Fans are extremely hyped as the classic adventure franchise of the 80’s is back once again with Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones! The fifth installment in the franchise is being helmed by James Mangold of Logan (2017) fame. The film is currently scheduled to release on June 30, 2023 and the filming concluded earlier this year in February, 2022. Ford’s character of Indiana Jones will pass the torch to some younger protagonist to continue the spirit of adventure and lead further movies in the franchise. As for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, we delivered some bad news a few months ago surrounding the leaks as they suggested a really bad film. Well, after the latest plot leaks from Reddit, it seems like they are going to be true after all! Major spoilers follow below so read at your own risk.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Opening
After the logos introduction (Disney, Paramount – no dissolve on a shot -, Lucasfilm), we are thrown right into the action in 1944. I think the first shot of the movie is a door opening (but not 100% sure) leading up to seeing Indy, in a Nazi uniform and a bag on his head, taken to a nazi officer by nazis who claim they caught this American spy. All of this happening while the castle is under fire and there is a lot of agitation in the background. Meanwhile, Basil Shaw is hiding in a forest nearby, looking anxiously for Indy. Cue to the scene of the trailer where Indy’s face appears after the bag is taken away. The nazi officer asks him, looking at Indy’s notes, why he was looking to steal the Lance of Longinus, which was used to crucify the Christ. It’s a conveted prize for Hitler who really wants it. Voller appears at some point and looks briefly to the Lance in its box before it’s taken away and you can see he notices something. The exchange concludes by the officer ordering to take Indy away and telling him in a triumphant way : “To the victor belong the spoils”. While Basil Shaw, an Oxford scholar clearly not made for auction, is caught by nazis looking for him with dogs and taken aboard their train leaving the castle (on the verge of being destroyed by the Allies bombings), Indy is about to get hung on a rope by several nazis but fortunately for him a rocket drops slowly in the room and descends several floors before exploding, which kills the nazis and makes him hung around the void thanks to the rope around his neck – but he manages to escape alive. Great tense sequence. Aboard the train, Voller is trying to reach the nazi officer to tell him something important but you can tell the nazis don’t really take him seriously. Meanwhile, Basil Shaw is interrogated by the nazi officer. After knocking a nazi in his car, Indy takes his place at the wheel but he as to let other nazis aboard and he drives along a road with them and nazis in sidecars until he decides to go off script to follow the nearby train. Good action sequence there, the sidecar ends up cut in half at some point and Indy gets on the train (first time we hear the Raiders theme very briefly if I remember correctly as well as the Wilhem scream when Indy knocks a nazi out of the train). Great succession of scenes where Indy progresses through the train while stumbling into a lot of nazis, trying, not often successfully, to blend in with them. As he progresses through the train he manages to get back the Lance of Longinus and realizes it’s a copy.
He also stumbles upon a lot of antiquities stolen by the nazis (which made me wonder if the train is kind of the Indy interpretation of the long-rumored nazi train full of gold). Meanwhile, Voller loses patience and informs the nazi officer that the Lance is a fake and that Hitler will be disappointed to hear about it. He starts talking about the dial of Destiny and shows it to the officer – or rather the only part of the Dial he has in his hands – and says it would be of greater interest to Hitler. It certainly is of interest to Basil Shaw. Indy manages to get to the train car where Basil is kept captive while the nazi officers have went the other way without noticing him in the restaurant train where he was hidden at a table when they passed by him. Basil tells him about the Dial. They manage to escape on the roof – where Indy kind of motivates Basil to follow him since he is afraid and says “I can’t do this!” – after Indy has sucked punched Voller and stolen the dial. On the roof, they are witnessing the Allies planes firing at the train, shooting a lot of nazis. Nice aerial view of this scene. They seem on the verge of getting out when the officer appears in front of them (the foggy scene of the trailer). Indy fights him while trying to stay alive when the train enters multiple tunnels, he manages to disarm the nazi with his whip and throw his gun to Basil to tell him to shoot, hence the moment where he shoots at Indy accidentally. Indy throws the nazi out of the roof and steals his line : “to the victor belongs the spoils”. While Indy and Basil finally look safe, Voller comes along with a gun and orders Indy to give him the dial. Indy sends him the bag containing the dial and Voller seems on the verge of escaping when he is hit by a sideroad perch near the tracks (the same kind that young Indy uses in LC to escape Fedora) that Indy barely avoids in turns. As Indy and Basil are trying to make signs to the Allies planes that they are to be saved, the planes destroy the bridge ahead of the train so they have to jump in the river. They get out of it alive ; Basil regrets that Indy had to give the dial to Voller but Indy shows him he threw only the bag (or another object) and he still has the dial. Cue the parting shot where Indy puts his arm on Basil under the bridge while we see a British flag raised on the remains of the train.
