THIS PAST WEEK I viewed the new action-and-adventure movie entitled "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny," the fifth and final in the series. The powerful score is, once again, by John Williams, and I found the acting consistently good, as with the prior films of the series. By some reports, the movie has not been a commercial success; but that, of course, does not mean anything in the realm of cinema appreciation and certainly means nothing to me. I really enjoyed the film.
Particularly trenchant, in the nonstop action, is the early scene, right after the younger character, the anthropology Ph.D. named Helena Shaw, introduces herself to the now-senior professor, Indiana Jones, at Hunter College in New York City. She is the daughter of Basil Shaw, a deceased Oxford scholar of antiquity and a professional colleague of Jones, and she is Indy's goddaughter. At her request Jones gives her one-half of Archimedes's Dial, an Antikythera mechanism (an ancient Greek hand-made model of the solar system) devised by the mathematician of ancient Syracuse, Archimedes. It can reveal fissures or warps in time, thus allowing for travel through time. Concerned about its power, Archimedes broke the machine into two halves that he separately buried and hid.
In 1945, at the very end of World War II, Jones and Shaw escaped death in their daring rescue of one half of Archimedes's Dial from wartime destruction--and they prevented its delivery to Hitler--and now in 1969 an unregenerate Nazi astrophysicist, Jürgen Voller, is determined to obtain both halves of the device and to use it to reverse the outcome of that war. After the war, Basil gave that half of the machine to Jones, who had stored it in his archaeological lab at Hunter.
The movie then moves to 1969, where, with Nixon as the new President, the counterculture is blossoming and student demonstrations are surging against the War in Viet Nam; and that is the swirling context in which Jones is now retiring from academia. When, right after the obligatory retirement reception at the College, Helena asks Indiana for the half of the Dial that her father had entrusted to him, Jones obliges. Helena immediately runs away with it, just as Voller and his henchmen, who have been trailing Helena, burst in, seeking to take the Dial.
Helena escapes. Voller's men take Jones at gunpoint and seek to escape the Hunter College campus in a Con Ed van. But the students are marching everywhere against the Viet Nam war, and the captors, with Jones under their gunpoints are forced to go on foot--right through the middle of a mass of student demonstrators, who are shouting anti-war slogans in unison.
I was surprised when Jones joined the students in the streets chanting "Hell no, we won't go!" His vocal participation--still in the captivity of the gun-toting henchmen of Voller--grows more and more vehement, surprising both the students who are marching and also his captors. His own fervent opposition to this unfair and falsely-premised war is on full display. Why?
The film reveals that Jones and his wife Marion are separated, driven apart by the grief resulting from the death of their only son, Mutt, in Viet Nam. As an act of rebellion against his father who opposed it, Mutt had enlisted. So Indiana's opposition to the war had been intensified; and his objection to the war found expression in the movie in his joining in the student chanting of "Hell no, we won't go." That point resonated with me, as I once marched against that unjust war as a college student!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQfMbSe7F2g