Film / Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Spoilers for all Indiana Jones works preceding this one will be left unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

A legend will face his destiny.

Sallah: Indy, I... I miss the desert. I miss the sea. And I miss waking up every morning, wondering what wonderful adventure the new day will bring to us.
Indiana: This is not an adventure, Sallah. Those days have come and gone.
Sallah: Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a 2023 adventure film, and the fifth entry in the Indiana Jones film franchise. In a franchise first, Steven Spielberg is only credited as executive producer on the film, with James Mangold (of Walk the Line, Logan and Ford v Ferrari fame) in the director's chair instead. Franchise co-creator George Lucas also returned as an executive producer as well, but not a writer, with Jez and John-Henry Butterworth (Edge of Tomorrow, Ford v Ferrari) instead writing the script with Mangold and David Koepp. Lastly, the film is the first and only Indiana Jones film to be released by Disney instead of Paramount (though the latter still gets an "in association with" label credit).

Set shortly after the Moon Landing in 1969, the film tells the story of the last big adventure of Dr. Henry "Indiana" Jones (Harrison Ford), with the adventurer working alongside his goddaughter Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) and his old friend Sallah (John Rhys-Davies). They come into conflict with a former Nazi doctor named Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), who fought against Indy during World War II, and seeks to use the titular Dial of Destiny to rectify the Nazis' mistakes.

The film also stars Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood, Antonio Banderas as Renaldo, Toby Jones as Basil Shaw, Boyd Holbrook as Klaber and Ethann Isidore as Teddy Kumar. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 18, 2023, and was released on June 30, 2023.

Trailers: Trailer 1, Big Game TV Spot, Official Trailer.

---

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny provides examples of:

Tropes # to E

• 11th-Hour Ranger: A random airplane pilot named Luigi is caught up in the last leg of the adventure when Teddy hijacks his plane with him in it to pursue Voller through the time fissure.
• The '60s: Having left off in 1957 in the previous film, the Indiana Jones timeline now jumps ahead over a decade to the final year of the 1960s. The present day narrative begins concurrently with the Apollo 11 moon landing and the Vietnam War is still unfolding in the background. Vietnam ends up being important to the backstory, as Mutt Williams enlisted and died overseas in the interim since Kingdom.
• Aborted Arc: Indy ends up the main suspect in the murders of his colleagues early in the film. When he returns to 1969, this is left unresolved.
• Action Dress Rip: Helena rips both sleeves off her top (one of them already having been damaged in the altercation in the hotel) to free her arms before she attempts a High-Speed Hijack by leaping from the tuk-tuk on to the back of Voller's car.
• Action Prologue: The film opens in 1944, with Indy and Basil caught by Colonel Weber and his Nazis while searching for the Lance of Longinus. The Lance proves to be a fake, but the two manage to kill Weber and steal half of the Dial from Voller before escaping.
• Actor Allusion:
  • Thomas Kretschmann's character isn't exaggerating when he yells at Voller for suggesting that showing the incomplete Antikythera would lessen the terrible situation that they're delivering a fake Lance of Longinus to the Führer, asking if Voller even met Hitler in person. After all, he's been on receiving end of Hitler's wrath many times before.
  • This isn't the first time that Karen Allen's character was separated from her husband.
  • Harrison Ford is used to using the word "retire" as a euphemism for "kill."
    • Also, this isn't the first (or second time for that matter) that Harrison Ford has to separate from his wife because something happened to one of their children.
  • This is not the first time Boyd Holbrook has played the role of a main henchman tasked with tracking down an older protagonist and his younger female sidekick in a movie directed by James Mangold.
  • Toby Jones was previously in another franchise that features a Nazi antagonist hell-bent on getting a supernatural artifact to win the war, a Project Paperclip scientist (with no experience at firing weapons), and a protagonist who travels back in time and wishes to stay there. However, he's on the Allied side this time.
  • This isn't the first time the fifth film in a franchise has revealed that Shia LaBeouf's character suffered a Bus Crash.
  • This isn't the first time Mads Mikkelsen plays a character who dies onscreen in a version of ancient Greece.
  • This isn't the first time John Rhys-Davies enters the room to find the protagonist just regaining his consciousness after the big showdown.
• Agent Scully: Indy comments that he doesn't believe in magic, although he admits that he's seen things in his life that he can't explain.
• Alliterative Title: The subtitle, Dial of Destiny, in a franchise first.
• All for Nothing:
  • Indy's mission to recover the Lance of Longinus in the prologue turns out to be this, as the Nazis didn't have the 1900-year-old relic, only a 50-year-old replica.
  • What Voller's efforts to reassemble the Antikythera amount to: it turns out that Archimedes rigged the Antikythera to always point to a rift that leads to the battle of Syracuse in 213 BC, meaning that Voller's plan to go to 1939 was never going to work.
• Alternate History: In real life, the Romans won the 213 B.C. siege of Syracuse and sacked the city. In the film, the Greeks manage to make a comeback thanks to the Romans getting scared off due to mistaking Voller and Teddy's planes for dragons, which in turn was caused by Archimedes' time travel shenanigans. Although since the actual siege of Syracuse lasted for months, and Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier during the siege, the Romans will clearly be back to try again later on.
• Ambiguous Situation: When Helena meets up with Indy at the start, is she lying about studying for her doctorate? While she quickly establishes herself to be highly knowledgeable about archaeology in general and the Dial in particular, she steals the half of it that was in Indy's possession and is very quick to try to sell it to the highest bidder (although she could well have been planning to double-cross said highest bidder before Indy and then Voller showed up). The doctorate story could be a ruse to gain Indy's trust, as he's her (estranged) godfather who has been a university lecturer for decades and would surely respect any young person looking to continue their studies in his chosen subject.
• Anachronistic Clue: When examining the tomb of Archimedes, Helena notices that the phoenix on the frieze on the side of the tomb has propellers. Just after she points this out, Indy discovers the body inside the tomb is wearing a wristwatch.
• And the Adventure Continues: The very last shot is Indy picking up his hat. He may be retired from academia, but he will never retire from being Indiana Jones.
• Answer Cut: Helena brings Indy back from Syracuse because she believes the world still needs him. He asks her who could possible still need him? Cue Marion walking in the door.
• Appeal to Force: At the end, when Helena can't convince Indy to return to the present, she wins the argument by punching her opponent's lights out.
• Arc Symbol: Clocks. The titular Dial resembles a clock, Indy's retirement present is a clock (which he quickly fobs off onto a passerby), at one point Teddy pickpockets a watch off Indy, Archimedes' body has a 60s era watch on it which turns out to be Voller's taken off his corpse in the past, and when Indy wakes up in his apartment in the present, some focus is given to the ticking of a clock next to his bed.
• Are You Sure You Can Drive This Thing?: Teddy needs to follow Indy and Voller through a time fissure in the sky. The only way to do this is to fly a plane. In spite of having never flown a plane before, Teddy succeeds at following them:
  Helena: You think you can fly one of those?
  Teddy: A Nord? Sure.
  Helena: It's not a ringing response.
  Teddy: Well, I haven't flown a Nord.
  Helena: You've never flown any plane.