Indiana Jones 5 – 1969 – NYC
Right after the end of the 1944 flashback, the story jumps to 1969. We discover Indy in his NYC apartment and a traveling shot shows us another room of his place before showing him sleeping on a sofa. I glimpsed a picture of his dad on a shelf, there may have been other elements like that but not sure. We can see a black & white picture of Marion on Indy’s fridge (from Raiders) and more importantly their finalized divorce papers on it. Indy wakes up suddendly when he hears very loud music (not the Rolling Stones song from the trailer). It’s coming from his neighbour downstairs. He yells at him through the window but he can’t hear him as he is busy with many friends, visibly starting a party. After a brief shot of Indy shirtless, he puts on an old tee-shirt (might be a baseball team t-shirt but not sure), grabs a baseball bat and goes down to knock on his neighbour door. Someone opens the door and the neighbor says “oh it’s my old neighbour upstairs” like he is used to Indy complaining. Indy indeed complains that it’s 8:00 am and he has to work and the man mocks him like he doesn’t believe he is still working. He also basically tells him to f** off since it’s “space day!”, i.e the Apollo parade. Cue to a scene of Indy preparing coffee and spilling a bit of alcohol in it before hiding Marion’s picture on the fridge with a magnet in a very intent way. He then leaves his place (the street shot from the trailer), takes the subway along a kid in a cosmonaut uniform, and gets to Hunter College where he starts delivering his class about Archimedes. There is a funny quirk from Indy when a student repeats “Syracuse?!” with interest and he says “Syracuse in Sicily, not in the state of New York”. All the students look either bored or on a hangover and no one replies when he tries to get them to participate, except Helena, who visibly knows a lot about Archimedes looking by her answers – but Indy doesn’t recognize her. Indy also sounds very excited when talking about the clever Archimedes-conceived weapons used by the Greeks against the Romans during great siege of Syracuse during which he died. Indy’s class is interrupted when students come in the room with a TV set to show the parade, and the atmosphere becomes excited while Indy shuts down his own projection on Archimedes with a dispirited look. Helena then follows discreetly Indy to the professors’ corner of the university where they thank him for his 10 years of service at Hunter College by offering him a big clock. He is kind of speechless as you can tell he really dislikes this gift and says something like “thanks for putting on me with all these years”. Then as he walks into the street he gives the clock to a homeless man and walks into a bar where he starts drinking. Helena follows his trail as Mason is herself following Helena.
