Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is the fifth and final Indiana Jones movie featuring Harrison Ford (Star Wars, Witness, Blade Runner) in the series of movies about an American Archeologist who, in this story, travels all over the globe at different times with different generations of friends to track down the Dial of Destiny, a tool that was made by the great Greek mathematician Archimedes during his time to allegedly travel through time in order to augment to knowledge. Jones is not alone on his quest to gain the parts of the Dial of Destiny as he is joined by Hollywood rising star Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Solo) who plays Indiana's Goddaughter Helena who is also the daughter of one of the men that Jones was originally assigned to work with when he was initially tasked to go after valuable artifacts during World War II. The pair, along with newcomer Ethann Isidore (Mortel) who plays young Teddy, make for an interesting cross-generational group that has each other's back around each perilous corner and has enough trust in each other to see the mission through!! The Dial of Destiny, as I will be calling the movie for the remainder of this review, is a tremendous movie!! It took courage for the writers to introduce time travel into an Indiana Jones film after many long-time fans complained about the unbelievability of aliens at the end of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull but like Indy says in the movie all it comes down to is how hard do you believe!! Plus time travel really was one of the mystical topics that the writers of the Indy series had not touched on yet and they did it here!! James Mangold did a fine job directing this film, it could not have been easy to jump from one era being World War II to the late 1960's and free love all the way back to the days of the Roman Empire in terms of directing a film but Mangold pulled it off flawlessly!! Six writers contributed to write a story that flowed well and had very few lulls in it. Even with Ford in his late 70's age-wise during filming there was great actioning throughout the film and Waller-Bridge certainly someday could take the brown fedora and whip if she wanted to!! The soundtrack by John Williams is outstanding and in my opinion is Oscar worthy!! Joanna Johnston did a fantastic job costuming ALL of the characters from ALL of the eras, no easy task by any means!! The Dial of Destiny received a PG-13 rating when it was released this year in 2023 and ran two hours and twenty-three minutes. Eight out of ten stars!!
Review of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