• Armor-Piercing Question: When Indy asks Helena why she's chasing the artifact that drove her father crazy, she simply replies, "Wouldn't you?" Of course the unspoken answer is "yes", since he previously joined his own father hunting for Jones Sr.'s obsession, so he agrees to help her.
• Artistic License – History:
  • The real-life "Dial of Destiny" (the Antikythera mechanism) doesn't look at all like its movie counterpart — it was wrecked by being at the bottom of the sea for two-thousand years. The real mechanism post-dates Archimedes by at least a decade, if not more (components of the mechanism have been dated at ranges from 205 BCE to 87 BCE; the earliest date is seven years after Archimedes died). Furthermore, the film repeatedly just calls it "the Antikythera", which is nonsense because it was named after a Greek island where it was discovered; its name just means "opposite from Kythera," a larger island across a neighboring strait. Finally, it was found on a cargo vessel, with no signs of Roman legionnaires on it as the film suggests.
  • While there was a real-life ticker-tape parade for the Apollo 11 astronauts held in New York City on August 13, 1969, the route never took place on the Upper East Side near Hunter College.
  • While Indy flies from New York to North Africa via PanAm, Helena is on a Royal Air Maroc flight. The Royal Air Maroc airline didn't start doing flights to and from New York until 1975.
  • The Sicilians and Romans confuse the German plane for dragons, but the concept of dragons as flying creatures is a medieval invention; dragons of classical myth were very large but otherwise typical snakes.
  • Linear B and Polybius Squares are two possible 'codes' on the Graphikos; in the case of the former, Linear B is called out as not being a language, despite it literally being the alphabet that Mycanaean Greek was written in. In the case of the latter, Polybius Squares were first described by Polybius in Volume 10 of his Histories... which he started writing forty years after Archimedes died. Polybius himself wouldn't even be born until 200 BCE, twelve years after the Siege of Syracuse ended.
  • Any archaeologist can tell you that leather generally doesn't stay preserved, especially in a warm and humid climate like the Mediterranean; despite this, when Jones and Helena come upon Archimedes's tomb, they find a modern wristwatch on his corpse, missing the face plate so Archimedes could analyze the interior... but with the leather strap completely intact!
• Artistic License – Military:
  • During the last act, Voller is greeted by his henchmen as "Herr Oberst", a correct way to address an officer in the German military (this is a rank equivalent to colonel). However, this is a Wehrmacht rank, while he's wearing a SS uniform. They should be saying "Standartenführer".
  • It is stated that the Roman ship carrying one half of the dial was guarded by a hundred centurions. Roman centurions were senior legionaires in charge of a century (60-80 legionaires). Centurions were all tough, veteran soldiers but their primary roles were as the legions' field-grade officers. They were not primarily bodyguards or special forces. A Roman legion would have about 60 centurions who were responsible for running the legion's day-to-day operations. It is highly unlikely that a Roman general would strip a legion of most of its officers to guard an artifact like the Dial. He would assign 1-2 trusted veteran centuries led by senior centurions.
• Artistic License – Physics: Any fan of Mythbusters will tell you that the 'Archimedian Death Ray' made up of concave mirrors doesn't work as assumed in real life; Indy professes this invention as factual in his archaeological lecture at the start of the film, and we see it in action at the Siege of Syracuse at the end. However, if the device itself really did exist (a matter of debate), it could've been used to disorient enemies instead. To the film's credit, the mirrors are not shown actually igniting any Roman ships afire.
• Badass Bystander: Credit must be given to Luigi, the pilot whose plane Teddy hijacks. Despite clearly being as scared out of his mind as everyone else is when both their plane and Voller's plane all fly through the storm and into the time rift, ending up at the Siege of Syracuse in ancient Sicily, every time we see him he is doing the best he can to walk Teddy through safely flying and landing the plane despite the increasingly chaotic situation. Most notably, he is also one of the very few bystanders across the whole movie who ends up getting caught up in the plot and lives to tell about it.
• Back for the Finale: The Nazis (in the form of Neo-Nazis) return as the franchise's final antagonists.
• Bait-and-Switch: During the beginning, there is a picture of Marion on Indy's fridge (as well as a picture of her during one of the flashback scenes) leading to set her up as a Picture Cameo only. Later, the actual Marion comes back with groceries, since there "wasn't a shred of food" in the apartment and starts to heal their relationship.
• Been There, Shaped History: Downplayed. It turns out that thanks to time travel, Indy, Helena, and Voller were all present at the Siege of Syracuse in 214 BC, although none of them have an appreciable impact on the battle itself. However, the appearance of a "dragon" (really a Heinkel He 111) seems to send a lot of Romans into retreat.
• Big Damn Heroes: A Roman soldier approaches Helena and Indy after seeing them parachute into Syracuse. The soldier is about to kill them with his sword when an archer accompanying Archimedes (who was also coming to investigate) nails the soldier just in time.
• Black Girl Dies First: Mason is the first major antagonist to die in the film, killed by Voller after she tries to reel in his behavior.
• Bookends:
  • Indy's final foes are the same as his first, as he faces off against Nazis (or at least ex-Nazis) one more time.
  • A chase sequence done in the midst of the rain opens and ends the film.
  • Weber and Voller are ultimately done in the same way: shot in the chest by a Shaw.
  • After the prologue, we see Indy wake up in his apartment. The movie also ends with him waking up in his apartment again after being knocked unconscious by Helena.
  • The very first shot we ever saw of Indy in Raiders was his hat (albeit from behind in silhouette). The very last shot of Indy is again his hat (albeit his hand grabbing it from off-screen).
• Bookshelf Dominoes: Indy kicks over the rows of shelves in the college archives, causing the shelves to topple over on top of Giant Mook Hauke.
• The Bus Came Back:
  • John Rhys-Davies returns to play Sallah for the first time since Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, though he plays a much more minor role than he had in that film.
  • Karen Allen also returns as Marion Ravenwood for a significant cameo in the epilogue.
  • After having been absent since Last Crusade (at least from the franchise's films), the Nazis return as the villains one last time both in the prologue and as the main villains of the film, albeit in the form of a group of neo-Nazis led by a former member of the Third Reich.
• Bus Crash: After playing a major role in the previous installment, it's mentioned that Mutt Williams was killed in action during The Vietnam War.
• Call-Back:
  • The music in the opening sequence set in 1944 pays heavy homage to that of Last Crusade, particularly the "Belly of the Steel Beast" track.
  • Once again, Indy wears a tie under his regular getup.
  • In the prologue, Nazi troops try climbing along the sides of the train car to get at Indy, like was tried on the truck in Raiders, and doesn't work out for them here either. And then the commander successfully climbing on the top instead and giving Indy a good beating, and Indy getting shot in the arm with a Luger, also happens again.
  • This isn't the first time Indiana Jones has been involved in a fight against Germans on a moving train.
  • Helena knows Indy well enough to know he wouldn't keep his promise to her father to destroy a valuable historic artifact, just as Belloq knew him well enough to call his bluff that he would destroy the Ark of the Covenant to keep it out of the hands of the Nazis in the first film.