As Helena comes to Indy to the bar and introduces herself, another scene shows Klaber (Boyd Holbrook) in a NYC hotel, trying to learn German with a book. A waiter comes into the room looking for professor Schimdt and mistakenly thinks it’s him before Klaber points to Voller, looking at the parade preparation by the window, and tells him (or maybe a little bit later but whatever) that the Americans went to the moon thanks to Voller. We also see the giant man working for Voller. Cue a great tone-setting/character-setting exchange between Voller and the waiter, as Voller asks him where he is originally from in a racist way (because the waiter is black) and the man says “the Bronx”. Voller also asks hims if he fought for his country and the man says he did set cannons for the Allies in WWII. I think it’s at this point Voller says that the Allies didn’t win the war but rather that Hitler lost it but I’m not sure. Anyway you get the feeling that Voller is going full nazi/racist, even so many years after the war. In the bar, Helena and Indy start discussing the dial created by Archimedes and Basil Shaw’s obsession with it. Helena gloats that she just became an archeologist herself seems to know a lot about the dial and says that she is looking for it, and knows that her dad and Indy lost it in a river in the French Alps. You can tell Indiana is supiscious since he repeatedly asks her if she remembers their last encounter, when she was a kid, and she stays evasive. He also asks her why she would want to go after the dial that drove her father crazy and she tries to sell him the idea of a great adventure but you can tell he is not responding to it. He also seems shocked to learn that Basil is dead but that might just be my interpretation – it’s not clear if he’s been dead for a long time or not. Indy does get caught up in their discussion around Archimedes – I think it’s here that they mention and the dial though and they head back to the university. In the university’s locked room of antiquities, he opens a drawer and shows her the part of the dial we saw in the 1944 flashback. They mention again that there is a missing part of the dial to make it complete, and he talks about the fact that Basil was convinced the dial had time-related powers. He also finds old letters of Basil and says he wrote so many times to him about the dial that he didn’t read all of them. Meanwhile, we have learned that Klaber is working with Mason but that their methods seem to diverge. Klaber and his accomplices are breaking into Indy’s personal office and when her colleague (the lady with glasses from the “surprise!” party) asks them what they’re doing and is growing suspiscous, they shoots her on the spot.
Another colleague comes in and gets shot as well. Both in a very brutal way, which immediately establishes them as dangerous and threatening bad guys. Klaber finally arrives sneakily in the room where Indy and Helena are still talking about the dial, where Indy just told Helena that she lied to him by saying Basil and him lost the dial in the French Alps and that Basil would never have lied. So why would she lie, he asks her ? Then Klaber arrives and threatens them at gunpoint, Helena runs away by the roof, Indy drops the shelves on the bad guys just after Mason was shocked to find that Klaber killed two professors from the university. Indy finds his dead colleague and is in real shock, he tries to call the police but gets arrested by the bad guys – there is a shot of the retro phone covered with the blood on Indy’s hands, taken from the corpse of his dead colleague. Helena manages to run away on the roof. Indy is then taken into a van by Klaber and the others, and he quickly understands that they are CIA. After the driver nearly drives through a barrier blocking the parade, he tries to drive back but then crashes into a taxy that screams at him so they have to continue by foot. Then they arrive into a peace protest, where Indy starts screaming a peace slogan to get into the crowd, before stealing a pancart and hitting of his kidnappers with it. Klaber starts shooting in the air, which frightens the crowd. Indy then runs to a police officer nearby, near the police officer’s horse, and tell him to stop him but Klaber doesn’t seem to be bothered so Indy steals his horse. Ensues the parade chase scene, very short but fun – the CGIS of Indy on the horse are way better than in the trailer but they still look like CGI. Then there is the chasedown in the subway, where Indy barely escapes one train before escaping another on the other track. He then arrives at the next station and gives his horse’s reins to a lady (“get my horse”) and casually jumps into the train just before Mason arrives. Indy says to his bemused train neighbour “the subway goes faster” (than the horse). Later on, at night, we see Indy looking at a news report in front of a TV store, where we learn he is accused of the murders of his colleagues. The news report also mentions that it is believed Indy has lost his son in the war and that he is divorced. As he tries to convince a man watching the news with him and telling him “it’s you!” that is not him, the guy gets knocked off screen… and here appears Sallah !
