Indiana Jones and the Losing Battle Against Mortality

New York, 1969. Asleep in a chair, Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is awoken not by an explosion, or by gunfire, but by a blast of “Magical Mystery Tour” from a nearby apartment. As he rises to remonstrate, he is shown naked to the waist, visibly worn, and stripped of both mystery and magic. The years have taken their usual withering revenge. Having spent his life hunting antiquities, Jones is at risk of becoming one himself. He pours a slug of booze into his coffee, and a document, glimpsed in passing, reveals that he is divorced from his wife, Marion (Karen Allen). Soon afterward, we see him teaching at Hunter College, where the students doze through his lecture. In honor of his years of service, he receives a clock, which he gives to a homeless man in the street. Time be damned.

These sorry scenes come from the fifth and almost certainly final chapter of a franchise that began in 1981. The new film is directed by James Mangold rather than by Steven Spielberg, and the title is not, as you might expect, “Indiana Jones and the Bathroom Break of Doom” or “Raiders of the Lost Slipper” but “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” It’s a movie of two minds, marked with hints of the hero’s mortality—“Everything hurts,” he says near the end—and yet determined to convince itself, and us, that he is the exception to the rule of universal entropy. Once Jones gets going, his exploits acquire a desperate edge that wasn’t there in the earlier movies. Maybe he fears that, were he to pause for breath, he might expire.

Every quest needs a whatchamacallit, be it the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail, and the latest object of desire is the Dial of Destiny—also known as the Antikythera or, as Jones calls it, “an ancient hunk of gears.” (It bears only the flimsiest relation to the actual Antikythera mechanism, discovered in 1901 in a sunken Roman ship.) Devised long ago by Archimedes, we are told, it comes in two parts, which, once meshed together, enable the user to scoot through time. The dial was an obsession for Basil Shaw (Toby Jones), an Oxford professor, and his daughter, Helena, has inherited the craving. As played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Helena is spirited, game, and happy-go-plucky, with a saving touch of goofiness. On and off, she joins forces with Indy, who is her godfather, but here’s the catch: unlike him, Helena is scruple-free. She treasures nothing grander than hard cash and gaily scorns the idea that the dial, like other rarities, belongs in a museum. She also refers to Jones as “an aging grave robber.” Is she wrong?

There is an argument that the entire chronicle of Indiana Jones has been a canny exercise in the art of looting, all the more brazen for being wrapped in the principle of noble and disinterested valor. Because we love and trust Harrison Ford, construing even his grumpiness as a shield against the lure of low motives, we are primed to assume that he is a better custodian of exotic bounty than anyone who dwells in the deserts, jungles, and monuments where he roams. The Ark may wind up in a crate, but, by God, at least it’s an American crate; what safer haven, for the holy of holies, than the Xanadu of the West? For a while, I wondered if the villains, in the new film, would turn out to be daredevil agents of a covert restitutions squad, snatching scarabs and cuneiform tablets out of the Met and smuggling them back to their rightful homes, with Indy in scandalized pursuit. It would make a change from Nazis.

But no. It’s Nazis. Here they come again. The baddest is Dr. Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), who, in the wake of the war, has reinvented himself as a mastermind of the U.S. space program. Shades of Wernher von Braun, although I doubt whether von Braun would have remarked to an American waiter, as Voller does, “You didn’t win the war. Hitler lost it.” Sure that he can improve on the Führer’s feeble efforts, Voller needs only the dial to bring his plans to fruition. We meet him, festooned with henchmen, in New York, where the astronauts of Apollo 11 are being welcomed back from the moon with a ticker-tape parade. They are overtaken by Jones, who, stirred from senescence, thunders down the avenue on a horse, with Nazis on his—and its—tail. He rides into the subway, at Fifty-ninth Street, and canters along the tracks. If, like me, you are bucked up by horse-out-of-water sequences, you are bound to thrill to this jape, the best of its breed since 1994, when Arnold Schwarzenegger rode his steed through a hotel and into an elevator, in “True Lies.”