  • In the Tangiers, Indy's whipping failing to impress/scare a room full of bad guys — and their response of trying to just shoot him — evokes the fight with the Cairo Swordsman 33 years earlier, but with Indy now having ironically switched places with the Swordsman.
  • Indy tries to keep back a group of eels living in the shipwreck with a flare, much like him and Marion trying to keep the snakes in the Well of Souls away with torches in Raiders.
  • Early in the film when Helena meets Indy in the diner to get help looking for the dial, Indy asks why she would spend so much time looking for the thing that drove her father crazy. She replies "Wouldn't you?" implying that she knows he did exactly that.
  • Helena refers to Indy as "Jonesy" at one point, something he clearly doesn't like.
  • Like in Raiders and Temple of Doom, Indy and party are in a corridor full of creepy-crawlies.
  • Indy and Helena have to deal with methane gas in an underground chamber, much like Indy and Elsa had to deal with oil while underground in Last Crusade.
  • Back in Temple of Doom, Indy declared that "fortune and glory" were his motives for adventuring, and he got entangled with a (Shanghai) mobster and his son at that time. While Indy's adventure motives changed long ago, his old motives are exactly what Helena's are today, and she got entangled with the son of a (Tangiers) mobster.
  • A subverted example; as in three of the previous films, there's a scene of Indy lecturing a class. But instead of his students being a rapt audience like in all the other times, now none of them listen to him at all.
  • When trying to determine who Voller plans to murder in the past, Indy pointedly references "Ike" as a possibility.
  • A subtle one to Raiders in the climax. When calling his "I'll destroy the Ark" bluff, Belloq told Indy that they were merely passing through history while the Ark was history. Now, traveling back to Ancient Syracuse and experiencing the Siege, Indy isn't merely passing through history; he's now part of history.
  • Indy and Marion's reunion has them reenacting the "Where doesn't it hurt" scene from Raiders, only with Indy doing the kissing.
  • Sallah sings a few verses of "A British Tar" from HMS Pinafore at the film's end.
• Casting Gag: Anthony Ingruber, who had played the younger version of Harrison Ford's character in The Age of Adaline, did motion-capture doubling of Ford as younger Indy in several scenes in the 1944 prologue. Ingruber also played a guest at the auction.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: Helena is particularly prone to this, as evidenced by her demeanour in the Tangiers scenes. Indy eventually calls her out on this.
• Chekhov's Classroom: Indy's opening lecture is about Archimedes' inventions, many of which have no archaeological proof attached. Helena interrupts him to ask about one in particular, the Antikythera and the film's MacGuffin. When they visit the Siege of Syracuse, Indy is overjoyed to see proof of Archimides' defenses.
• Chekhov's Skill: On board Renaldo's boat, Teddy says that he doesn't know how to swim. Renaldo replies that everyone can swim; it is just a matter of "reach and pull, reach and pull". Later, after Teddy falls into the underground river, he can be heard repeating "reach and pull" to himself as he swims away.
• Cigar-Fuse Lighting: While translating the tablet, Helena takes Dr. Voller's lit cigarette off him and takes a puff. She then holds it behind her back where Indy is able to touch it to the fuse of the stick of dynamite she has hidden in her pocket.
• Clear My Name: Indy's last great adventure starts with neo-Nazis murdering two of his colleagues in an attempt to steal an artifact from his college. The authorities assume that Indy did it, forcing him to pursue Helena to Tangier to retrieve the artifact and prove his innocence.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The previous film revealed Indy had fought in World War II (as an operative for the OSS). The 1944 prologue dramatizes one of those wartime adventures — albeit with a new companion, not Mac.
  • Marion's picture was taken during Raiders of the Lost Ark as she's wearing her Egyptian garb from that movie.
  • Indy's apartment has a photo of Henry Jones Sr. and the painting of the Grail from his father's house.
  • Indy mentions he is familiar with Tangiers. He'd previously visited the place as a boy in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.
  • Helena's explanation of how she met Teddy is almost identical to what Indy tells Willie Scott when he explains how he met Short Round in Temple of Doom, namely that she caught Teddy trying to pick her pocket but his persistence endeared him enough to her that she took him under her wing.
  • When climbing in the cave of Dionysus, Indy mentions being tortured with voodoo and drinking the blood of Kali.
  • At one point, Sallah can be heard telling his grandkids part of a story about Indy and Marion running away from an exploding plane.
• Contrived Coincidence: Downplayed, but since the dial only finds the rift but doesn't control them, the fact that one opens on Syracuse as it's under siege is one.
• Conveniently Placed Sharp Thing: After being captured by the Nazis at the start of the movie, Indy is able to palm a piece of broken glass when he is shoved on to some broken bottles on the floor, and later uses it cut his bonds. Later, during the climax, Indy uses the head of a ballista bolt stuck through the fuselage of the plane to cut the ropes on his hands.
• Cover Identity Anomaly: Voller says he is a professor at "Alabama University" rather than the "University of Alabama".^note Possibly a case of Alabama University being the film's expy for the actual university.
• Cowardly Lion: In the wartime prologue, Basil comes across as being somewhat out of his depth after being captured, but he nevertheless takes part in the traintop fight and is the one who shoots Colonel Weber.
• Crash Course Landing: Played with. Teddy is obsessed with aviation, and is shown having constructed a mock-up of the controls of a plane at his table in the hotel, and is getting a pilot to talk him through how to take-off his particular aircraft, with the implication that he has done this before with other pilots. This experience allows him to steal a plane in Syracuse and chase the bomber holding Indy, despite never actually having flown before.
• David Versus Goliath: Indy has trouble taking Voller's towering henchman Hauke, but eventually Teddy defeats him by chaining him to an underwater grate with handcuffs.
• Death by Irony: Indy's symbolic and literal intention to remain behind in Ancient Syracuse for his final days: He, an archeologist who's spent his entire life studying the past, now dying in it — especially as he feels he has no future.
• Decon-Recon Switch: Helena can be read as a deconstruction of more modern interpretations of the Adventurer Archaeologist trope. While Helena is ostensibly inspired by Indy and her father's adventures, she's a Dark Action Girl who wants to retrieve antiquities not to preserve and study them, but to profit off of them; for instance, her primary motive for acquiring the dial is paying off a gambling debt, and she is more than willing to sell it to a literal group of Nazis if it means she can get the money. She leans more heavily into the 'adventurer' half of the trope, even having her own Sidekick in the form of Teddy, and while she is knowledgeable about the dial and its adjacent MacGuffins, she's downright callous at times when it comes to the preservation of human life, let alone the preservation of antiquities; Jones snaps at her after she makes a dynamite-related quip in the aftermath of their escape from Renaldo's boat, during which yet another of Indy's friends died. However, it gets reconstructed, as she's shown to be fiercely loyal to both Teddy and Indy as the film goes on, and her Pragmatic Hero attitude does save their lives several times over the course of the film, ultimately culminating in her punching out Indy and dragging him back to 1969 by force.
• Deep South: Voller became a professor at the University of Alabama and his goons have Southern accents.
• Denser and Wackier: It's not obvious at first - and the film takes itself very seriously for the most part - but the plot concludes with a time travel to ancient times, where neo-Nazis (dressed up as the real deal) are fighting Romans for no reason other than being there, which is the sort of a twist you could only expect from a Film Serial. Even Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was open from the get-go it was going to involve The Greys.
