Charlotte, I just have to say: putting aside my own history with the Indiana Jones films — especially Dial of Destiny — you’ve articulated everything I believe about this film, but with far more eloquence and thoughtfulness than I ever could. I truly love this piece. It deserves to be shared with anyone who’s forgotten the power of a great heroic cinematic character. You see through cinema and its influences with a depth that surpasses any famous film historian or critic I’ve read.
And now, after reading this, I think I’m ready to revisit Dial of Destiny — and perhaps, in doing so, it will help me navigate my own grief. My father, who introduced me to cinema through this character, has always been, in a strange and private way, my symbol of heroism. Maybe this is how I finally allow myself, as I know I should, to accept that he’s truly gone.
Thank you for reminding me — and all of us — why these stories still matter.
Wowzers! Thank you so much for this compliment, Enrico! That means a hell of a lot to me coming from you; deeply, deeply happy that you enjoyed this piece, and that it moved you to revisit Dial of Destiny on such personal grounds. I hope that viewing experience is everything you hope for and more ❤️
"Why not let them cook up a Young Indiana Jones movie so as to build upon the thematic heft of this world? How does a boy grow into a legendary Nazi-puncher?"
They did that quite well in the "Young Indiana Jones Chronicles" TV show from many years back. That could be a starting point..
Less related to heroism in a modern vs post-modern world, but I’ve always thought there’s much more going on in this screenplay than Mangold and the Butterworths received credit for.
There’s the metatextual element of a legacy sequel about a time travel device that doesn’t work the way you expect it to, and when it does take us back in time it’s made clear that we (nor Indy) can stay there.
Then there’s also the simple idea (which you dug much deeper on) of making a movie in the 2020s about bringing back an aging hero from the greatest generation to fight Nazis who have embedded themselves inside our government…and let’s not forget Boyd Holbrook admirably standing in as the stooge following along as if he got connected to Voller via the 1969 equivalent of an internet message board.
Love this, Shawn; thank you for sharing! To your point about Indy not being able to stay in the past, it's so narratively pivotal that Helena is the one to drag him out of it while saying that she needs him. Indy's heroism can no longer insist upon itself, and so relies on the precedence of his younger allies who are more native to this new era, and yet time and again do we see that his heroism is one of, if not the most crucial piece of the whole puzzle; a heroism that well and truly stands for something real and aspirational, which Helena's postmodern sheen prevents her from doing.
The movie starts by asking us to accept an Indiana Jones who's been crushed into utter defeat — a drunk, forgotten and abandoned — which already takes us out of the wondrous mythical world that Lucas and Spielberg created and maintained. (Nobody wants to see Indy in any kind of "real world.")
Then he meets a person who's not only utterly charmless and unappealing in that context — meaning, a screen presence who functions just fine in a 21st Century sardonic comedy setting but shouldn't be anywhere near swashbuckling adventure; who is idiomatically a modern conception, totally devoid of the romantic appeal and strength of Marion or Elsa or even Willie (not to mention Indy's male companions from Sala to Short Round to even Mutt) — and blatantly positions the story around the idea that she has the qualities that Indy lacks and is positioned to "take over" from him, since he's so spent and defeated. (The original endings where she literally took his hat and presumably continued as the leader of a new franchise was mercifully removed, but the buildup to this is still there in the bulk of the movie.)
It's no longer Indiana Jones; it's not the same universe or the same character, and it's consequently a dreary, depressing chore.
The "wondrous, mythical world" you mention is a beautiful sentiment, but unhelpful for understanding what the mythos of Indiana Jones deals with in objective sense. If we use Raiders as our jumping point in tandem with the time periods of many of these films, we can conclude the likes of anti-Nazism (a running theme thanks to Crusade) and a retroactive yearning for adventure and possibility as two key elements or ideas in an Indiana Jones movie. Since DoD begins with a classic Indiana Jones romp in Nazi Germany, pits Indy against Nazis throughout the film, and depicts Indy in the twilight of his life - perhaps now yearning for the same adventure and possibility of his youth that audiences yearned for on account of the time periods that those films took place in - DoD is certainly in line with the Indiana Jones mythos. Magic realism, meanwhile, is maintained through the time fissures in the sky.
