Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is out, and while it has some significant structural problems it is still entertaining. However, if you go into the film with lower expectations, I think you will be happier in the end.

This review will cover the good, the bad, and the great while remaining spoiler free. If you’d rather listen or watch, here’s my video review of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny:

So, the great! Harrison Ford is amazing. I’m sure that’s no surprise to anyone. He is so talented and accomplished. He is an actor’s actor, and he makes the film.

The premise is that Indy is all alone and at the point of retirement with no family, no nearby friends, and no colleagues who really care about him. Then suddenly his long-lost god daughter (who he doesn’t recognize) appears, and incidents occur that set them chasing after the Dial of Destiny — whether he wants to go or not. It’s a good premise, and overall, the film was entertaining, but after I left the theater, it just didn’t sit right with me. There were really four big issues with the film as well as some things that worked really well.

First problem with the film is that it felt a bit “textbook” to me as if someone with a clipboard went through the script ticking off check boxes. Fan service is a tricky thing since it taps that desire for the familiar, but it can feel so easily feel forced and inauthentic. This led to an ending that was too nostalgic and sweet without enough story connections to support it.

Second, the ending didn’t fit the rest of the film. Granted, the end was pretty much in line with the kind of ending that I expected before I saw the movie, but the storyline didn’t support the ending delivered. That doesn’t make it a terrible film; it just makes the ending unsatisfying even if it meets expectations, which is why I think so many early reviewers have been upset. A good ending completes the trajectory of the story to its natural and inevitable end.

Third, there was a lot of CGI and de-aging. Some people are sensitive to the amount of tech in a film and how realistic it looks. I didn’t think it was that bad, but is that the standard that an iconic franchise should aim for? I don’t know. I’ll leave that to you to answer. For me, it worked well enough that it didn’t impact my enjoyment of the film despite a few squishy moments when Young Indy’s face was a little too smooth or when the backdrop looked too much like a green screen wall.

Fourth, and most importantly, the film robs Indiana Jones of his agency. They set him up as an old cranky man (in a lovely realistic way) who feels absolutely disconnected from the world around him, and then they rob him of his agency by making a life altering choice for him. This is the biggest reason why the ending of the film feels so unnatural and unearned. This could have also been solved in a single line of text to Helena, “Let’s go home.” The meaning behind these words would have connected so many storylines and emotions. And the other stuff would have slotted into place.

Here’s the thing. You can sell an audience on pretty much anything, if you earn it in the storytelling, which is basically connecting a character’s experiences and needs to the conflict and choices that they make. When a storyline is built incrementally, which Dial of Destiny does well throughout most of the film, there is an intrinsic promise made to the viewer about what kind of ending is possible on the story spectrum. The closer you get to the end, the narrower those possibilities become. The result is that even if that audience will hate the ending, they can’t imagine any other ending because “this” one felt right and inevitable because of how the story was told. That didn’t happen in Dial of Destiny.

There are some things that Dial of Destiny does well. For one, it does a really good job of building Old Indy’s story arc. It opens with a strong setup of a young vibrant Indiana Jones saving friends, preserving history, and taking out Nazis. We then leap forward in time to current Indy who is old, lonely, and sad. It’s a stark contrast to our expectations, which makes us want to know how Indy got here.

There were some honest and endearing moments that nail the character of Old Indiana Jones, showing how time and life have worn away his youthful edges, leaving him feeling like one of his out-of-date historical relics. His time has passed. It really resonates because this is something that a lot of retirees feel as they try to figure out their own relevance as time seems to pass them by, leaving them to feel like they no longer fit into the world around them. That younger vibrant “self” isn’t gone. It’s just buried beneath layers of dust, memories, and time.

Indy has suffered some significant losses that are shared in occasional one-liners that deserved a more screentime because they are the building blocks that created this bitter and lonely man. He is not our Indiana Jones — he knows it, and we know it. The story of The Dial of Destiny is really the story of how he regains that part of himself that has been lost to time.

His god daughter Helena is the catalyst that starts the process of waking him up. However, the film buries important details about their relationship in the action scenes, and I can’t say more without spoilers. But the gist is that he’s embarrassed and regretful of his actions, and she is angry at him for his choices. The film never really confronts why Indy essentially abandoned her, but we can assume that it was because his own life was spinning out of control. This isn’t the kind of thing an audience should be left to work out on their own. We needed to see them talk it out beyond the stray one-liners that are shouted out during fight and chase scenes.

These two characters are so much alike that it feels like the film was trying to portray Helena as a younger, female version of Indiana Jones (cue the studio’s desire to find a fresh face for the future of the franchise), but it doesn’t work so well because the film doesn’t really give them time to bond and connect. It also feels obvious that the role of Helena was originally written as Indy’s son, which then got scrapped since Shia LeBouef’s made himself a persona non grata within the franchise.

So, we get his young goddaughter swooping into his life, stirring up emotions and trouble. As the action increases, Old Indy starts to wake up. We see the fire return to his eyes as he gets closer and closer to being a vibrant older version of the man we saw in the opening scenes. Instead of saving history, he’s saving Helena and himself along the way. That does work, but I would have loved a little more of a personal connection between them.

All of this built toward the ending that Indy wanted, the ending in which he basically said, “This is what I want to do.” While watching the film, I felt equal parts sad and happy at that moment because if felt right for him given the trajectory of his life, circumstances, and the story. Then, we get a left hook that sends the ending into a completely different direction that doesn’t feel natural or organic to everything we’ve seen so far.

The thing is, if this was any other film and any other actor, I think it would have fared better in the reviews because the movie isn’t bad. It’s just that the bar is especially high, and you can’t pull cheap tricks with a fanbase that knows a character this well. Most of us have “known” Indiana Jones for our entire lives. Taking short cuts and left turns with the story just won’t work.

So, yeah, I am disappointed. I can see where these negative reviews came from. However, I think the movie is still worth watching and I enjoyed most of it. However, it’s not the kind of a sendoff that I wanted for Harrison Ford, and it’s not what he or the audience deserved. If they come out with a new film in the future, they are going to have to do a lot of work to re-establish the credibility of the franchise because they made a few story choices that pretty much killed all future possibilities for the Indiana Jones franchise. But that’s a problem for the future.