Who had a rendezvous with Indy. We then discover Sallah’s apartment and grandkids and learn that Indy helped his family emigrate to the US during the war and that he is forever grateful for it. Sallah then drives him to the airport, where Indy plans to go to Morocco as he suspects Helena will try to sell the dial at an antiquities auction organized by local mobsters – that Voller knows about as he is heading to Morocco as well. Sallah mentions he misses the sea, the desert and the adventure, but Indy tells him these days are long gone and that this is not an adventure as the police is looking for him for murders. He also refuses Sallah’s proposition to travel with him to help him. He finally says “give them hell Indiana Jones!” just before Indy is nearly hit by a car while crossing the street – which has Sallah looking uneasy and once again Indy looking like he is definitely not ready or eager for an adventure. As Indy drinks some alcohol in the plane, he sees his reflection in the window and remembers his last encounter with Basil Shaw (and Helena as a kid). It’s a flashback scene where Indy looks younger, de-aged again, but more like in his fifties or something. He has a tense exchange with Basil in his office and saves this part of the dial from being destroyed by Basil, who says it has to be destroyed because it’s very dangerous. He offers him to take it with him and Basil makes him promise that he will destroy it. Helena overheards the conversation so we understand she knew from the get go that Indy had the dial and that he betrayed his promise to Basil. As he leaves in his car, Helena runs to him to give him his hat, and he promises her that her father will be better (as he seems to be getting nuts with his obsession for the dial), and that he will give her news. It seems he never did, hence some anger from Helena. The flashback ends with Helena looking at her own (child) reflection in her own flight to Morocco. Cue the traditional Indy traveling map, slightly modernized!
1969 – Morocco
I’m not sure about the order of this scene but it makes more sense that it happened there : aboard the Voller plane to Morocco, Mason tells him that the CIA can no longer let him follow his quest for the dial (which they only allowed him to in order to be nice for his service to the Apollo mission) now that his men have killed professors at Hunter College and that Voller himself has ditched a meeting with the US president in Los Angeles. As some CIA members are about to divert the plane back to the US, Klaber and his men teargas them and someone (I think Voller) shoots Mason, who dies. (I honestly thought she would play a bigger role). In Morocco, Indy, in costume, walks into the bar where Helena is planning to sell the dial in the auction backroom. Teddy, who is learning some piloting craft from a pilot drinking nearby, tries to prevent him from accessing the room but he can’t – and he also lets Voller walk in shortly after. Cue the exchange about capitalism between Indy/Helena/Voller (who genuinely doesn’t seem to recognize Indy although he did consult his CIA file in NYC). We see Anthony Ingruber quite a lot as one of the bidders. After the Indy whip scene and the gunfires from the trailer, the chase for the dial begins. There are several twists in a fast-paced action scene here but Voller ends up with it and Indy and Helena go after his car but they are stopped by Helena’s former fiancé, a local mobster, who wants to kill her. By the way, Helena is clearly depicted as a capitalistic, after the money woman who only stole the dial to resell it to the highest bidder. Teddy comes to the rescue in a TukTuk, hence the chase. Great action sequence there, where Indy, Helena and Teddy each drive the TukTuk (or the next one). Voller and his gang finally get to their helicopter as Indy’s TukTuk can’t run anymore due to the multiple shocks it took.
As Indy and Helena banter about the situation and go into a war of who is more useful than the other in the quest for the dial, they mention that they have to found an artifact (forgot its name, sorry) that indicates the place where Archimedes might have stolen the other part of the dial. It should be deciphered with a greek code, but there are two of them (one which Indy can translate, the other that Helena can). They think it’s in the Egean sea and Indy gets the upped hand by saying he knows a guy with a boat and diving skills. They then meet Antonio Banderas’ character and go looking for the artifact on his boat. There is a night scene on the boat, very emotional, where Helena asks Indy what historical event he would attend if the dial indeed had time-travel powers. He answers that he would prevent his son from dying into the war (which he did to “**** him off”, he says) and collapsing her mother into despair thus leading to the end of their union. Helena is moved by this and doesn’t quite know what to answer. I don’t remember at which point it was, maybe here, but Indy, after rereading the Basil letter in the plane, realizes that there are two dates of interest in his notes : 08/20/39 (days leading to the start of WWI) and 08/20/39 which is a few days away. I think at this point we also know that Basil’s guess was that Archimedes, through mathematics, realized that the Dial could predict time faults in the sky, which would allow, once you can read it, to get there in time and jump to another time. In the morning, the team of Indy, Antonio and Helena prepare for the underwater exploration with a 3 minute limit there. Great scene full of tension when they find the artifact and eels come out of it (after Indy was scared on the boat when Teddy said they were like snakes and he says “no they don’t!!”). Meanwhile Voller and his crew arrive in another boat and get the artifact just as Indy, Helena and Antonio’s character get out of the water.