It's fine if you find Helena charmless or unappealing, but that is, again, unhelpful for understanding how she works in this specific story. It's true that she has qualities that Indy lacks, but Indy also has qualities that she lacks, and this dance of modern and postmodern sensibilities (Indy being modern, Helena being postmodern) directly plays into how much Indy still has to give, even if the world is inevitably changing and therefore requires Indy to evolve in some way. Helena challenges him to do that, and she depends on him quite a bit throughout this film.
It is totally, 100% fine if you don't like Dial of Destiny, but you're predicating its worth and its value as an Indiana Jones story based on what you want to see from it, rather than what the film, or Indiana Jones more broadly, actually is. And since it's clearly not appealing to your idea of IJ specifically, you seem to have adopted this defeatist attitude about the whole film that disregards a lot of what actually happens in it.
At that point, it's just aimless, unconstructive cynicism that's useless to our growth as film watchers, and, in my heart of honest hearts, I'm not really sure what you're gaining from indulging that sort of thing.
I'll go further — nobody who's onscreen appeal is based around a confessional mode, whether by literally breaking the fourth wall (as in Fleabag) or through "asides" or takes to the audience (like Michael J. Fox or Bruce Willis in their 80s blockbusters) can function properly in an unreconstructed capital-A adventure context like Indy or Star Wars or James Bond. The original, satirical "Casino Royale" from the 1960s cast the then-upcoming Woody Allen as James Bond (actually "Jimmy" Bond) for precisely this reason: because it doesn't work; it doesn't fit.
John McClane can make those jokes to the audience, interrupting the flow of the action, probably only because of the unique talents and charm of Bruce Willis, whose stardom is based on his embodying a rare combination of smirking con-man and iron-jawed, squinting cowboy...and the Die Hard movies work so well because they're constructed around that particular ideosyncratic persona. (Cary Grant in "North by Northwest" is a version of the same thing, defined loosely). But Indiana Jones, like James Bond, or Odysseus, can't work this way: Indy doesn't interrupt himself with self-doubts; he's not an "everyman" and cannot be one.
---
Having read what you just wrote, I would respectfully add that I accept your definitions and your analysis but I just don't accept that a Postmodern approach can coexist with Indiana Jones (for reasons that I've hopefully made clear in what I've already written). And, look, it's not just me: the movie was a flop — it was utterly rejected both by critics and by Indy fans old and new. I don't know whether Waller-Bridge was the fatal misstep; it might have been James Mangold (a dreary, journeyman director devoid of vision and certaintly nowhere near Spielberg in terms of translating pure joie de vivre into cinema). But the Indy movies just don't function as a framing device for postmodern, self-doubting, sardonic (or "ironic") protagonists, any more than Superman comics (or Wonder Woman comics, in which this approach was also tried and failed).
Appreciate the expansion + the mention of screen personas here (I find them fascinating as a dramaturgical tool), but you're still insisting upon these subjectivities and defining them with unnecessary limitation. The only way we wouldn't be able to observe Phoebe beyond her Fleabag persona is if we refuse to observe that. Per your note on the casting of Woody Allen in the satirical 1960s Casino Royale because he doesn't work as James Bond, why not instead consider that they cast him because he DOES work in the sense of leveraging the satirical essence of that film? Why frame it with skepticism rather than creative possibility?
You identify Bruce Willis' screen persona as key to the characterization of John McClane, but Die Hard was the film that established that persona in the first place. Up until that point, Willis mainly trafficked in rom-coms, and so there couldn't have been any precedence to build around this persona you mention, because it didn't exist yet. You willingly understand/accept/canonize what is objectively an evolved form of Willis' persona. Why deny that to Waller-Bridge? On the flipside, do you hold Willis' persona against him in films like Moonrise Kingdom? If so, why? What's the point?
