155 min | PG-13 | June 30, 2023 | Walt Disney Pictures
Indiana Jones is old, divorced, and one day from retirement when his goddaughter drags him after a dial that bends time. The Nazis chasing it now work for NASA. The send-off is heartfelt, but a good reason for it never arrives.
The film opens in 1944 aboard a Nazi train where a de-aged Indiana Jones races to recover a stolen artifact. Then it jumps to 1969 and the day of the moon landing. Indy is old, divorced, and one lecture away from retiring as a professor nobody listens to anymore. The plot hangs on the Antikythera, a dial built by Archimedes that supposedly locates fissures in time. The real subject is obsolescence. This is a film about a hero the world has already buried.
Harrison Ford plays Indiana Jones as a man hollowed out by grief and routine. He carries the weariness in his shoulders and lets the old swagger surface only when the fists start swinging. Phoebe Waller-Bridge plays Helena Shaw, his goddaughter, as a fast-talking grifter who sees the dial as a payday and Indy as a means to it. Mads Mikkelsen plays Dr. Voller, a Nazi physicist the Americans recruited for the space program, with a still and clinical menace. Toby Jones plays Basil Shaw, Helena’s father, whose obsession with the artifact curdles into madness. Karen Allen returns as Marion for a closing scene that the film treats as its emotional anchor.
James Mangold directs his first Indiana Jones film after Steven Spielberg stepped away. The script credited to Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, David Koepp, and Mangold strings set pieces across New York, Tangier, and the Aegean. The de-aging in the 1944 prologue plasters a young face onto Ford that the eyes never animate from inside. John Williams scores the film with the familiar themes and a new motif for Helena that gives her more dimension than the writing does. The Tangier tuk-tuk chase cuts fast and constant and rarely holds a shot long enough to register geography. The production design recreates 1969 with hippie protests and ticker tape, then strands the hero in the middle of a decade that has no use for him.
The film works best when it sits with Ford and lets him play an old man out of his own time. It works worst when it remembers it is a blockbuster and reaches for spectacle the franchise perfected decades ago. The third act takes a swing so strange and literal that it either delights or alienates, with no middle ground. Mangold builds the climax around a single question, which is whether Indy belongs in his present at all. The answer the film reaches is sentimental and genuinely earned in the same breath. This is a respectful farewell that never quite finds a reason to exist beyond the goodbye.