Voller orders Indy to translate the greek code on the artifact but he refuses ; he threatens to kill Antonio’s character and then does in cold blood in front of Indy so Helena starts translating the code after negotiating a money deal with Voller once they find the missing part of the dial. Indy is disappointed by Helena’s behavior but realizes, as she makes some explanation about the riddle just translated and Archimedes history, that he she has hidden some dynamite (previously taken on Antonio’s boat) in her backpocket. At some point she asks Voller to give him his cigarette and she manages to discreetly give it to Indy so he can light the fuse. After having affirmed that the riddle means the missing part of the dial is in Alexandria’s Library (in Greece), she throws the dynamite which explodes downstairs. Indy, Teddy and Helena escape on the other boat and she celebrates her move but Indy calms her down by saying he just lost a friend. Then they realize the artifact was not entirely explored as, by burning it, they find its true form and its true legend – in the code only Indy can decipher. Thus they realize that they must head to Sicily, to Archimedes tomb, while Voller goes on a false trail – but he sees them heading west instead of east so he follows them as his boat can still run.
1969 – Sicily
As Indy buys some stuff in order to explore the Cave of Dionysos where the Dial is supposedly hidden, Teddy tells Helena she is now being bossed by Indiana, which she refutes and says she’s still in control and will still be able to sell the goods they find during their quest – as Indy told them on the boat the artifact should be in a museum.As Teddy drifts off and steal some money from a teenager to buy some ice cream, he encounters Voller and his men who kidnap him. Indy realizes it and tells Helena they will use Teddy’s knowledge of the artifact to get to the dial so that he is basically safe and won’t be killed. Indy and Helena steal the wedding car and head first to the cave – which is a touristic place open to the public. They indeed arrive there first and realize that, according to the riddle, the dial is hidden in the part of the cave with the most echo. They find a crescent moon opening near the top of the cave and start climbing towards it. Helena mocks Indy for having some trouble climbing, hence his lines about Kali and being shot 9 times, and we learn that he has some vis and plaques in the knees or legs. And when she says “so why are you stopping?” he snaps back “I’m thinking!” Alternative shots of Indy and Helena progressing through the cave – and stumbling into a corridor full of insects like the ones in ToD + tarantulas, even Indy sounds kind of scared about it – while Voller and his gang follow their tracks (much like the LC final enigmas sequence). At some point, Teddy, who is being handcuffed to the giant man since he tried to escape, falls into the water with him after a frail rope bridge collapsed ; he manages to steal him the key and escape the water while the giant dies drowned – so no Indy fight for him, which makes sense as there would be no plausible way for Indy to kill him at his age. After solving a booby trap by using water pressure, Indy and Helena access the room where Archimedes tomb is hidden. They are taken aback by the fact that one of the mural drawings show a raven with metal claws, i.e with a futuristic look, and that are what appear to be ancestors of watches in the room although, as Indy mentions it, watches wouldn’t be invented for 1000 years after Archimedes.
