening with Marion - we'll circle back to that later), or Helena realizes that for some reason she was wrong to be mad at Indy, or, I dunno, something to explain Helena's change of heart. Not just for logistical reasons (i.e., to get Helena to the end of the story) - but because it would make the whole relationship feel that much more emotional, and we'd give a shit about what's happening at the end.
It's really too bad, because Waller-Bridge is truly one of the movie's few bright spots, and Helena - brilliant, cheeky, brave, cynical, and horny - might be the only decent supporting character in this thing.
PART VII - THE SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
I'll be honest - I'm having a hard time identifying what went wrong here. What makes Teddy so much less memorable than Short Round? Why is Boyd Holbrook's character so much less memorable than previous Indy movie right-hand stooges like Dietrich and General Vogel?
I don't think it's technically the writing. Like, okay, so Holbrook's character isn't well-developed, but then, neither were Dietrich or Vogel. And any adjective I could use to describe Short Round also applies to Teddy.
I really think it largely comes down to not-awesome casting choices. Holbrook, for example, is the definition of "generic handsome white dude," which immediately makes him less engaging than, say, Ronald Lacey as the perpetually-sweaty and sadistically-giddy Toht in Raiders.
Regardless of the reasons, I can say "Remember the big dudes Indy fights in Raiders and Temple of Doom?", and everyone immediately knows who I'm talking about. But I'm pretty sure that six weeks from now no one will even remember that Boyd Holbrook is in Dial of Destiny.
PART VIII - MISSING PAY-OFFS
There are a bunch of instances in this movie where they seem to be setting up something very particular, only then they just drop it. Like, there's this one Nazi who is just MASSIVE, and you spend the whole movie thinking Indy is gonna have to fight him and will be totally screwed, because that's what happens in all of these movies. But instead, Teddy just locks the guy to an underwater grate and leaves him to drown. It wouldn't seem weird if it were presented as some kind deliberate subversion of the expectation that Indy and the giant will eventually do battle, because that would still be a payoff of sorts. But no. Little kid drowns giant huge man. The end.
More noticeable is the fact that the MacGuffin in this movie, Archimedes' Antikythera, is supposed to allow for time travel, and they give Indy a whole scene where he expresses the desire to go back in time and save Mutt... and then they never make that desire a part of the conflict. Yeah, in, like, the last two seconds of the big finale, Helena realizes that the MacGuffin can only bring them to one very specific point in time, not anywhere on the timeline. But prior to that, Indy is never tempted to use it for himself. He's more tempted by the Holy Grail in Last Crusade than he ever is by the Antikythera in Dial of Destiny. It's just... odd.
PART IX - HAZY DETAILS
Movies need to work on an emotional level first and a logic level second. That's why it's okay for some of the details to seem a little wonky (especially in a fantastical adventure story like this one). If the story is working and you're engaged, you either won't notice the little inconsistencies until after the movie is over, and when you do notice them, you won't care.
But in a bad movie, when you're bored out of your non-crystal skull, you have a lot of time to notice and think about all the things that don't make sense. And there's a lot of them here.
To wit:
Every frame of this movie, including both flashbacks, takes place after Raiders, Temple of Doom, and Last Crusade. Indy has, by this point in his life, come into contact with a gold box full of God's wrath, magic stones that allow you to pull a man's still-beating heart from his chest, and a chalice guarded by a thousand-year-old knight that can instantly heal bullet wounds. Yet Indy does not initially believe that the MacGuffin could have any actual supernatural powers.
Speaking of Indy being an idiot: Helena attends one of his lectures and, in the process, demonstrated knowledge of the MacGuffin. And yet, in the very next scene, they're having a drink at a bar, and when she tells Indy she's looking for the MacGuffin, he says, "What do you know about that?" And that's not even taking into account that HER FATHER WAS A EXPERT REGARDING THE MACGUFFIN. I know Indy has suffered a lot of head injuries in his time, but Jesus Harold Christ, has he turned into the dude from Memento or something?