Same with Indiana Jones; you're insisting upon a nebulous limitation ("can't have self-doubt) and, by extension, skepticism and cynicism towards anything that moves beyond that limitation (in this case, DoD, which adheres very robustly to classic IJ themes and attitudes while introducing an x-factor in The Old Indy Story™). It's perfectly fine if you don't accept the narrative and thematic evolution of a character or mythos, but that's all it boils down to - you don't accept it because you refuse to.
You're entitled to that, but it's ultimately just an opinion rather than actual, observational criticism; a craft whose value is directly derived from the possibility with which it can equip the readers to watch, read, and engage with film. That's what I build this publication around.
Whether fans and critics rejected it or not is irrelevant (70% and 87% on Rotten Tomatoes for critics and audiences respectively, btw; hardly an utter rejection); what matters is what we are individually capable of and choose to create out of it. My question is, why insist upon a defeatist rejection that has little objective foundation when you could open your mind to curiosity and possibility by way of what we can tangibly observe? If you ask me, the former sounds exhausting.
Respectfully, this subjective/objective distinction isn't going to serve us well — it's going to get us tangled in the weeds of intentionality, meaning, judging the value (in any sense) of an artistic endeavor on its own abstract terms, rather than in terms of the actual aesthetics that shape how the resulting art is evaluated, which is much more difficult.
Bruce Willis had never played a role like John McClane — he was, as you say, known for rom-coms (including the two disastrous Blake Edwards movies he'd made before Die Hard), and casting him as an action hero (who also had a comedic side) was a risk, just like casting Arnold Schwarzenegger as a robot or casting Eddie Murphy as a supremely competent homicide detective or casting Humphrey Bogart as a hero (after a series of Bowery Boys movies and other seedy fare where he was the shifty villain) were all risks. But the results don't work the way they do because we decide in the abstract to value the idea — they work because the mysterious alchemies of cinema and stardom and narrative all allow them to work.
Bruce Willis didn't build an entire career (arguably) on the shift he made in order to play John McClane, becasue it was a good idea, in the abstract, that we decide collectively to reward because we admire the thinking behind it. He built his post Die Hard career on becoming an instant superstar because he'd lit the screen on fire; because the movie was an absolute smash; one of the most imitated and respected movies of its kind ever made — it singlehandedly changed the genre, and Willis made that possible because of his chemistry on screen.
And the same thing is true of Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. It's a better fit for him than Han Solo (although Han Solo fit him beautifully), and — again, as with Willis — his superstardom followed from the increidble way he was able to occupy the role onscreen. Again, it didn't happen because we agreed as a culture to open our minds and accept something new, in the abstract; it happened because the gamble paid off and the screen caught fire.
And this just isn't something that you can will into existence. I'm saying Helena doesn't work — doesn't engage the audience — not just because of the theoretical reasons I've laid out above, but because she can't hold the big screen in the context of this kind of movie; the air goes out of the room when she's onscreen. If she were charming or appealing in a different way — if the same character as written were played by (say) young Sigourney Weaver, or by Florence Pugh, then, yes, the result would have been different. But the movie flopped because Waller-Bridge rubbed audiences the wrong way, and unfortunately movie stardom is one of the few areas of life where that kind of fickle and petty subjectivity can't be argued with.
So I guess I'm reverse engineering some of the theorizing about this lead balloon of an Indy movie from that — but her persona in the movie connects with her real-life identity...and she did reportedly work on the script and convince Mangold that Indy should be more of a burned-out husk and that Helena should outshine him, which again, is a fine idea in theory (as you say) but doesn't work out onscreen; it reveals the flaws in the underlying thinking.
We can't "decide" to like movie stars any more than we can "decide" whom to fall in love with. The fact is, yes, Die Hard was a testing ground for a new kind of Willis performance and role (as Raiders was for Harrison Ford), but the tests worked; the chain reaction was activated and movie magic occurred. I'm sorry if you think this is some kind of subjective imposition on my part, but it's not, any more than the fact that audiences (and myself) just didn't care for Helena or the story she shared with Indy, and no amount of critical logic about how it's actually a good idea if you give it a chance, is going to change that.