They find the missing part of the dial in the tomb but Voller arrives at that point. He orders Indy to give him the dial, he seems reluctant to but Voller threatens him to kill Helena and mentions that she is the only family member he has left. Indy gives him the dial and he assembles it but Teddy, who had been sneaking into the room, then jumps on Klaber. First 1969 gunshot scene where Indy uses a gun ! And he seems still good at it but he gets shot in the shoulder (to me it seem just above the heart but it’s mentioned later on that it’s a shoulder injury). He is clearly hurt and Helena wants to save him but Teddy says “let them take him, we’ll save him once we’re out of there”.Voller and his crew take Indy into a van, heading to the airport where Voller wants to fly, with a nazi plane, to the time fault where, while Helena and Teddy chase them (discreetly) on a stolen bike.As Indy is taken aboard the nazi plane, Helena instructs Teddy to try to flight a plane although he never did before. She then goes on to catch the nazi plane after a bike chase. Onboard, Indy and Voller have a great exchange (“You should have stayed in NY”, “You should have stayed out of Poland”), and Indy asks him who he wants to assassinate to change history and make Germany victorious : Churchill ? Roosevelt? Then Voller tells him he wants to kill Hitler to prevent Germany for invading Poland and committing this big mistake, saying that history is a succession of wars and that you have to be on the victors’ side.As he calculates the coordinates from the dial into the time fault, and that they come dangerously close and there a few seconds left, Indy tells him that Archimedes didn’t know about the continents’ moving and thus that they can’t be heading to 08/20/1939. Indy starts laughing almost hysterically, which makes Voller doubt his decision and he tries to stop it at the last minute but they’re drawn into the time fault – along with Teddy’s plane behind.
Voller erupts in triumph as he thinks they just arrived in Sicily in 1939… before realizing that they are in Sicily but 2.000 years before, precisely during the Roman siege of Syracuse. With a lot of boats, arrows, catapults and stuff !In Sicily, we see Archimedes trying to complete the dial when his assistant tells him that “dragons” have arrived (the two planes). They heat outside in amazement while the city is under siege.Klaber shoots frantically with his gun and then his machine gun at the ships and other soldiers, calling them “savages”.On the plane, Helena drops several nazis out of the airplane by activating a switch that opens up the ground. As the plane is getting hit by lances from the Romans (or Greeks? or both?), Indy manages to untie his ropes with a lance nearby and get free. He then stumbles upon Helena and gives her a parachute but Voller tries to get it from them until he is disarmed. Helena and Indy jump with the parachute while Voller and Klaber crash with the plane.On the ground, Indy is in awe of what he is witnessing, like a little boy seeing his dream come true. As he tells Helena to leave him there and get back to the plane of Teddy (who landed safe nearby), Archimedes, who just saw the corpse of Voller (horribly burned, his face can’t be recognized), and his watch, and took the complete dial from him, come to meet Indy and Helena. Indy talks to him in greek. As Helena tells him that Archimedes has “rigged” the dial, in making sure it only sends back to Syracuse on the day of the siege so that they could save him, we understand it’s thanks to this jump in time that he found his knowledge about watches and on how to complete the dial.Helena desperately tries to convince Indy to get back to the present with him, and tells him he would change the course of history by saying, but he refuses to listen to her and says there is nothing for him in 1969. She then punches him and the screen fades to black.
Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny Ending
Indy wakes up back in his bed in NYC, with a lot of bandages on him and several pills around the room. As he gets out of bed, he finds Helena and reproaches her of having brought him back to the present although there is nothing for him there. She says there is though and at this point we see Marion (clearly aged) entering the apartment with a bag of groceries and saying that there was no food at all in the fridge. Indy is shocked to see her here and asks her why she’s back, she says she has been told he has returned and then asks him “if Indy has returned” – which means he was also not the same after Mutt’s death, i.e the drinking problems maybe ? -. Teddy and Sallah arrive and Teddy asks for ice cream but Helena tells him they can go get it outside – he says Marion brought ice cream and Helena claims the ones outside are better, clearly looking to let Marion and Indy some intimacy. As they head out we hear Sallah sing the song he sang after being kissed by Marion in Raiders.Then Marion asks Indy is his shoulder hurt and he asks her back where it hurts, she says “everywhere” (meaning emotional pain I guess), except on her elbow, and they re-enact the boat scene from Raiders in reverse before Indy kisses her. Then the camera moves to the balcony of the apartment where we see Indy’s hat drying on a drying line on an airer. The screen reduces into a small circle like in the Tom & Jerry cartoons, circling the hat and appearing to end there… just before we see Indy’s hand getting the hat back inside. The end!
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is all set to release in theatres on June 30, 2023.
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