Indiana Jones: Religion or Mathematics?
In which the latest Jones movie asks which one has the ultimate power
I was watching “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” the fifth Jones movie that I find to be a clunker.
It’s now out in theaters. You might as well just read this and not waste 150 minutes of your life and $10 on a ticket.
You might think a stupid movie has nothing much in it. But no, I found something, just as Jones tomb-raids old temples and ancient graves.
Early in the movie, the scriptwriters give us a feint. They make us think that Jones is going after an object of ultimate worth and power. This object is the “Lance of Longinus.”
This is the lance purported to have pierced Jesus Christ’s side during his crucifixion, a holy relic that might have the same magical power that the Holy Grail had back in the third Jones romp, “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989).
Jones has risked his life to go into — um, what? — Nazi Germany during WW2 to find it. The opening scene has him disguising himself on a Nazi train, during a WW2 battle, just to fetch the lance.
But guess what? The lance is a FAKE.
During the discovery of this fakery, we find the real object that the characters end up searching after throughout the movie, Archimedes’ "Dial of Destiny.”
We are told by the Nazis that this is the object of ultimate power. The bad guy claims that the dial has the “power of God.” Unlike the lance of Longinus, which has no power because it’s a fraud.
Why does the dial have such power?
We don’t really know except that people can travel through “fissures of time” using it, and thereby end or change history.
What ensues throughout the movie is one long dull chase after this object — actually, they have half of it and they are trying to find the other half. As is typical in this fare, we hope that the bad guys find it so that we can see somebody use it. Because this movie would be dull as peeling paint if nobody ended up using the dial.
Which means that this kind of movie makes us root for the Nazis. But try not to think about that!
Now, what does it mean that the Lance of Longinus is a fake and the real object of power is mathetmatical, which is the Dial?
We are told that a couple of times. The Dial is “physical” and “mathematical,” and that is therefore the real “power of God.” Whereas the religious artifact is meaningless and pointless.
This caught my attention early on, because the filmmakers were obviously forsaking the holy-relic quest of past Jones movies and substituting Archimedes’ dial as the 21st-century brand of power.
Control math and you control everything. A good old 21st century view of reality, or certainly Google’s.
Were the moviemakers also knocking religion by making the lance a fraud?
You might think so, and I can definitely see some religious conservatives saying so.
But then this is a royally expensive B-movie that is supposed to be corny and ridiculous. So that’s one strike against this conclusion.
And yet there’s a much more powerful strike against it, which is the movie’s ending.
Spoilers now ensue.
The entire direction of the movie is for the Nazis to use the dial to go back in time to — um, what? — kill Adolf Hitler.
Apparently, the bad-guy Nazi, a German physicist who helped NASA land on the moon, is still a bad-guy Nazi. And his cockamamie theory is that if he kills Hitler in 1939, the Nazis will win WW2. Or something.
Anyway, they use the dial. But they don’t consider the fact that — um, what? — Archimedes didn’t know about continental drift. (I can only imagine Harrison Ford reading this script and asking himself why oh why he has to announce this with a straight face.)
That somehow means that the dial doesn’t take them back to 1939; it instead takes them back to Archimedes.
Specifically, the siege of Syracuse. Naturally, the historian Indiana Jones is amazed to see Roman triremes. I ho-hummed because the whole thing, the climax of the movie really, looked like a cutscene in Civilization VI (a video game). It’s an uninteresting battle scene that would’ve been done better with 1950s tech by Cecil DeMille.
Jones meets his hero, Archimedes, the genius mathematician who controls space and time by making a gear-based dial that allows anybody to time-travel. If I were taking this movie seriously, I’d say this is a Jesus-Christ moment: the main characters meet their god or savior. After all, we’ve been told this genius made something that can control or end history, which is the power of God.
I have never seen a duller historical figure in a movie than Archimedes in this stinker.
He has a beard and he stares. That’s about it.
Early in the movie, students snore during Jones’ lecture on the siege of Syracuse and Archimedes. If they watched this movie, they would keep snoring all the way to the end credits. Meeting Archimedes is the climax of the most expensive movie ever made? Um, what?
Now, when the script tells us that the dial is the most awesome artifact imaginable, there has to be a payoff of gigantic proportions. In ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ and ‘The Last Crusade,’ we get that kind of payoff with the holy relics. The ark of the covenant fries the Nazis, and the holy grail heals the sick, effectively raising the dead.
What does the Dial of Destiny actually do? Nothing except take you to Archimedes.
All the hype about this MacGuffin and it ends up being pointless and stupid.
That makes me think that the declaration of holy-relics as fakes and the Dial as the real “power of God” is undermined at the end of the movie. Entirely undermined.
I don’t know if that’s intentional, but I doubt it. Instead, if a movie sucks, as this one does I think, then it’s bound to undermine its claims. Here, if this movie is claiming that religion contains no power but mathematics does, most of us are coming out of this one believing the opposite.
In the end, much as I hate to say this, I preferred the aliens at the end of “Crystal Skull” to time-travel-and-meet Archimedes at the end of this movie.
At least aliens, dumb as they are in “Crystal Skull,” are a bizarre if not exciting payoff.