At best, this is competent on a technical scale (although it rarely reaches that height). But the film is fundamentally misguided, as Jango pointed out.
There are several issues that I have to get off my chest (although everyone else has already mentioned them). First off is that Indiana Jones - INDIANA JONES!!! - has no interest in the adventure or science or discovery. He's being dragged along for the ride to stop Nazis that are lazily shoehorned in because Nazis are classic villains of the series. I'd have been down for him being a sad old man before getting caught up in the adventure, but it never happens. As Jango mentioned, there is a humorless quality to the film as well: everybody treats this with deathly seriousness - no smiling, no fun, no youthful enthusiasm. Indy is an angry old man now, so we'd better get with the times: we're not having any of that "entertainment" in this movie, no way!
The CGI is constant and really, really awful, with flat cinematography showing off how awful it is. The animated backdrops of the city in the first parts of the movie are really annoying (we could have done it all on soundstages and made it look more real simply by not showing off the animated background so much - point the camera downwards from above and show actual three dimensional interactions on the screen instead of people walking in front of a backdrop). The cuts between rapid CGI shots and flesh and blood people are jarring, especially in the Tangier sequence (again, this wouldn't have been as big of an issue if the movie was willing to joke around a bit so there was anything to focus on but the action).
Minor nitpicks of Mikkelsen and company for just being bland bad guys - Mikkelsen is phoning it in without any actual savoring of the part (compare this to his turn in
Casino Royale when he's really chewing on his character's villainous speeches) - and Wombat never earns her place as Indy's sidekick because - unlike, say, Mutt - she never *interacts* with Indy. She never jokes with him, she never gets to know him, she never properly argues with him, she's just in the same place looking for the same thing because... he's wanted for murder, I guess? Why is Indy doing this?
And why isn't he in prison when the movie ends anyway?
And then there's Mutt and Marion. There is a way to make Indiana Jones an angry old man, and this backstory is a good way to do it. Unfortunately, this is NOT BAKED INTO THE CHARACTER AT ALL. We see him as old and bitter, and it takes a long time before he info-dumps to his criminal goddaughter that he doesn't know and who has been a total bitch to him about his sad history of losing his son and divorcing his wife. Gee, it would have been good if we were allowed some time for him to interact with Marion or Mutt (I understand that Shia is persona non grata, but they could have recast him), or if he was on this adventure with Salah and they could talk about things in a more natural way than just info-dumping to the audience.
Which brings me to the thematic importance of the Dial itself. Indy feels lost in the present world. I don't think the movie really earns this vision of the man after seeing him for four straight movies as the quintessential adventurer, but okay, let's roll with it in theory. Somehow we're meant to see that he has lost hope and doesn't have his spirit anymore, and at the end is given the choice to quit and
drink beer with Archimedes and help him invent some cool stuff.
So what happens? HE GETS RAILROADED. His choice doesn't matter! Indiana Jones is literally punched in the face and told that he can't live his own life, but one pre-ordained by this woman THAT THINKS SHE KNOWS BETTER. And of course, it *does* work out... somehow. Somehow she contacts all of his old friends and they join around him and he is loved forever, the end. If *he* had made that choice, this ending would have meant something... but he doesn't. He is forced into a happy ending that he never earned through his own power, after an adventure in which he was superfluous and unimportant. And of course, there's still a murder warrant out for him...
The more I look on this, the more dead I get. It isn't an aggressively terrible movie, but I can't think of anything *good* in it. Nothing to excite me. And the more I analyze it, the more I hate what I do see.