Sometimes, you are just tired. So tired. Life has been going wrong in so many different ways, and even the adventures of your youth weigh you down. When they come back to drag you out of retirement, though . . . This month, Eve and I are taking Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny for a spin. The movie takes an 80-year-old Indiana Jones and visits him with the consequences of a promise broken to a dear friend 20 years ago. Before he knows it, Indiana Jones has teamed up with his goddaughter to save the world from a megalomaniac Nazi with plans to change history with the help of Archimedes’s Dial; a dial so precise that it is not only able to predict planetary positions and weather but rips in the fabric of time itself. Jones’s mission is complicated even further by his goddaughter’s love of money and dangerous debt.
Eighty-one-year-old Harrison Ford dons the fedora and swings the whip one last time as Indiana Jones in the character’s swan song, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Some old friends rejoin him, like John Rhys-Davies as Sallah and Karen Allen as Marion. For this movie, he’s paired with Phoebe Waller-Bridge as his goddaughter Helena, Ethan Isidore as Teddy, and veterans Antonio Banderas and Toby Jones in brand new roles.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny primarily takes place in 1969, with flashbacks to 1945 to recount how he and Basil first came into possession of Archimedes’s Dial, called the Antikythera. Throughout the movie, we see them losing, chasing, regaining, and re-losing this device several times as we learn more about Herr Voller and Helena. Without spoiling the ending, the movie wraps with an interesting philosophical twist.
The music for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is composed by the incredible 91-year-old John Williams, and he’s not lost his touch at all.
As we record this episode, the movie The Sound of Freedom by Angel Studios is in theaters and doing well but can do better. It has become a center of controversy between conservative and liberal elements in news and social media. The critical part for us is that it drives home an important message, highlighting the problems of human trafficking, particularly children. If you have yet to see it, please consider doing so.
First Impressions
Quite a few scenes in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny take place in the past, and both he and Toby Jones are digitally de-aged for them. Some have complained about its distracting effect on the movie, but neither Eve nor I really noticed it. Whatever process they used to create the scenes has avoided the uncanny valley we’ve seen in the past, at least for us.
While the movie was enjoyable, we both felt that there was a tremendously missed opportunity for a decent character arc for Indy’s goddaughter Helena. The only motive they ever gave for her was greed and to pay off a debt with some “bad people.” Yet, by the movie’s end, she’s clearly not driven by that motivation anymore; we don’t know the new motivation. The creative team had a chance to provide her with a redemption arc here, but they either utterly missed it, or it ended up on the cutting room floor.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is the fifth movie in the Indiana Jones franchise. It takes some of its backstory queues from the fourth film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but not enough to impact your potential enjoyment.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is the second major franchise in which Harrison Ford has reprised a role he pioneered in his early adulthood. In both, he is playing the heavily cliched character of the “grumpy old man.” For me, using this trope drives home Hollywood’s rut of recycling. They are so hung up on the formulas that were successful in the past that they seem unwilling to risk any new ideas.
For me, the writing could have been better. The writers should have taken the road less traveled and delivered an unexpected experience for the audience. I wish they’d been a bit braver.
Motivation
Early on, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny sets the stage for conflicting motivations between Indy and his goddaughter Helena. He’s motivated by an altruistic desire to preserve history for everyone to see and learn from, while Helena is clearly in it for the money. We learn a little later that she owes money to some dangerous people, but that tidbit is not presented in any redemptive way; she didn’t borrow the money to pay for an orphan’s cleft lip surgery or anything. She’s simply making bad choices. By the movie’s end, her motivation had changed, but there wasn’t anywhere that Eve or I could put our finger on and say, “this is where” or “this is why.”
Just like we discussed in our last episode, motivation is an important topic for believers. As Christians, we are motivated by many things, but mainly by the promises in the Word of God. But to be motivated by the promises of God, we need to know about them. That requires a willingness to study scripture. Time spent in the work, learning what we can about God, is pleasing to Him:
For I desire faithful love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. (Hosea 6:6)
It is in that same Word of God that we see that God cares about what drives us:
All a person’s ways seem right to him, but the Lord weighs motives. (Proverbs 16:2)
In Matthew chapter 6, Christ speaks directly to the issue of motives:
Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. Otherwise, you have no reward with your Father in heaven … No one can serve two masters, since either he will hate one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money. (Matthew 6:1, 24)
In Mark, Jesus makes the point even more apparent. It’s not what a person consumes that defiles him, but the contents of his heart:
He said to them, “Are you also as lacking in understanding? Don’t you realize that nothing going into a person from the outside can defile him? For it doesn’t go into his heart but into the stomach and is eliminated” (thus he declared all foods clean). And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of people’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immoralities, thefts, murders, adulteries, greed, evil actions, deceit, self-indulgence, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile a person.” (Mark 7:18-23)
The heart’s motivations can either build a believer up or tear them down.
Our ungodly passions also drive wedges in our community of believers. When James wrote his epistle, he was speaking to believers, not to unbelievers:
What is the source of wars and fights among you? Don’t they come from your passions that wage war within you? You desire and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and wage war. You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and don’t receive because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures. (James 4:1-3)
There’s a valid question behind the motivation for some praise and worship music that has proliferated through the more contemporary churches lately. Is a song written to praise God or to make money? These kinds of questions should drive us to consider motivations as well.