• Dented Iron: Indy, after a hard life of adventure involving many injuries and now in his seventies, has finally hit the point where he can't physically keep up anymore. While still fairly spry for his age and able to throw a few decent punches, provided he takes his opponent off guard, he simply can't enact the same death defying stunts and lengthy brawls he used to.
  • He noticeably relies on riding on vehicles or horseback anytime there is a chase in order to keep up.
  • At multiple points he tries to take Voller's men in a fight but is repeatedly easily overpowered if they see him coming.
  • At one point, he gets tired out halfway up a relatively short climb and makes a point to complain to the much younger Helena about how much the years have worn him down. Apparently, in addition to all the adventuring he's done in his 70+ years of life, he's also suffering from regular old age-related problems as well, including "a plate in one knee and screws in the other".
  • Indy getting into Good Old Fisticuffs with a huge musclebound henchman like Hauke is a staple of these films, but since Indy is a geriatric old man and Hauke is a giant mountain of muscle, every "fight" just involves Hauke grabbing Indy by the shoulders and forcibly pushing him to the ground.
• Digital De-Aging: The Action Prologue set in 1944 has Harrison Ford digitally de-aged to appear as he did in the 1990s.
• Dirty Cop: Helena mentions that she paid off all the cops to protect her during the auction. The cops later back off when the Moroccan mobsters show up, implying that they are on their payroll, and they can afford to pay them more than Helena can.
• Dismantled MacGuffin: The Antikythera is incomplete when first discovered in the castle and needs to be assembled with two more pieces in order to resume function again.
• Disney Villain Death: The opening Traintop Battle ends with Indy throwing Colonel Weber off the train to his death. Later, during the final battle, Helena drops several Nazis off of Voller's plane to their deaths.
• Distaff Counterpart: With her somewhat relaxed approach to the illegal selling of antiquities and younger sidekick, Helena is basically the female equivalent of a younger (Temple of Doom-vintage) Indy.
• Divorce Is Temporary: At the beginning of the film, Indy and Marion are divorcing out of the grief of losing their son. And the end, they're back together, reenacting the "where does it hurt?" scene from Raiders.
• Doctor von Turncoat: Voller, a former Nazi scientist, was recruited by NASA to help with the Apollo Project; this is Truth in Television, as numerous Nazi scientists were recruited by the US government to help build their nascent rocketry program as part of Operation Paperclip after World War II. His profession as a professor at the University of Alabama is fitting, since their Huntsville campus played host to scientists like Wernher von Braun when they worked at the nearby Redstone Arsenal.
• Dressing as the Enemy: Indy spends much of the prologue in an SS uniform. The large bullet hole in the back explains how he got it, and gets him in trouble when some mooks he's trying to pull a Bavarian Fire Drill on notice it.
• Dumb Blonde: During Indy's lecture about the siege of Syracuse, one of his students (who as it happens is female, and blonde) thinks he's talking about the city in upstate New York.
• Dwindling Party: Villainous example. Voller starts off with a huge crew and massive amounts of resources in his hunt for the Antikythera but once Indiana Jones gets involved, he starts losing both manpower and resources until he's left with only a handful of loyal men and just enough equipment to get his plan off the ground once he finally has the artifact in his hands - and it still manages to get worse from there.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Indiana Jones starts the film as a depressed, bitter retired adventurer and soon-to-be-retired academic, and with a dead son and a fallen-apart-marriage with his One True Love, one gets the sense that at this point, Indy is just waiting to die. But, after being thrust into one more adventure with his god-daughter, Indy rekindles his love for archeology and adventure, puts the Nazis down one last time, and ultimately finds a reason to keep living in being a surrogate father to Helena (and Teddy) and in his love with Marion. Indiana Jones may never have found that "fortune and glory" he's been seeking all these years, but ultimately he finds that he has all the treasures he could ever need.
• "Eureka!" Moment:
  • As the plane approaches the temporal rift, Indy sees a bunch of pellets shifting on the floor. He realizes that Voller didn't take continental drift into account, and the concept wasn't found out until after Archimedes created the dial, so wherever they're going, it's not 1939.
  • Invoked by none other than Archimedes himself, when he finds Voller's wristwatch on his corpse; it's stated earlier in the film that studying its inner workings enables him to finish the original Antikythera.

Tropes F to N

• Famously Mundane, Fictionally Magical: The eponymous "Dial of Destiny" is the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient real-life device speculated to be an astronomy-related analog computer. In the movie, the dial has been made by Archimedes and is a compass for finding time fissures.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: Even if Indy was potentially incorrect about Voller's dial co-ordinates being messed up by continental drift, the line he drops right before Voller's plane enters the time fissure heralds that they are actually headed to Syracuse circa 213 BCE.
  Indy: I DON'T KNOW WHERE WE'RE GOING, JURGEN, BUT IT SURE AS HELL AIN'T 1939!
• Fling a Light into the Future: The true purpose of the Antikythera is to bring help from the future to win the Siege of Syracuse.
• Foreshadowing:
  • When talking to the bellhop, Voller tells him that the Allies didn't win; rather, Hitler lost, showing he believes far more in the cause than he does in its leader. Voller eventually tells Indy, instead of trying to kill an important figure of the Big Three, he plans to kill and replace Hitler as the leader of the Reich, using his knowledge of the future to lead them to victory.
  • In 1969 Syracuse, a crowd of children are watching a puppet show featuring a Roman legionnaire fighting a dragon. During the climax, the dial sends the German bomber to Syracuse during its siege by the Romans, and both sides mistake the bomber for a dragon.
  • Klaber is introduced learning how to speak German from a language textbook. He intends to join the Nazis in 1939 as part of Voller's time travel plan.
  • The skeleton of Archimedes is wearing a modern device, specifically a watch similar to the one Voller is wearing before his plane departs for the time fissure. This foreshadows that the time fissure operates on Stable Time Loop logic, and the climax of the film actually takes place in Ancient Syracuse with Voller's watch ending up in Archimedes' hands. Archimedes' tomb also contains a carving of a phoenix with propellers on its wings, which turns out to be the airplane the Nazis take to go back in time.
  • During the chase through the parade, Indy and Voller's mooks run into a crowd of Vietnam War protesters, and Indy immediately begins loudly protesting along with them until he is forcibly shut up. We later find out what ultimately happened to Mutt (killed in action during the very war being protested), and suddenly Indy being so quick to join the protesting is given a lot more weight to it.
  • When we first meet Teddy, he is learning virtually how to pilot a plane, a scene which sets up his role during the climax as he pilots a plane he's never flown before to chase after the Nazi plane through the time rift and ultimately offer the protagonists an opportunity to return home.
• Frame-Up: Thanks to Voller's agents, Indy ends up framed for the murders of his colleagues at Hunter College.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • Viewers who pay attention as the camera pans over Indy's apartment in the first scene in 1969, will notice the folded US flag and picture of Mutt in uniform on a shelf, clueing them in to the fact that is revealed much later in the movie that Mutt died in Vietnam.