Charlotte, I just have to say: putting aside my own history with the Indiana Jones films — especially Dial of Destiny — you’ve articulated everything I believe about this film, but with far more eloquence and thoughtfulness than I ever could. I truly love this piece. It deserves to be shared with anyone who’s forgotten the power of a great heroic cinematic character. You see through cinema and its influences with a depth that surpasses any famous film historian or critic I’ve read.
And now, after reading this, I think I’m ready to revisit Dial of Destiny — and perhaps, in doing so, it will help me navigate my own grief. My father, who introduced me to cinema through this character, has always been, in a strange and private way, my symbol of heroism. Maybe this is how I finally allow myself, as I know I should, to accept that he’s truly gone.
Thank you for reminding me — and all of us — why these stories still matter.
Wowzers! Thank you so much for this compliment, Enrico! That means a hell of a lot to me coming from you; deeply, deeply happy that you enjoyed this piece, and that it moved you to revisit Dial of Destiny on such personal grounds. I hope that viewing experience is everything you hope for and more ❤️
"Why not let them cook up a Young Indiana Jones movie so as to build upon the thematic heft of this world? How does a boy grow into a legendary Nazi-puncher?"
They did that quite well in the "Young Indiana Jones Chronicles" TV show from many years back. That could be a starting point..
Less related to heroism in a modern vs post-modern world, but I’ve always thought there’s much more going on in this screenplay than Mangold and the Butterworths received credit for.
There’s the metatextual element of a legacy sequel about a time travel device that doesn’t work the way you expect it to, and when it does take us back in time it’s made clear that we (nor Indy) can stay there.
Then there’s also the simple idea (which you dug much deeper on) of making a movie in the 2020s about bringing back an aging hero from the greatest generation to fight Nazis who have embedded themselves inside our government…and let’s not forget Boyd Holbrook admirably standing in as the stooge following along as if he got connected to Voller via the 1969 equivalent of an internet message board.
Love this, Shawn; thank you for sharing! To your point about Indy not being able to stay in the past, it's so narratively pivotal that Helena is the one to drag him out of it while saying that she needs him. Indy's heroism can no longer insist upon itself, and so relies on the precedence of his younger allies who are more native to this new era, and yet time and again do we see that his heroism is one of, if not the most crucial piece of the whole puzzle; a heroism that well and truly stands for something real and aspirational, which Helena's postmodern sheen prevents her from doing.
She sinks the movie. That’s the real problem. It’s just an incredible, tone deaf misfire.
Okay. How so?
The movie starts by asking us to accept an Indiana Jones who's been crushed into utter defeat — a drunk, forgotten and abandoned — which already takes us out of the wondrous mythical world that Lucas and Spielberg created and maintained. (Nobody wants to see Indy in any kind of "real world.")
Then he meets a person who's not only utterly charmless and unappealing in that context — meaning, a screen presence who functions just fine in a 21st Century sardonic comedy setting but shouldn't be anywhere near swashbuckling adventure; who is idiomatically a modern conception, totally devoid of the romantic appeal and strength of Marion or Elsa or even Willie (not to mention Indy's male companions from Sala to Short Round to even Mutt) — and blatantly positions the story around the idea that she has the qualities that Indy lacks and is positioned to "take over" from him, since he's so spent and defeated. (The original endings where she literally took his hat and presumably continued as the leader of a new franchise was mercifully removed, but the buildup to this is still there in the bulk of the movie.)
It's no longer Indiana Jones; it's not the same universe or the same character, and it's consequently a dreary, depressing chore.
The "wondrous, mythical world" you mention is a beautiful sentiment, but unhelpful for understanding what the mythos of Indiana Jones deals with in objective sense. If we use Raiders as our jumping point in tandem with the time periods of many of these films, we can conclude the likes of anti-Nazism (a running theme thanks to Crusade) and a retroactive yearning for adventure and possibility as two key elements or ideas in an Indiana Jones movie. Since DoD begins with a classic Indiana Jones romp in Nazi Germany, pits Indy against Nazis throughout the film, and depicts Indy in the twilight of his life - perhaps now yearning for the same adventure and possibility of his youth that audiences yearned for on account of the time periods that those films took place in - DoD is certainly in line with the Indiana Jones mythos. Magic realism, meanwhile, is maintained through the time fissures in the sky.