From here, the new movie, like its predecessors, trots the globe, insuring that we are never in one place long enough to get a feel for it. We are whisked off to Morocco, and then to Greece, where Jones teams up with an old pal, played by Antonio Banderas and described as “Spain’s greatest frogman.” There is no higher accolade. Next is Syracuse, in Sicily, and the Ear of Dionysius, a real-life cave with a fictional tomb inside. Last, a visit to the sacred realms of the downright ridiculous, on which I shall not expand. Wherever Jones and Helena go, Voller and the gang seem to be one step behind, and the pattern grows oddly monotonous. Even deadly peril can be rote.

You should, nonetheless, make a date to watch Mangold’s film, and, if you have to duck out after an hour because you’ve left something in the oven, no matter. The story is front-loaded with good stuff—not least a combustible prelude, set at the butt end of the Second World War, in which a youthful Jones escapes hanging, dodges innumerable bullets, and leaps from a car to a motorbike to a train, which then attacks itself. (A machine-gun emplacement, near the front, set ablaze by an Allied bomb, fires on its own rear carriages as the train rounds a bend. Hell yeah.) And how, you may ask, is the youthfulness achieved? By digital trickery, with Ford’s face rejuvenated before our eyes. To be honest, he was never boyish, so the transfiguration is hardly extreme, and I found it surprisingly moving. If you really want to rove back and forth through time, you don’t need the Antikythera at all. Forget the myth. Screw Archimedes. All you need is the movies.

All of Mel Eslyn’s début movie, “Biosphere,” takes place in what might be called the Dome of Destiny. It’s a cozy sphere, sealed and self-sustaining, in which a former Republican President of the United States, Billy (Mark Duplass), and one of his senior advisers, Ray (Sterling K. Brown), eke out what remains of their lives. They share the space with tomato plants, copies of Shakespeare (no beach reads, much to Billy’s chagrin), and a pond stocked with nutritious fish, named for characters from “Cheers.” There’s a Diane, a Woody, and a Sam, one of whom is cooked and consumed near the start of the film. If there was a Norm and a Cliff, I guess they got eaten long ago.

As far as one can gather, Billy and Ray are the last two people on earth. We never quite learn what befell the rest of mankind, though Billy does hint, now and then, that he was to blame. “That was me,” he says, raising his hand as if confessing to a coffee spill. He seems a decent guy, if none too bright, and emotionally far from equable. “I do not freak out!” he exclaims, totally freaking out, and he’s disconcerted when Ray, a scientist by training, uses words such as “palatable” or “purview.” They’ve been friends since childhood, and they often still behave like kids, squabbling over the TV remote. By way of leisure, they watch “Lethal Weapon 2” (1989)—“Best movie ever,” according to Ray—and play Super Mario Bros.

Note that both of those products, the buddy-cop flick and the video game, rely upon a central male pairing. “Biosphere,” though sometimes larky in tone, is also a frowningly intense venture that never stops being about itself. There are no stray cultural references here, nothing casual or loose; every detail is rigged to beef up the main dramatic predicament. The only novel that we see Billy read is Manuel Puig’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” which tells of two cellmates in an Argentinean jail, and of sexual stirrings in their relationship. Sure enough, Eslyn’s film—which she wrote with Duplass—proceeds to chart the blundering onset of homoerotic tension between Billy and Ray. One describes the other as his secret sauce. Game on.

The list of themes that “Biosphere” does not address is impressively long. Aside from the lack of interest in the apocalypse, nuclear or pestilential, there’s nothing about politics, unless you count Ray’s admission that he was a registered Democrat, or Billy’s crowing cry of “Dude, I ran the fucking country”; no discussion of race, although, as in the “Lethal Weapon” saga, one hero is Black and one is white; no ravening aliens or maleficent computers; and not a crumb of metaphysical awe. Instead, the whole emphasis of the film is on gender. Billy says, “I am way more masculine than you.” Ray says, “That mold of men and of manliness—it is so ingrained in me, bro.” The mold breaks. We hear talk of “accelerated evolution.” The plot drifts into areas of bio-fantasy that will strike some viewers as whimsically hopeful and others as modishly comical. You reckon that the fish, at least, will wriggle free of this ideological net? Think again. ♦