  • During the prologue, Colonel Weber discovers an illustration of the Spear inside Indy's journal. Based on the handwriting on the visible page, the drawing appears to be inside Henry Jones, Sr.'s Grail Diary.
• Genre Blindness: Despite all his experience, Indy still hasn't learned that seeking dangerous artifacts merely enables the villains to follow right behind him and steal them.
• Genre Shift: Where the previous three films and this Grand Finale's Action Prologue were heavily based on the pulp adventure serials of the '30s and '40s and the latest last one based on the pulp sci-fi of the '50s, this one is derived in part from the action thrillers and Conspiracy Thrillers of the 60's and 70's including Spy Fiction such as James Bond (which inspired the creation of the franchise in the first place and shared its cast members in both franchises) and its many imitatorsinvoked during the decades and post war-Nazi conspiracy thrillers such as Marathon Man, The Odessa File and The Boys from Brazil (which featured Wolf Kahler, who played Colonel Dietrich from the first film).
• German Humor: Snarkily invoked by Indy in the climax, telling Voller he's German and shouldn't try to be funny.
• Giving Radio to the Romans: This turns out to be what Archimedes built the dial for; he wanted people from the future to come through the rift and help win the Siege of Syracuse. In the end, he walks off with Voller's modern wristwatch.
• Godhood Seeker: At the beginning of the film, Voller claims that whoever possesses the full Dial wouldn’t be a king, an emperor, or the Führer; they would be God. Near the end of the film, Voller reveals that he intends to use the Dial to travel back in time and replace Hitler in order to make history turn out the way he wants it to.
• Going Postal: Implied to be the reason why the authorities think Indy murdered two of his colleagues. A television broadcast on the subject makes note of the fact that Indy has lost his son, he's losing his job, and he's going through a messy divorce, all of which would pile on the stress and conceivably cause him to snap.
• Grand Finale: Of the Indiana Jones movies, as the fifth out of a planned five film deal with Paramount Pictures. The movie shows Indy retiring from academia, and Helena trying to gain his aid by offering him "one last triumph". Excluding the future Flash Forward moments in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (where he's retired), this is also chronologically the final adventure in Indy's life. While the franchise will continue in other media, such as in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Harrison Ford has said this is definitely his last outing with Indy.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Hitler, albeit posthumously. While the Führer's long dead at this point, his stain on history continues to reverberate and drives Voller's actions.
• Gratuitous Greek: A secondary MacGuffin of the film is the "Graphikos", an object that will lead whoever finds it to the second half of the Antikythera; anyone who knows even a smidge of Greek will tell you that they're looking for something literally called 'the writing'.
• Grief-Induced Split: In the time since the previous film, Indy and Marion have gone their separate ways following the death of their son in Vietnam.
• Grievous Bottley Harm: Helena smashes a bottle of champagne over the head of the police man who tries to grab her when she is fleeing the hotel in Tangiers.
• Grumpy Old Man: Indy has been reduced to one by 1969 after losing both Mutt and Marion, having lost his spark for adventure, teaching history to apathetic students at an unfamiliar college and is essentially just wallowing in his apartment waiting to die. He even has annoying hippie neighbors who play really loud music that he threatens with a baseball bat, yet is brushed off anyway.
• Hanging Around: A band of Nazi soldiers plan to hang Indy in a tower at the fortress. When an Allied bomb takes out the floor, Indy finds that the rope around his neck is the only thing preventing him from plummeting to his death, even as it is slowly strangling him.
• Happy Ending Override: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ends with Indy and Marion's wedding, with Indy having being promoted to Associate Dean at Marshall College, and the very last scene implies their son Mutt may take the adventurer's mantle later. Twelve years later, they're in the middle of a divorce, Indy's been working for Hunter College for at least a decade (going on the comments made at his retirement party) and Mutt died during the Vietnam War, a tragedy which caused Indy and Marion's falling out.
• Hassle-Free Hotwire: At the Syracuse airport, Teddy hotwires a light plane with minimal effort in order to chase the bomber carrying the abducted Indiana Jones.
• Have We Met?: When they meet in Morocco, Voller asks Indy if they've met before, to which Indy replies "Are you still a Nazi?"
• "Hey, You!" Haymaker: Indy knocks out the driver of the staff car at the fortress by rapping on the car window and, when the driver winds down the window, immediately punching him in the face.
• High-Speed Hijack: Helena leaps from the tuk-tuk on to the back of Voller's car in an attempt to retrieve the Antikythera.
• Historical Domain Character: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins are all seen briefly during the chase through the ticker-tape parade. At the end, when the characters travel back to the Siege of Syracuse, Archimedes himself appears.
• History Repeats: A tragic instance with Mutt Williams in the interim since Kingdom. Like his father and grandfather half a century earlier, tensions between Mutt and Indy became strained and Mutt ended up enlisting in order to take part in the great conflict of his time — one that, just like World War I was for Indy, became a bloody, grinding stalemate. Unlike his father, sadly, Mutt was killed in action.
• Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: An unusual example where an actual Nazi attempts to travel back in time to kill Hitler. Voller intends to use the Dial to go back to August 1939 and kill Hitler just before World War II starts, intending to replace him with a more competent leader (implied to be either Voller himself or his younger self) who can use Voller's knowledge of what happens in the war in order to win it. The plan is foiled because Archimedes rigged the Dial to always direct its users to a time rift that leads to the ancient siege of Syracuse.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • A tragic instance with Mutt Williams in the interim since Kingdom. Indy reveals to Helena that his son enlisted in the US Army to spite his father (due to simmering tensions between them). This, of course, put him directly into the meat grinder of the Vietnam War (ironically much like World War I was for Indy) and ultimately got him killed.
  • Like Belloq, Mola Ram, Donovan and Spalko before him, Voller using the MacGuffin is what gets him killed. Unlike his predecessors, though, Voller doesn't die as a direct result of him using the MacGuffin. Instead, he is able to use the Dial to fly back in time ... but he goes to the Siege of Syracuse in 213 BC (not 1939 as he had hoped), following which his plane gets shot down by the Roman ballista crews, and he dies when it crash-lands, along with any of his henchmen who've made it that far.
• Hollywood Density:
  • The titular Dial is made entirely of bronze, but you wouldn't know it from the ease with which the characters handle it.
  • The golden disk hidden inside the Graphikos is said to be made of gold, but a solid gold object that size would weight in the neighborhood of 10 Kg. (22 lbs.) and would thus not be handled with such ease.
• Hollywood Silencer: Voller's men use silenced pistols to murder Indy's colleagues at Hunter College literally just outside the door of the room Indy and Helena are in without them hearing anything.
• Hope Spot: One for the villains: Voller's plane is sucked through the time fissure moments after trying and failing to divert course, Voller's confidence in his plan shaken by Indy's assertion that Archimedes' calculations didn't take continental drift into account and that the fissure was going to send him sometime very far from 1939. Upon seeing the familiar coast of Sicily, Voller is gleeful that Indy was wrong, and that his plan is on track after all ... and then the clouds clear to reveal the sea beneath them is filled with Roman triremes.
• Hospital Epilogue: Indy is punched by Helena so very hard that he's (presumably) knocked out during the entire trip back through time and then from Sicily to New York, finally waking up at home. Then the major plot threads are resolved quickly, movie ends.
