The prospect of a new Indiana Jones movie at this late date, more than forty years after Raiders of the Lost Ark, is daunting. The series ran its natural course through the 1980s: a stellar debut followed by a sequel that expanded and complicated the original premise and then a second sequel that regressed into crowd-pleasing antics, stunt-casting, meta-humor, and ended with a satisfactory ride off into the sunset. The franchise was revived in 2008 with mixed results. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull features some terrific sequences from Steven Spielberg, who alongside all his other virtues (and shortcomings) as a filmmaker remains one of the greatest directors of action in film history, a fine hammy villain performance from Cate Blanchett, and a mostly satisfactory ending. It’s also marred by a disastrous screenplay, featuring some of the most poorly-written dialogue ever filmed by a major director. What could we expect, another 15 years down the line? Further degeneration of a once-great franchise, or perhaps a return to greatness, fully embracing the age and increasing obsolescence of its star, creators, and the whole world the series was created in homage to?

A little bit of both, as it turns out. The opening reel (an archaic term in reference to a 20 minute chunk of film, rendered nonsensical by the digitization of cinema, much like the terms “film” and “movie”) of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is dire, encapsulating in an ugly gray package all the worst trends in contemporary Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking. Star Harrison Ford is digitally de-aged with horrifyingly uncanny results and the exterior shots, and this being a sequence set on a train in an Indiana Jones movie there are a lot of exterior shots as the action moves to the top and the sides of said train, are cartoonishly incompetent. The phoniness of the images, something I’m not necessarily opposed to on principle—there are lots of ways to make a movie and digital fakery is certainly one of them—are made galling by our awareness of what has come before in the series. Raiders of the Lost Ark is, above all else, a loving tribute to the stunt performers and action filmmakers of the Hollywood studio era, when lunatics like Yakima Canutt would risk life and limb for the sake of a two-reel serial installment. Last Crusade even gave us a prologue with a similar set-up: a flashback to a younger Indiana Jones (played by River Phoenix at a time when studios and filmmakers had enough faith in their audience’s imagination to allow a character to be played by more than one actor, without the benefit of computers) for a chase sequence that takes place largely inside and on top of a moving train. An actual train, moving in the actual world. More or less. Dial of Destiny’s opening couldn’t more perfectly remind us of what we’ve lost, of the debased state of the modern blockbuster, if it tried. And maybe that’s the point.

Because the rest of the movie, once it gets going, turns out to, in fact, be about what it’s like to outlive your relevance. In 1969, Ford’s Jones is an old man, nearing retirement, divorced and mourning his son (RIP Mutt). He’s sucked into a new adventure by a daffy young woman named Helena, played by 2018 It Girl Phoebe Waller-Bridge. She’s the daughter of one of his old colleagues (Toby Jones in the prologue), obsessed with the eponymous object, a device designed by Archimedes. The device is split in two: Jones has the first half until Helena steals it. They eventually will team up to find the second half, with the help of a map which also has to be found. Opposing them is Mads Mikkelson, playing a Nazi scientist (now NASA rocket builder) similarly obsessed with the device. The film settles into the familiar rhythm: Jones travels to a new location, meets some strange people, then gets chased by them and a bunch of Nazis. 

The chases may be a matter of necessity: every action sequence in the film is something the aged Ford can perform sitting down. But they’re also for the most part fun and creative. New director James Mangold is no Spielberg of course, but he’s always been, at worst, a competent craftsman. They also have a tangibility entirely missing from the opening sequence. The supporting cast is mostly anonymous: Mikkelson’s minions are suitably if generically menacing (they’re also CIA agents, lol); Helena’s companion is a wispy-mustached teenager who is mostly OK; and Antonio Banderas shows up for a little while and has almost nothing interesting to do. So there’s really very little of note other than the plot mechanics, which lead us ruthlessly from one set-piece to another. This is of course the classic Indiana Jones structure, one borrowed from old serials, and one that earned the films and the era of high concept blockbuster they helped usher in the ire of an older generation of critics who longed for more personal, humane filmmaking. This is now the standard form for the Hollywood blockbuster: the chase, enlivened by scenes of mass destruction (usually but not necessarily of cities). The early Indiana Jones films pioneered and perfected this form: think the truck chase in Raiders, with its direct Canutt homage, or the mine cart chase in Temple of Doom, which merged cinema and theme park ride as well as anything before or since. The 21^st century Jones movies though, do not aspire to compete with that past. And Dial of Destiny suggests they simply cannot do so: everyone’s just too old to bother.

For if Dial of Destiny is about anything, it’s about letting go of the past. All of the Indiana Jones films are, in some sense, about letting go. Raiders is about the wisdom of choosing to not open the ark; Temple of Doom about artifacts as vehicles for community harmony and growth rather than Fortune and Glory; Last Crusade about finding a balance between obsessive archeological pursuit and family commitment. (Crystal Skull doesn’t really fit this scheme, because, again, Crystal Skull’s script is terrible.) Dial of Destiny finds Jones an obsolete and broken man. The adventure he’s dragged into brings him back to life, and it ultimately offers him the chance to continue that life of adventure or go back home to his broken old man world. He has the opportunity to live in the past (literally), but we know, and he knows, that one can’t ever really do that. Like it or not, we have to go on living in the present, as dull and gray and marred by crappy digital effects as it is.