It’s Not Magic; It’s Math!
Several times during Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, we hear the phrase repeated, “It’s not magic; it’s math,” almost as if they are trying to explain away the supernatural elements of Indiana Jones’s life. At one point, Helena asks Indy if he believes in magic, to which he replies, “I don’t believe in magic, Wombat. But sometimes in my life, I saw things. Things I can’t explain. And I came to believe that it is not so much what do you believe but how strongly do you believe it?” This doesn’t really hold up to the franchise canon, though. Looking at each of the previous films, you see LOTS of unexplainable things that cannot just be “belief.”
- Raiders of the Lost Ark – the Ark of the Covenant is opened and melts the bad guys
- Temple of Doom – The witch doctor reaches into a guys chest and pulls out his still beating hear
- Last Crusade – water from the Holy Grail heals a bullet wound
- Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – Alien Space Ship is revived and takes off in front of their eyes
The quote hints at a relativistic post-truth philosophy; each person can have their own truth as long as they believe it hard enough. In Dial of Destiny, we see a desire to explain away all the supernatural as a combination of individual belief and “sufficiently advanced technology.” I found this sad, given how reassuringly the first and third movies embraced the supernatural power of God.
Eliminating the supernatural from the human psyche is a not-so-subtle way to dismiss God. We must never forget that God does not exist in our world—we live in His. The more we understand, the less we grasp. So much of what is “supernatural” is natural but beyond our understanding. God’s power and will is so far beyond the limits of our comprehension that we can’t even begin to grasp it. The Psalmist knew this, using imagery of the Leviathan to drive the point home:
How countless are your works, LORD! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. Here is the sea, vast and wide, teeming with creatures beyond number—living things both large and small. There the ships move about, and Leviathan, which you formed to play there. (Psalm 104:24-26)
Eve wasn’t quite as annoyed by the portrayal of a scientific artifact in Dial of Destiny rather than a supernatural one. As a young-earth creationist, she believes that ancient man was much more intelligent and capable of scientific advancement than the current evolutionary assumptions have proscribed. If you’d like to research more examples of just how smart our ancestors were, check out The Puzzle of Ancient Man by Dr. Donald Chittick.
Destiny
The primary mechanic driving the overreaching plot of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is the idea that the Antikythera is so precise that it cannot only predict planetary positions and weather but rips in the fabric of time itself. The idea that this is mathematically predictable assumes that time is fixed and unalterable—that destiny is immutable. This movie doubles down on this idea by including anachronisms within the tomb of Archimedes, like plane propellers and a wristwatch foreshadowing the movie’s penultimate scene that takes place back in 213 B.C. at the siege of Syracuse. Including these items means that what was yet to happen for Indy and Helena had already happened for Archimedes, creating the entire self-fulfilling prophecy. It also means that the bad guy, Dr. Voller, played by Mads Mikkelsen, had already failed to bring back the Third Reich and correct Hitler’s mistakes.
Destiny is in the movie’s title, though, which is interesting because anytime you bring time travel into the mix, you imply that nothing in history is fixed. Many stories have been written about time travel, both good and bad, and Eve enjoyed The City of God series by Randy Ingermanson. They begin with an attempt to thwart an assassination attempt of the Apostle Paul and sound very interesting—check them out!
Recall, though, that God’s power and will is so far beyond our comprehension that not even time hides mysteries from him:
The word of the LORD came to me: I chose you before I formed you in the womb; I set you apart before you were born. I appointed you a prophet to the nations. (Jeremiah 1:4–5)
Despite every decision that every single one of our ancestors has made since Adam and Eve, God knew and chose us before the earth’s formation.
Obsession
Two characters in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny are burdened with obsession. Toby Jones’s character, Basil Shaw (who is also Helena’s father), is obsessed with the Antikythera and learning its secrets. Doctor Voller is obsessed with fixing Hitler’s mistakes and restoring the Third Reich.
It’s easy to write obsession off as a form of idolatry but remember they are not the same thing. True obsession, like depicted in the movie, is a mental illness. It is a direct result of the fall. Folks who are truly obsessed are victims of the fall as much as anyone. Idolatry should not be written off, though:
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride in one’s possessions—is not from the Father, but is from the world. And the world with its lust is passing away, but the one who does the will of God remains forever. (1 John 2:15-17)
Are You Just Watching? is listener supported. Special thanks to our current patrons: Isaias Santillano, Craig Hardee, Stephen Brown II, David Lefton, and Peter Chapman for their generous support. We can't continue to share critical thinking for the entertained Christian without your financial help, so please head on over to our Patreon page and become one of our supporting patrons! What did you think of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny? We would like to know, even if just your reactions to the trailer or the topics we shared in this episode. Or what general critical-thinking and entertainment thoughts or questions do you have? Would you like to suggest a movie or TV show for us to give a Christian movie review with critical thinking?Please support the podcast!
Share your feedback!
Please connect with us
1 comment on “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny – AYJW142”