• Hypocrite: The Nazis in the prologue justify their hoarding of priceless artefacts they took during the war on the basis of "to the victors go the spoils". Indy points out that, given their armies have been on full retreat and Berlin is close to falling to the Allies, the Nazis clearly aren't the victors of this war.
• I Choose to Stay: Attempted by Indy in Ancient Syracuse during the climax — at least before Helena forcibly drags him back to 1969.
• Indy Ploy: It wouldn't be Indiana Jones if they didn't just make it up as they went along.
  • The opening section set in 1944 sees Indy fighting his way out of a train full of Nazis while it's being attacked by Allied forces. He has no plan, no backup (other than Basil, but he's also been captured), and (since this is the opening and one is assured that Indy survives), no problem escaping death. He makes it through mostly by repeatedly blending in with the Nazis thanks to his stolen uniform and taking advantage of the mayhem caused by an Allied air attack on the train. Special mention must go to the moment where his attempt to steal a car is interrupted by a couple Nazi officers climbing into the back and mistaking him for their driver; Indy rolls with it without missing a beat.
  • After being captured at Hunter College, Indy manages to escape from Voller's goons when they have to lead him through the moon landing parade. He momentarily distracts them by joining an anti-Vietnam War chant from some protestors before wriggling out of the grip of the guy holding him and thwacking him with a protestor's sign. He first tries to get a mounted policeman's attention, but when Klaber shoots him Indy instead steals the cop's horse and dashes through the parade. Klaber and Hawke aren't far behind on a commandeered motorcycle and parade car respectively so Indy rides the horse into the subway and darts out onto the track when Klaber still rides after him, narrowly dodging two subway trains to make it onto the next platform. Even after all of that, Mason has almost cuts him off before he slips into the now just-arrived subway train he avoided a moment earlier.
  • Helena has her own moment when Voller is attempting to force them to translate the Graphikos at gunpoint. Thinking fast, she uses her reputation as an unscrupulous smuggler to feign defecting to Voller's side, manages to weasel Voller's cigarette from him and uses the translation to draw attention away from her lighting the dynamite she pocketed in an earlier scene with said cigarette. And afterwards reveals to Indy that while she gave a truthful translation rather than attempt to come up with a convincing lie on the spot, she noticed that the Graphikos weighed a lot more than a wax tablet should and deduced that the actual instructions were hidden inside it, which she quietly let slip Voller's notice. And she pockets the payment that Voller gave her for defecting as she, Indy, and Teddy use the resulting chaos to escape too.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: The Roman ballista crewmen at the Siege of Syracuse deserve credit for successfully bringing down a WW2-era bomber AND taking out individual crew-members on it with the bolts.
• In Their Own Image: Voller essentially plans to do this to modern history. Upon assembling the Antikythera Mechanism, he and his followers fly a bomber plane through a time portal with the intent to travel back to 1939 in order to Kill and Replace Hitler, and then lead Nazi Germany to win World War II and eventually conquer the world.
• Iris Out: The final scene ends this way.
• Ironic Echo: In the prologue, Colonel Weber justifies his theft of priceless artifacts with the line "To the victor goes the spoils." Indy throws the line right back at him before throwing him off of a moving train.
• It Only Works Once: The Antikythera Dial can only take people back to the Battle of Syracuse, rather than Voller being able to program it to take him to 1939 so he can kill Hitler and arrange for his younger self to take the Fuhrer's place.
• It's All About Me: Voller is not only planning to assassinate Hitler in 1939 with the intention that his own past self will take Hitler's place, but when the Dial takes his plane to the Battle of Syracuse, he immediately starts ordering the crew back to the fissure because he can't be there, ignoring how everyone else on the plane is in the same situation.
• Kick the Dog: When an African-American server delivers the room service to his New York hotel room, Voller takes enjoyment in quietly needling the man with... despite his military service in World War II, including the Normandy invasion, does he feel that "his people" actually "won" then, and how does he feel of "his country" now.
• Last Episode Theme Reprise: The end credits feature a slightly slower and more bombastic version of the "Raiders March" to signify how the story of Indiana Jones is finally at a definitive end.
• Later-Installment Weirdness:
  • This is the only film in the franchise not to have an opening credits sequence. Instead, the only titles shown in the opening are Disney and Lucasfilm's "PRESENTS" credits, Paramount's associate credit and the film's title, and the rest of the major credits are placed at the start of closing credits sequence.
  • It is also the only film in the franchise where the opening Match Cut does not change from Paramount's logo to a mountain or similar, due to Disney being the main studio in charge. What we see is Lucasfilm's logo changing to a latch.
• Law of Time Travel Coincidences: The titular artifact is revealed to be a device that can detect rifts in space-time. The antagonist believes that by flying into one of these holes in 1969, he can end up in one that's over Berlin in the 1930s, where he can kill Hitler and ensure the Nazis win WWII; however, Archimedes, the designer of the mechanism, actually intended for anyone who came through the rift to end up at the Siege of Syracuse in 212 BCE, in the hopes that aid from the future could destroy the Roman invaders.
• Leave the Two Lovebirds Alone: In the final scenes, when Indy is reunited with Marion, Sallah offers to take his children, Teddy, and Helena out to get some ice cream and leave the two alone. When Teddy comments that they already bought some ice cream, Sallah answers, "I know a place that has better ice cream."
• Logo Joke: Due to Disney now producing the film, the traditional Match Cut using the Paramount logo isn't used, despite showing the current Paramount logo after the "100 Years" Disney logo. Instead, the Lucasfilm logo is used to transition into a metal latch. Additionally, the logos are accompanied by a ticking noise that progressively speeds up.
• Lost Technology: The titular Dial of Destiny — the film's equivalent to the Antikythera Mechanism — is an analogue computer that can be used to track the movement of the stars and the appearance of rifts in space-time.
• Low Clearance: During their Traintop Battle, Indy, Basil and Colonel Weber have to drop flat on top of the carriages several times to avoid being swept off by tunnels as the train speeds through the French Alps. When Dr. Voller climbs up to retrieve the Antikythera, he gets knocked off when a railway watertower pipe overhanging the track strikes him in the face.
• MacGyvering: Indy uses Teddy's chewing gum to plug the leak in the radiator of the tuk-tuk. Downplayed in that he explains that Moroccan chewing gum is made from the sap of a plant which is heat-resistant, and he clearly states that it's a temporary patch-up (there's a bullet hole in the radiator, after all) which should suffice to enable them to drive as far as the railway station, from where they can get a train out of Tangier.
• Made of Iron: Young Voller must have been. He is propelled face-first into a watertower pipe by a speeding train, fails down several meters, and survives.
• Make Wrong What Once Went Right: Voller's motive for acquiring the Antikythera. He intends to travel back to August 1939 and ensure Nazi Germany doesn't lose the Second World War. More specifically, he intends to invoke Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act and ensure that a more competent Führer (implied to be either Voller or his younger self) is leading the Third Reich as the war begins — one who also benefits from the future knowledge of the conflict that Voller brings with him.