It's fine if you find Helena charmless or unappealing, but that is, again, unhelpful for understanding how she works in this specific story. It's true that she has qualities that Indy lacks, but Indy also has qualities that she lacks, and this dance of modern and postmodern sensibilities (Indy being modern, Helena being postmodern) directly plays into how much Indy still has to give, even if the world is inevitably changing and therefore requires Indy to evolve in some way. Helena challenges him to do that, and she depends on him quite a bit throughout this film.
It is totally, 100% fine if you don't like Dial of Destiny, but you're predicating its worth and its value as an Indiana Jones story based on what you want to see from it, rather than what the film, or Indiana Jones more broadly, actually is. And since it's clearly not appealing to your idea of IJ specifically, you seem to have adopted this defeatist attitude about the whole film that disregards a lot of what actually happens in it.
At that point, it's just aimless, unconstructive cynicism that's useless to our growth as film watchers, and, in my heart of honest hearts, I'm not really sure what you're gaining from indulging that sort of thing.
Thanks for responding. I was writing:
I'll go further — nobody who's onscreen appeal is based around a confessional mode, whether by literally breaking the fourth wall (as in Fleabag) or through "asides" or takes to the audience (like Michael J. Fox or Bruce Willis in their 80s blockbusters) can function properly in an unreconstructed capital-A adventure context like Indy or Star Wars or James Bond. The original, satirical "Casino Royale" from the 1960s cast the then-upcoming Woody Allen as James Bond (actually "Jimmy" Bond) for precisely this reason: because it doesn't work; it doesn't fit.
John McClane can make those jokes to the audience, interrupting the flow of the action, probably only because of the unique talents and charm of Bruce Willis, whose stardom is based on his embodying a rare combination of smirking con-man and iron-jawed, squinting cowboy...and the Die Hard movies work so well because they're constructed around that particular ideosyncratic persona. (Cary Grant in "North by Northwest" is a version of the same thing, defined loosely). But Indiana Jones, like James Bond, or Odysseus, can't work this way: Indy doesn't interrupt himself with self-doubts; he's not an "everyman" and cannot be one.
---
Having read what you just wrote, I would respectfully add that I accept your definitions and your analysis but I just don't accept that a Postmodern approach can coexist with Indiana Jones (for reasons that I've hopefully made clear in what I've already written). And, look, it's not just me: the movie was a flop — it was utterly rejected both by critics and by Indy fans old and new. I don't know whether Waller-Bridge was the fatal misstep; it might have been James Mangold (a dreary, journeyman director devoid of vision and certaintly nowhere near Spielberg in terms of translating pure joie de vivre into cinema). But the Indy movies just don't function as a framing device for postmodern, self-doubting, sardonic (or "ironic") protagonists, any more than Superman comics (or Wonder Woman comics, in which this approach was also tried and failed).
Appreciate the expansion + the mention of screen personas here (I find them fascinating as a dramaturgical tool), but you're still insisting upon these subjectivities and defining them with unnecessary limitation. The only way we wouldn't be able to observe Phoebe beyond her Fleabag persona is if we refuse to observe that. Per your note on the casting of Woody Allen in the satirical 1960s Casino Royale because he doesn't work as James Bond, why not instead consider that they cast him because he DOES work in the sense of leveraging the satirical essence of that film? Why frame it with skepticism rather than creative possibility?
You identify Bruce Willis' screen persona as key to the characterization of John McClane, but Die Hard was the film that established that persona in the first place. Up until that point, Willis mainly trafficked in rom-coms, and so there couldn't have been any precedence to build around this persona you mention, because it didn't exist yet. You willingly understand/accept/canonize what is objectively an evolved form of Willis' persona. Why deny that to Waller-Bridge? On the flipside, do you hold Willis' persona against him in films like Moonrise Kingdom? If so, why? What's the point?
