3/10 In 2008, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas finally dusted off Indiana Jones after 20 years for his fourth of five appearances greenlit all the way back in 1979 with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It was not well-received. Probably the most prominent memory of the film is the way “South Park” codified audience reaction, reimagining the film as a traumatizing series of violent rape scenes with Spielberg and Lucas, both perceived to be on the downslope of their careers at this time, exploiting their old character sexually instead of just financially.

Now it’s 15 years later, Spielberg has moved on from nostalgia but kept his career in full swing and Lucas has pawned all his intellectual property off to Disney, and after immediately running Star Wars into the ground, the company has spawned more Lucasfilm filth with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and it’s the same damn movie. It’s a new director, a new production company, a new decade and a new paradigm of blockbuster filmmaking, and it’s the same movie down to so many of the worst details.

July, 1969- Elderly archaeology professor Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford and Anthony Ingruber), his adventuring days long over and now mostly ignored by his students, retires from Hunter College as the city celebrates the lunar landing, but his old enemy lurks in the windows overlooking the parade. Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), a Nazi scientist recruited to NASA under the name Dr. Schmidt whom Jones had fought personally in France in 1944, believes he has found what he was looking for all those years ago, the Dial of Destiny, a – oh, for the love of, ugh – a time travel device. Voller intends to go back in time to kill Hitler and assume command of the Third Reich himself to have another go at World War II, and Jones, with the help of – wow, we’re doing this again too, great – a surrogate child, this time goddaughter Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), race to stop him.

It’s easier to understand what’s happened here if you understand what Indiana Jones is – Spielberg may have meant him as a riff on James Bond, but it’s Star Wars. Raiders of the Lost Ark was just a slightly more mature Star Wars in a different setting. It’s a fun action movie based on the same adventure serials made by the same company, a lot of the same personnel, same special effects including a lot of the same specific sound effects and music cues from John Williams, the same Nazi bad guys and the same characters. Indiana Jones is just Han Solo on Earth in the ‘30s, and Indiana Jones movies are just serialized Han Solo smuggling adventures in that setting.

In 2023 after the Lucasfilm sale, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a Disney-era Star Wars movie. It’s the same people copying a slightly different paper with the same lack of imagination, the same artistic cowardice and the same fundamental misunderstanding of what makes the older movies great.

“There are no aliens in Indiana Jones” and “Don’t put Indy in a refrigerator” are the same two sentences as “There’s no time travel in Indiana Jones” and “Don’t deepfake Indy.” Indiana Jones is squarely a fantasy character, and ancient religious MacGuffins like the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail fit within a fantasy setting. When you take this world set 50 years in the past with all the familiar city names and historical events and try to slap science fiction elements on top of it at the end, specifically things like aliens that aren’t grounded in everyday culture, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t jive. Audiences reject it like a transplanted organ.

Also, don’t give Indy a kid. No one wants to see that, least of all Indy or the kid. Indiana Jones was conceived as an Americanized version of the James Bond fantasy, the globe-trotting action hero who’s irresistible to women, and that guy doesn’t have kids. Even when they finally gave James Bond a kid in No Time to Die, it was an infant who almost immediately stopped him from adventuring, not a young sidekick who Disney wants to continue the franchise with.

They deepfaked a young Indy during the 1944 sequence – literally, this $350-400 million movie is using a deepfake model that was trained on footage of Ford in his 40s from the first three movies – and I don’t know what they were expecting. It looks absolutely terrible, of course. Ingruber has a horrible cartoon sheen over his face that looks a lot like The Polar Express, maybe a few shades more realistic than that, but he’s surrounded by real human faces on a massive PLF screen, so it sticks out really badly. Additionally, they haven’t deepfaked the voice, so this thing that’s pretending to be 40 is speaking with Ford’s gravely 80-year-old snarl instead of his characteristically boyish voice from the movies it’s based on.

It’s unholy! That’s not a hyperbole, it harkens back to folklore about demons imitating people to try and get invited inside or make some type of bargain, always with a horrifying, obvious giveaway that reveals their contempt for humans. That is the closest analogue this type of technology has in existing culture. It is literally the purview of demons and ghosts.

Of course, the real loser here is Ingruber. This guy was the star for the first half hour of one of the most expensive movies ever made, and I don’t know what he looks like! His only major film credits are this and 2015’s Age of Adeline, where he was also a younger version of a Harrison Ford character. Is that really going to be his career? The guy who looks like Harrison Ford? I don’t even know if he’s good for that much, because I’ve never seen him without Harrison Ford’s face digitally copied and pasted over his own!

The primary selling point of this enormous gamble is nostalgia – for $350-400 million, come see a horrifying cartoon of a character you once loved! – but what you’re actually sitting down and watching is an action movie, and the action is rushed and sloppy. Andrew Buckland, Michael McCusker and Dirk Westervelt’s editing doesn’t hold continuity well enough, and the fun Indiana Jones music isn’t always playing. It feels sad watching this 80-year-old man do as many stunts as he can, especially with that series signature weirdly missing.

I’m not the first to observe that there are no more movie stars in this era, and if anyone is wondering why, Dial of Destiny is the new exhibit A. Instead of making new stars, instead of making anything new at all, Disney is betting enormous amounts of money on cartoon versions of the old ones.

Jones is even more committed to calling a Nazi a Nazi than usual in Dial of Destiny, an unfortunate but easily tracked reflection of reality. The rise of Donald Trump over the past eight years or so has included a marked reluctance to call a Nazi a Nazi, something that’s clearly not gone over well with the writers here. The film even goes out of its way to point out American willingness to collaborate with Nazis, setting up Voller as a Nazi scientist who helped win the moon race and having him taunt a black World War II veteran who is now bringing him room service about how his country repaid him.

In 2023, the villain isn’t Hitler, it’s the guy who agrees with Hitler’s ideas, but thinks it was Hitler’s own foolishness that stopped him from executing them – the Nazi version of Ted Cruz, if Ted Cruz had a modicum of self-respect and were much, much easier on the eyes.

But perhaps the biggest headache, the biggest moment of “my god, they’re really doing this again,” is caused by that insane budget number. Disney has released four $200 million+ movies in theaters in two months. Four! How well relative to their budget are any of them expected to do?

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny opened at $83.9 million over the long Independence Day weekend, good for 45% of the market, and it’s still going to loose a massive amount of money just because of how much was spent on it.

Leopold Knopp is a UNT graduate. If you liked this post, you can donate to Reel Entropy here. Like Reel Entropy on Facebook and reach out to me at reelentropy@gmail.com.