• Meaningless Villain Victory: As with previous Indiana Jones movies, an antagonist gets what they want, but in the worst way possible. Voller successfully acquires and uses the Dial to travel back in time. Except the rift wasn't the one he wanted, since Archimedes rigged the dial to his ends (specifically, so that it would have brought help against the sieging Romans), so when he arrives in the past he is taken completely by surprise and is killed there in minutes. He changes the past... in a way, but not only it's not of his own volition but by being a pawn, it isn't even noticeable due to You Already Changed the Past being in place. The fact that his intervention ends up helping a besieged population adds that extra layer of irony.
• Mêlée à Trois: The Final Battle. The Romans and Greeks are fighting the Siege of Syracuse when Voller's neo-Nazis show up through the time fissure, and a panicking Klaber begins attacking both sides indiscriminately.
• The Millstone: By the time the main story starts, Voller has come to view Hitler himself as a General Failure whose incompetence led the Third Reich to ruin. This is why he intends to go back in time - to assassinate Hitler and replace him with a more competent Führer (implicitly himself) who can successfully conquer the world.
• Missing Steps Plan: A villainous example. Voller plans to go back to 1939, right before the invasion of Poland, assassinate Hitler and either take over or at least help his younger self with that task. Even ignoring how his plan is doomed to fail from the start due to the Antikythera being rigged - which Voller isn't aware of - he apparently wants to take over Nazi Germany with a mere handful of hoodlooms. How he plans to achieve that or why anyone should follow him in the notoriously fractuated Nazi leadership is anyone's guess.
• MockGuffin: In the Action Prologue, Indiana Jones and Basil Shaw are trying to recover the Lance of Longinus (a.k.a. the Spear of Destiny), the lance that pierced the side of Jesus as he hung on the cross during his crucifixion. The Nazis have recovered the Lance from a fortress in France and loaded it on a treasure train bound for Berlin. However, Voller realizes that the Lance is a replica because it is made of an alloy not available in Roman times, and the engraving on it is too recent. Indy comes to the same conclusion as soon as he gets his hands on it. However, in his researches, Voller discover something even more valuable; the Antikythera, which becomes the main MacGuffin of the film.
• My Name Is Inigo Montoya: Voller makes a point of telling the dying Agent Mason that his name is Jürgen Voller, not Professor Schmidt.
• Nazi Gold:
  • The Action Prologue begins with a Nazi plunder train being filled up with stolen treasure, although it's derailed by Allied forces before it can make it back to Germany.
  • After Voller takes the Graphikos from Indy and Helena, it turns out he can't actually read it, being written in an Ancient Greek cipher. Helena offers to translate for him but demands several tens of thousands of dollars in payment. Voller casually pours a satchel of diamonds out into her hands, commenting that it's more than her asking price.
• Nerves of Steel: During the climax the Roman forces besieging Syracuse don't skip a beat when a giant flying machine that they take for a dragon suddenly appears out of nowhere bearing down on them, and immediately begin attacking it. And manage to shoot it down. This isn't too surprising, they are Romans after all.
• Never Bring A Knife To A Gunfight: Indy brandishes his whip in a Moroccan casino, only to find that virtually everyone else in the room has a pistol. He promptly dives for cover.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • The American Government recruiting Voller under Operation Paperclip. By trying to exploit one of the Nazis' most valuable scientists and mathematicians for the Cold War, they instead gave Voller the (relative) freedom and resources he needed to pursue his hunt for the Antikythera.
  • The protagonists, knowing the danger the Antikythera poses, nevertheless assiduously try to recover it instead of destroying it or leaving it alone, in obscurity. They even use the Graphikos to go find the second half of the Antikythera, even after having successfully fooled the Nazis regarding the latter's whereabouts, instead of just destroying the Graphikos, thereby giving the Nazis the opportunity to follow them and steal the second half of the Antikythera.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Jürgen Voller is a former Nazi rocket scientist who got recruited by the United States to help with the Apollo project; the fact that he's stated to have relocated to Alabama, and his connections to NASA, make him a stand-in for real-life Nazi Wernher von Braun.
• No Escape but Down: Indy and Basil leap from the Nazi treasure train into the river just before it is derailed by the Allies after the bridge the train track is on is obliterated by their bombers.
  Indy: We're gonna have to jump, Bas! [jumps]
  Basil: But what about my dickie knee? [jumps anyway]
• Noodle Incident: During their hunt for the Antikythera, Indy remarks to Helena that he's been shot 9 times throughout his career. One of them was by Basil Shaw (which Indy mentions and which we previously saw in the 1944 prologue). While not stated, we know a second one was the shot Indy took in his left shoulder during the truck chase in Raiders. The circumstances of the other 7 shootings are left unrevealed.
• Not Helping Your Case: When Indy scolds Helena for being willing to sell the dial to pay off her bail money, Teddy helpfully explains how that's not the case.
  Teddy: It's not just bail money! Some of it is gambling debts, and-
  Helena: Thank you, Teddy!
• "Not So Different" Remark: Voller tries to make one towards Indy, arguing that they might as well go back since they're both old men who have been forgotten by the world. Indy doesn't dignify it with a response.
• Nothing but Hits: In the first scene set in 1969, Indy's neighbors play hit songs from the 1960s, particularly "Magical Mystery Tour" by The Beatles and "Space Oddity" by David Bowie.
• Not My Driver: An accidental version. Indy knocks out the driver of a Nazi staff car at the fortress and hauls him out, then jumps into the driver's seat, planning to steal the car. However, before he can take off, two Nazi officers climb in the back seat and, assuming he is their driver, tell him to drive on. Indy goes along with it and obeys, while attempting to keep the train carrying the MacGuffin in sight.
• Novelization: Averted; this is the first Indiana Jones film to not have one of these.

Tropes O to Y

• Oh, Crap!:
  • When the Nazis are about to hang Indy, an Allied bomb smashes through the roof and embeds itself in the floor without exploding. The Nazis standing in a circle around have a horrified look on their faces which gets worse as the bomb sinks through the floor and falls into the room below. And worse again as it crashes through the floor of that room and they realize it is going to do this all the way to bottom of the tower, where it will almost certainly explode.
  • At the Hotel L'Atlantique auction, Indy uses his whip in an attempt to scare a room full of mobsters. After whipping a few, Indy's attempt fails when they all pull out their guns, leading him to have this reaction just before they start shooting.
• Older Hero vs. Younger Villain: Indy is in his seventies in the movie, and is fighting against a Nazi in his late fifties, on top of all of his thirty-year-old Neo-Nazi minions.
• Only Sane Woman: Mason, a CIA agent and Voller's handler, tries to mitigate collateral damage after his goons shoot two professors at Hunter College. She's the first one to die when Voller decides he's done pretending to work for the US.
• Our Time Travel Is Different: Time travel in the Indiana Jones universe happens by way of seemingly random "time fissures" that can only be located by the most advanced mathematics and, crucially, the titular Dial — a.k.a. the Antikythera. However, all Antikythera calculations only point towards fissures going to and from one specific point in time (rendering Voller's plans to return to 1939 and take the Third Reich for himself moot), and because Stable Time Loop is in effect, it would appear that the past is immutable.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Indy and Marion's current estrangement comes from losing their son Mutt, who died serving in Vietnam before the film's events.