Same with Indiana Jones; you're insisting upon a nebulous limitation ("can't have self-doubt) and, by extension, skepticism and cynicism towards anything that moves beyond that limitation (in this case, DoD, which adheres very robustly to classic IJ themes and attitudes while introducing an x-factor in The Old Indy Story™). It's perfectly fine if you don't accept the narrative and thematic evolution of a character or mythos, but that's all it boils down to - you don't accept it because you refuse to.
You're entitled to that, but it's ultimately just an opinion rather than actual, observational criticism; a craft whose value is directly derived from the possibility with which it can equip the readers to watch, read, and engage with film. That's what I build this publication around.
Whether fans and critics rejected it or not is irrelevant (70% and 87% on Rotten Tomatoes for critics and audiences respectively, btw; hardly an utter rejection); what matters is what we are individually capable of and choose to create out of it. My question is, why insist upon a defeatist rejection that has little objective foundation when you could open your mind to curiosity and possibility by way of what we can tangibly observe? If you ask me, the former sounds exhausting.
Respectfully, this subjective/objective distinction isn't going to serve us well — it's going to get us tangled in the weeds of intentionality, meaning, judging the value (in any sense) of an artistic endeavor on its own abstract terms, rather than in terms of the actual aesthetics that shape how the resulting art is evaluated, which is much more difficult.
Bruce Willis had never played a role like John McClane — he was, as you say, known for rom-coms (including the two disastrous Blake Edwards movies he'd made before Die Hard), and casting him as an action hero (who also had a comedic side) was a risk, just like casting Arnold Schwarzenegger as a robot or casting Eddie Murphy as a supremely competent homicide detective or casting Humphrey Bogart as a hero (after a series of Bowery Boys movies and other seedy fare where he was the shifty villain) were all risks. But the results don't work the way they do because we decide in the abstract to value the idea — they work because the mysterious alchemies of cinema and stardom and narrative all allow them to work.
Bruce Willis didn't build an entire career (arguably) on the shift he made in order to play John McClane, becasue it was a good idea, in the abstract, that we decide collectively to reward because we admire the thinking behind it. He built his post Die Hard career on becoming an instant superstar because he'd lit the screen on fire; because the movie was an absolute smash; one of the most imitated and respected movies of its kind ever made — it singlehandedly changed the genre, and Willis made that possible because of his chemistry on screen.
And the same thing is true of Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. It's a better fit for him than Han Solo (although Han Solo fit him beautifully), and — again, as with Willis — his superstardom followed from the increidble way he was able to occupy the role onscreen. Again, it didn't happen because we agreed as a culture to open our minds and accept something new, in the abstract; it happened because the gamble paid off and the screen caught fire.
And this just isn't something that you can will into existence. I'm saying Helena doesn't work — doesn't engage the audience — not just because of the theoretical reasons I've laid out above, but because she can't hold the big screen in the context of this kind of movie; the air goes out of the room when she's onscreen. If she were charming or appealing in a different way — if the same character as written were played by (say) young Sigourney Weaver, or by Florence Pugh, then, yes, the result would have been different. But the movie flopped because Waller-Bridge rubbed audiences the wrong way, and unfortunately movie stardom is one of the few areas of life where that kind of fickle and petty subjectivity can't be argued with.
So I guess I'm reverse engineering some of the theorizing about this lead balloon of an Indy movie from that — but her persona in the movie connects with her real-life identity...and she did reportedly work on the script and convince Mangold that Indy should be more of a burned-out husk and that Helena should outshine him, which again, is a fine idea in theory (as you say) but doesn't work out onscreen; it reveals the flaws in the underlying thinking.
We can't "decide" to like movie stars any more than we can "decide" whom to fall in love with. The fact is, yes, Die Hard was a testing ground for a new kind of Willis performance and role (as Raiders was for Harrison Ford), but the tests worked; the chain reaction was activated and movie magic occurred. I'm sorry if you think this is some kind of subjective imposition on my part, but it's not, any more than the fact that audiences (and myself) just didn't care for Helena or the story she shared with Indy, and no amount of critical logic about how it's actually a good idea if you give it a chance, is going to change that.
Thanks again for the interesting discussion.