The Indiana Jones franchise both started and peaked in the ‘80s. Harrison Ford was a dashing young action star, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were just becoming household names, and setting the original trilogy five decades in the past allowed them to have a recurring villain everyone could rally around defeating: Nazis. It was a recipe for success. Now, with the latest addition to the franchise, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, we see a much older Ford and, inevitably, a later setting where World War II has ended. So who is the new villain? How does a 70-year-old Indy fit in during the ‘60s? Where are the Nazis?! Director James Mangold gave me the lowdown on all of it.
I recently spoke with Mangold in celebration of the film’s upcoming release and addressed these difficulties. He gave a rather poignant response, citing one big hurdle in particular that would provide some trouble creating an Indy story in 2023:
You can’t do everything. But the other really interesting challenge in making an Indiana Jones movie as Indy ages isn’t just the age of the hero, but is also the age or the time he’s living in. One of the beauties of the original first three films, I’d say, is they all take place between the ’30s and ’40s. And so there’s this incredible synergy between the kind of classical John Williams, take no prisoners, Ernst Korngold-esque score between Harrison, the dashing kind of hero with a touch of darkness in the in the fedora, between Nazis and the war and the sense of good and evil. So clearly it’s kind of a movie about movies and a movie about Golden Age movies.
So it seems that Mangold romanticized these classic elements just as much as the rest of us. So much so that in his mind, Indiana Jones movies are representative of Golden Age movies in general. He noticeably left out Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, of which he previously noted he had one big issue with, but in all fairness, that film was overcoming many of the same obstacles.
It’s clear that Mangold struggled not only with Indy aging, but how a classic hero like Indiana Jones fits into that modern age. Specifically, Mangold dug into exactly why Indy’s glory days were largely over, noting that a serious cultural shift towards Modernism may be more difficult for a character who no longer deals in the moral simplicity of WWII:
As Harrison ages and the world changes and we enter a period of modernism, suddenly villainy isn’t as clear anymore. I mean, we still live in a period of modernism, you know, realpolitik and triangular, and and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And and it’s not as clear anymore. So it’s harder, in a sense, to be that kind of hero. And so the one thing we had to tool or try to figure out how to do is how to try and embrace that reality of the modern age and show how this hero might not fit so easily into this modern world as well as he did in that golden age world. And then, of course, finds his niche and proves himself once again.
And prove himself he does! It’s delightful to see Indiana Jones back to kicking ass on the silver screen, and yes, he does fight more Nazis. Harrison Ford has said in the past he’d always wanted to return to Indiana Jones, and given the fact that he doesn’t even seem close to retiring, this film was inevitable. Folks are, in general, saying positive things about Ford’s new movie, and with Steven Spielberg around to give James Mangold advice, it’s easy to imagine that this is going to be a worthy installment, despite the hurdle of jumping forward so many years.
You can see the film for yourself on June 30! It’s yet another highly-anticipated addition in what’s turning out to be a killer summer 2023 movie release schedule.
