Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

I’ve written before on many occasions about my longtime obsession with Indiana Jones. I first saw Raiders of the Lost Ark in the theater the summer I turned 11 years old, and was there for each of the three sequels on the opening weekend. A trip to Disney World a few years ago got me on a serious Indiana Jones kick and in the span of a few months I rewatched all of the movies, all of the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, read all of the Marvel and Dark Horse comics and a huge pile of Rob MacGregor novels. I found that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was much better than I remembered from my one viewing on opening weekend, and that The Last Crusade was even better than I remembered and I remembered it being awesome, and that the original Raiders film is pretty much without a single flaw.

But when there were the first rumblings that Harrison Ford would be reprising the role in a fifth feature film, I was skeptical. Ford is still a fantastic actor, but he’s a little long in the tooth to be an action star. Admittedly, James Mangold’s Logan made it clear he knew how to handle the story of an aging adventurer, but I remained unconvinced. Willing to be convinced, but skeptical.

Then I saw the trailer yesterday, and all of my doubts evaporated. I have no idea what’s happening here, or what this has to do with what appears to be the Antikythera mechanism. Is Phoebe Waller-Bridge playing Marcus Brody’s daughter, or granddaughter? Or is she one of Sallah’s kids who went off to school in the UK? Are those Nazis who got recruited in Operation Paperclip who are up to no good years later? I don’t know, and at the moment, I don’t care. Because that’s Indiana Jones, dammit. I’m sold. That’s the GUY.

I went into the trailer skeptical, but by the end I was grinning from ear to ear. And I’ll be there on opening day to see what happens, just like I’ve been doing for the last four decades.