When we first meet Voller, in 1945, he's helping the Nazis locate an entirely different MacGuffin, the Lance of Longinus - an object he knows sufficiently well to identify a fake just by touching it for a few seconds. So he's another Belloq, right? An evil archaeologist? Except, no, he isn't, because the U.S. recruits him to help get to the moon. So I guess he's a physicist? That being the case... how the hell did he know so much about the Lance of Longinus? What would you say you DO here?
When Indy and Helena find Archimedes' tomb, the dead mathematician's casket has engravings of dragons with propellers, and he's wearing a wristwatch, which would not be invented for another couple of thousand years. Indy and Helena thus deduce that Archimedes' dial worked, and that he at some point visited the future. But then later, Indy assumes Archimedes couldn't have known about continental drift because it hadn't been observed in his time. Indy's assumption seems to be that Archimedes visited the future, got a watch, and did nothing else. Which seems like a weird assumption to make.
Voller believes the fissure in time will take them from 1969 to 1939. It actually takes them from 1969 to 212 B.C.E. I understand that continental drift is meant to be responsible for the error, but I don't understand why it's 212 B.C.E. and not another year ending in a nine, like 219 B.C.E. I mean, I understand it insofar as 212 is when the Siege of Syracuse happened, but I don't understand it as a mathematical error.
During the big finale, when they're flying over the Siege of Syracuse, Indy and Helena meet Archimedes and realize that a) he got the wristwatch from Voller's dead body, and b) the propellers on his tomb were their propellers. In case we don't understand that this is some kind of closed loop, Archimedes even tells them, "You were always going to meet me." Despite this, when Indy wants to stay behind, Helena says he can't stay because he'll change all of history. At first I thought this was just a B.S. argument she was using to get him to come with her, but then she says it again after they return to the modern day. Like. Huh?
There's a CIA guy on crutches who disappears from the movie so quickly I'm not sure why he's even included. Or why he's on crutches, come to think of it.
When we first re-meet Voller in 1969, he's working with the CIA to find the MacGuffin, and he has these two henchmen who, it's made very clear, are not in the CIA. And yet, they're allowed to tag along with the CIA and when they kill innocent people the CIA is just like, "Hey, that's not nice!" Who are these guys, and why are they given free reign?
Everyone acts like everything is okay at the end even though Indy is still wanted for murder and they have not only killed the real culprits but left their bodies in the distant past.
PART X - SALLAH
Someone decided that at least one other well-known supporting character from the original Spielberg movies had to show up here besides Indy. There are three possible reasons for this decision:
Someone on the creative team thought that as Indy reckoned with his past, it was important he actually cross paths with someone from that past, even though, theoretically, that's the whole reason Helena is in the story.
Someone on the creative team just wasn't very creative.
An executive at Disney recognized that the marketing for this movie was going to be highly dependent on nostalgia.
I will not speculate as to which of these was the actual culprit.
ANYWAY, once this decision was made, the people making the movie ran head first into a brick wall of a problem: There's almost no well-known supporting characters from the original Spielberg movies to bring back. Canonically, the villains are all dead, so they're out. Sean Connery and Denholm Elliot are actually dead, so that won't work. Mangold's misguided take on the story requires that Indy have no romantic partner - so Marion, who he wed at the end of Crystal Skull, is out, as is Willie Scott. That basically left the possibility of Ke Huy Quan returning as Short Round or John Rhys-Davies returning as Sallah.
They went with Sallah. Why? If I were to make a cynical wager, it's because Temple of Doom isn't exactly the most beloved of the original trilogy, and Ke Huy Quan doesn't look like Short Round anymore because it's been forty years since that movie was made, and of course no one knew that the dude was moments away from winning an Oscar. John Rhys-Davies doesn't really look like Sallah anymore, either, but he still sounds more or less like Sallah, and everyone knows his voice 'cause he was two different characters in Lord of the Rings. And yeah, Sallah was an Egyptian played by a Welsh guy, but no one has ever really made a big stink about that, so whatever.
