Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny arrives as a museum piece, dusted off, set behind glass, and lit with the gentle reverence owed to an artifact nobody can quite place. The year is 1969. The hero is old, the moon landing is on television, and the screenplay has the good sense to let Harrison Ford look tired. James Mangold directs a chase across Tangier, Sicily, and a Nazi train, and the machinery of the franchise grinds on with professional courtesy. The casting is democratic in a quiet way. A female co-lead in Phoebe Waller-Bridge, a Moroccan teenage sidekick, a Black CIA agent, Sallah returned from his cab. None of this is announced. The film simply includes them and moves on, which remains the most dignified available method.

Helena Shaw, the goddaughter, is the more competent of the two principals. She lies, she smuggles, she outwits the old man repeatedly, and in the final act she punches him unconscious to save him from his own nostalgia. A feminist reading is available to anyone who wants it. The film will not hand it over. There are no speeches about the patriarchy, no monologue on the burden of women in archaeology. The script prefers a smirk and a getaway. The moralizing that does occur concerns Nazis, which is uncontroversial, and aging, which is melancholy. The sermon is brief. The film has other business.

What the picture declines to do is equally instructive. No same-sex romance, no climate anxiety, no redistribution of wealth, no body positivity, no neurodivergent subplot, no rewriting of the historical record for present-day comfort. Archimedes stays Archimedes. The Nazis stay Nazis. This is an adventure built on a grammar that predates the current cultural conversation, and it makes no apology for that. The result is a film of modest social consciousness and solid craftsmanship, wearing its era on its sleeve like a fedora it has owned since 1981. It will not change anyone's mind about anything. It was not asked to, and it knows it, and there is something almost restful in that.

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