Harrison Ford is donning his signature brown leather hat and cracking the whip one last time. On December 1, Walt Disney Studios released the first trailer for the long-awaited fifth film in the Indiana Jones series, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
In a recent interview with Empire, director James Mangold–the first non-Steven Spielberg director in the franchise’s storied history–said he sought to capture the magic of the original trilogy, while also making the passage of time feel more tangible to the viewers.
“I wanted the chance to dive into this kind of full-on George [Lucas]-and-Steven old picture and give the audience an adrenaline blast,” he explained. “And then we fall out, and you find yourself in 1969. So that the audience doesn’t experience the change between the ‘40s and ‘60s as an intellectual conceit, but literally experiences the buccaneering spirit of those early days… and then the beginning of now.”
To that end, the film will lean heavily on de-aging technology similar to the techniques used in various recent Star Wars properties and films like The Irishman. The end result usually has an uncanny valley feel to it, but Ford is boasting that that won’t be the case here. “This is the first time I’ve seen it where I believe it,” he told Empire.
Content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
Mangold described the film as being “about a hero at sunset,” an allusion to the bittersweet tone of finality likely to permeate Dial of Destiny. Mangold captured a similar emotion in 2017’s Logan, which served as a coda to the Hugh Jackman Wolverine arc, and earned widespread critical praise. In his own interview with Empire this month, Ford explained why he came back to the film, saying, “I just thought it would be nice to see one where Indiana Jones was at the end of his journey.”
The first Dial of Destiny trailer introduces a few key new characters, including Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Jones’ goddaughter Helena and Mads Mikkelsen looking rather villainous. while also showing us the return of John Rhys-Davies as gregarious archaeological excavator Sallah, who establishes the film’s wistful tone in an opening monologue about his past days exploring the world. Concrete plot details are scant, but we do get a choice line from Indy that hints there may be something supernatural-seeming afoot. “I don’t believe in magic, but a few times in my life I’ve seen things, things I can’t explain, and I’ve come to believe it’s not so much what you believe as how hard you believe it,” he says.
The franchise has been dormant for more than 14 years, when Steven Spielberg directed Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the fourth installment that saw Ford star alongside Cate Blanchett and Shia LaBeouf. Though it did well commercially and received largely positive reviews at the time, Crystal Skull has been derided in the years since, especially the infamous “Nuking the fridge” scene, which became a meme of its own. the fifth film has officially been in the works since 2016, and marred by a series of delays—the original release year was 2019— including injuries to Ford.
The trailer has several callbacks to Indy bits of yore, including the closing scene when an overmatched Jones has brought a whip to a gunfight, an allusion to the iconic Raiders of the Lost Ark scene Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny will release next summer on June 30.