So Sallah gets shoehorned in.
After Indy gets framed for murdering two of his colleagues, he's on the street and his sees his face on a news report about about the cops looking for him. Some guys notices it's him and starts screaming for the cops, and then Sallah steps out of nowhere and clocks the guy and he and Indy make their escape. They go back to Sallah's pad, and we learn that Indy helped Sallah and his family immigrate to the U.S. after the war. Sallah makes his grandkids show off their knowledge of American history and tells Indy that "they understand what it is to be American and Egyptian," which is purely for the benefit of audience members with staunch anti-immigrant leanings (there's just no logical reason for Sallah to say such a thing to Indy, especially in 1969).
In Egypt, Sallah was an archeological excavator, called "the best digger in Egypt" by Indy; he's introduced first in Raiders because he knows the local area and he knows what Belloq and his own crew are up to. He had a beautiful home with a gorgeous view of Cairo, which he called "paradise on Earth."
In New York, Sallah a cab driver who lives in a not-terrific-looking apartment, but he doesn't seem to sad about it, likely because they can't have TWO sad old men in the movie.
In any case, although he has not lived in Cairo for many decades, Sallah proves to be a helpful source of knowledge regarding the local underworld in... Tangier.
Little known fact: Tangier is not Cairo. Tangier and Cairo are actually different cities in different countries in different parts of Africa. They are separated by roughly three-thousand miles. So this is like asking a guy in London about things currently happening in Tokyo because he grew up in Hong Kong.
ANYWAY, Sallah gives Indy a ride to the airport, where he presents Indy with his fedora and whip, which he says he got from Indy's apartment. So Indy is wanted for murder, and his face is all over the news, but Sallah has no trouble getting into his home, and Indy has no trouble boarding an international flight. Did Sallah help him get a fake passport? I'd ask how Sallah did that, but I don't think Sallah did do that, 'cause he yells "GIVE 'EM HELL, INDIANA JONES!" as Indy walks inside the airport, demonstrating a complete lack of concern regarding Indy being recognized.
Then Sallah shows up again at the end because reasons.
So, yeah. This character's inclusion was clearly deeply important to the narrative of the film.
PART XI - INDY'S LOST ARC
Look. Not every protagonist needs an arc in order for the story to be successful. Some of the best (or least most famous) action and adventure films ever made include main characters who do not change as people in any profound way between the first and last frame of the film: North by Northwest, the vast majority of James Bond movies, Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (the original, with Walter Matthau, not the shit remake with Denzel), Death Wishes two through five, most of the Mad Max movies, Die Hard 2, Under Siege, Predator, Speed, Ford's own Air Force One, Dredd... the list goes on and on.
In fact, the first two of Indy's arcs in the original trio of Spielberg flicks are both varying degrees of non-existent (in Raiders he goes from being a cynic to being a believer, in Temple of Doom he goes from being completely mercenary to being at least somewhat altruistic, and in Last Crusade, most significantly, he repairs his relationship with his dad). I don't remember him having an arc in Crystal Skull beyond a superficial one (i.e., he gets married at the end of the movie).
The lead characters in these movies don't need to change much (if at all) because the allure of action movies is generally not deep character work and probing insight into the human condition. The protagonist needs to be a conduit to adventure, and that's it, 'cause the spectacle is the true draw.
But all these characters do get something Indy doesn't get in Dial of Destiny, and that something, I would argue, you absolutely do need to include in your action movie: Agency. And I don't just mean CAA.
Like I said, throughout the movie, Indy is basically a depressed asshole who has given up on life. So, as I mentioned, when he finds himself at the Siege of Syracuse, he's happy to die on a beach a couple of thousand years before his own time, even if Helena isn't.
Now, the way this should go, really, is that Helena tells Indy she wants him to come home, and it's either explicitly or implicitly clear that she means she loves him (not in a romantic way, obvi) and doesn't wanna lose him. And Indy now has something to live for - his god-daughter! - so he agrees to go back (if you wanna see this same dynamic play out but in a way that's actually dramatically satisfying, check out how they handle Rocky in the first Creed).
But in this movie, Helena just knocks Indy out cold and drags his cranky old ass back to 1969.
Indy, in other words, has not made a choice to change as a result of things he experienced during the course of the story - in fact, he hasn't changed! When he wakes up in the present, he chastises Helena for bringing him back! When she tells him, "You're meant to be here, Indy," he asks, "For who?"
Indy hasn't learned a goddamn thing.
This would be a real problem even if it didn't completely screw up the last scene in the film.
But it does.
PART XII - THE END
Partway through the movie, when we learn about Mutt's death, we also learn that said death is responsible for Indy's divorce from Marion. Marion, Indy tells us, "Found no end to her grief," and he was "helpless to console her." That's the only time they ever discuss the matter.
Now, maybe I'm nuts, but my takeaway from that was NOT that Indy in some way withdrew or "failed to show up," proverbially speaking. All I got from Indy's speech was that Marion was totally wrecked by their son's death and he couldn't help her.
Okay. So. Cut ahead to the end of the movie. Helena tells Indy that he's meant to be here, and he asks, "For who?", and in walks Marion (with Teddy).
"What are you doing here?" Indy asks Marion.
And Marion responds: "Someone told me you were back. Are you back, Indy?"
Well, first of all, no, Indy is not back. That line is obviously meant to be kinda literal (i.e., Indy is back from the past) but mostly figurative (i.e., Indy is back from the dark place at which we found him when the movie began)... but as we've just established, Indy didn't decide to come home, Helena dragged him. Nothing about what has happened suggests the classic Indy is "back."
Second of all, Marion's line makes no sense, because it's never been clear that Indy in any way abandoned her. He didn't say some version of "Marion found no end to her grief, and I withdrew, because I didn't know how to handle it." He says he was "helpless" to end her grief. He makes it sound like if anyone need to come "back," it was her.
Thematically, it would actually make a lot of sense if Indy had abandoned Marion. Because, remember, Helena also feels abandoned by him! If Indy had saved Helena at the end instead of it happening the other way around, and then went back to Marion to make good... if the whole movie ended up being a redemption story... that might have made some sense! It's just that is not what they did here.
Fortunately for Indy, he never has to answer Marion's question, because in walks Sallah and his grandkids. Helena suggests they go for ice cream, so she, Teddy, Sallah, and the children beg off, leaving the old lovers alone.
Marion turns back to Indy and comments on his gunshot wound. "Does it hurt?"
"Everything hurts," he says, repeating his line from the boat scene in Raiders. The Indy/Marion love theme starts to play.
We know where this is going: Marion is going to ask Indy where it doesn't hurt, and he's going to tell her places on his body it doesn't hurt, and she's going to kiss those places, the last of which, naturally, will be Indy's lips. They're gonna recreate the boat scene wholesale!
But wait... that doesn't make any sense if Marion needed Indy to come "back." The kisser is the one apologizing (it happens in Raiders after Marion accidentally hits an already-injured Indy the face with a mirror) the one being kissed is receiving the apology. In other words, in the logic of the film, Marion can't kiss Indy first.
So instead of Marion asking Indy where it doesn't hurt, she says, "I know what that's like." And then he asks her where it doesn't hurt, and they do the whole spiel. It's a completely nonsensical and unearned emotional beat.
Then there's a few more unimportant shots before the credits roll, because you can't end a big adventure movie with two geriatrics making out in a kitchen (CUE THE JOHN WILLIAMS THEME!).
But you may have missed those shots when you rolled your eyes straight out of their sockets.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny isn't the worst movie ever made; it's not even the worst movie I've seen so far this summer! But now there's another entry in a big franchise everyone use love which we shall forevermore have to pretend never happened, and that's a shame.
I'd think of a better concluding paragraph, but I've overstayed my welcome, and unlike Indiana Jones, I know it.