• Outside-Context Problem: Played straight and then subverted during the climax.
  • Played straight in that the Roman legions assaulting Syracuse are faced with a WWII vintage plane that traveled 22 centuries into the past through a time fissure, none of which they have any possible context to understand.
  • Then subverted in that their complete failure to understand what they’re seeing doesn’t deter the Romans for a second from immediately trying to take it down, and they succeed.
• Parent-Child Team:
  • After his previous adventure with his son, Indy tackles this one with the help of his goddaughter, Helena Shaw. She's not particularly happy about it at first, since he tracks her down to Tangier and prevents her from selling half of the Antikythera to some mobsters, but she later warms up to him after seeing his love of archaeology in action due to being the daughter of an archaeologist and working on her doctorate herself.
  • Helena, meanwhile, has a partnership with Teddy, having become a Parental Substitute for him after he tried to pickpocket her at the age of ten.
• Peggy Sue: In addition to invoking Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act, this is the other danger of 1969 Voller's plan: Knowledge of the Second World War and what to do and not do this time around. It's all but stated he's going to give it to his 1939 self and use it to succeed Hitler.
• Percussive Prevention: Helena punches the wounded Indy in the face and knocks him out to prevent him from remaining in the past as he wants to do.
• Police Are Useless: When pursued by Voller's agents in New York, Indy tries to get help from a member of the NYPD's Mounted Unit; however, the officer seems to be under the impression that Jones is a senile old man and barely acknowledges him, forcing Indy to steal his horse to get away.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Indy steals Colonel Weber's statement that "To the victor goes the spoils" right before killing him.
• Prolonged Prologue: The opening section set in 1944 lasts approximately twenty minutes.
• Public Domain Artifact: A (fake) Holy Lance and the Antikythera both appear.
• Pushy Gun-Toting Villain: What Voller is reduced into after ending up in the middle of the siege of Syracuse, rather than 1939. It doesn't end well for him.
• Put on a Bus: Multiple absences from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
  • Jim Broadbent doesn't reprise the role of Marshall College's Dean Charles Stanforth, leaving it unknown what's become of Marcus Brody's successor in the interim since the last film. That said, Marshall College itself doesn't appear, with Indy now working at Hunter College in New York.
  • With the death of John Hurt in 2017, it's unsurprising that Harold Oxley is also absent (though it's left unclear in-universe if Oxley is still alive or if he's passed away in the interim).
  • A variation with Ray Winstone. George McHale (apparently) died at Akator in the previous film's climax, so his absence during the main 1969 portion is justified. However, the previous film's backstory had also established Mac and Indy were partnered together during the Second World War; according to Indy, they did 20-30 missions together in the European and Pacific theatres. Yet, there's no sign of the younger Mac at all in the 1944 Prologue and Basil Shaw takes his place (though this could easily be explained away as Mac simply being busy on another mission elsewhere on the European front).
  • In a sense, the Soviet Union. With Spalko's death and the failure of the Akator operation, the Russians are relegated to a background role due to the Cold War (and with surviving Nazis taking their place).
• Ragnarök Proofing:
  • The Antikythera works perfectly once all the pieces are assembled, despite being roughly 2200 years old, with half of it spending most of that time underwater.
  • The Tomb of Archimedes includes a rope bridge over a river, and a puzzle lock in a room with a deadly trap, all of which are in excellent condition for a place nobody has set foot in for twenty-two centuries.
• Remember the New Guy?: This film introduces Basil Shaw, a friend of Indy's During the War with whom he was close enough to become the godfather of Basil's daughter Helena. Helena becomes one of the main characters. Later on, we meet Renaldo, the frogman who is introduced as an old friend of Indy's.
• The Remnant: Voller and his allies are ex-Nazis seeking a way to reverse Nazi Germany's downfall and restore the Third Reich.
• Resolved Noodle Incident: Indy's adventures during the Second World War, which were established during the previous film. The prologue dramatizes one such adventure during the Allied Liberation of Europe in 1944.
• Riddle for the Ages: Anything related to the nature and actual functioning of the time rifts, since the dial only finds them, but doesn't study them. Justified, as the main characters are archaeologists, not physicists, and while the villain is a physicist he is more interested in exploiting the rifts rather than understanding them.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Indy realizes that Archimedes didn't know about continental drift and so didn't factor it into his calculations, and exclaims "I don't know where we're going...but it sure as hell ain't 1939!". He appears to be desperately clutching at straws, as the difference that 2,000 years of continental drift would make is negligible. But his conclusion is nonetheless right as it turns out that rather than allowing unrestricted time travel, the Dial is just a two-way portal that only leads back to 214 BC.
• Rock Beats Laser: The Roman fleet attacking Syracuse is able to bring down a large WWII era plane using nothing more than ballistae bolts. Justified, since the plane was already experiencing difficulties and wasn't expecting combat, while the Roman soldiers are very much combat-minded. Noticeably, the first few bolts hit the plane while the whole crew is confused about what to do, and when they start reacting Voller is mostly acting erraticly. The crew also has only handguns to respond, and the plane can't maneuver. Noticeably, the second plane actually gets away without a scratch by mere virtue of being able to keep enough altitude that it's not even spotted by the fleet.
• Runaway Bride: Helena was at one point engaged to Aziz Rahim, the son of Big Rahim, a notorious Moroccan mobster, but ran out on him before their wedding. When Helena causes trouble at the hotel L'Atlantique (which is owned by Big Rahim), she comes into direct face-to-face contact with her ex-fiancé, who is disgruntled from being woken up by his father to go deal with the disturbance, surrounded by heavily armed goons and carrying a huge machete.
  Aziz: I expect you sold the ring!?
  Helena: Didn't get as much as I'd expected for it.
  [Aziz angrily attacks her]
• Sadly Mythtaken: Both Greeks and Romans imagined dragons as giant, constricting, venomous snakes - and not fiery, flying beasts, as depicted in the Middle Ages and beyond.
• Saved by the Punishment: Indy is about to be hanged by the Nazis when a bomb blows the floor out from under them. With his hands tied behind his back, the only thing that stops him from plunging to his death is the rope around his neck.
• Saying Too Much: Helena acts like she doesn't remember Indy's last visit to Basil and just wants to find where in Germany the Antikythera was lost. It's when she mentions Indy not destroying it like her father wanted that Indy realizes she does remember his visit and unravels how she knows way more than she's let on.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Zig-zagged. Near the end of the movie, Indy starts laughing at Voller, claiming his calculations are off because he didn't take continental drift into account. The thing is, continental drift is really slow. In the time since the Siege of Syracuse, there would only be 22 or so meters of movement which is coincidentally the same as the wingspan of the plane the Nazis are on. Considering that they are sucked into the time rift and there isn't another one in the frame, such a tiny difference would not matter. However, this may be done intentionally on the part of the writers. At this point Indy is exhausted, wounded and captured, Voller has pretty much won, and no one is aware that help is coming or that Archimedes rigged the Antikythera to always go back to the Siege of Syracuse. So this might as well be done to show that Indy is desperately grasping at straws.
• Serial Escalation: Each of the Indiana Jones films have had the fate of the world hanging in the balance if Indy can't stop the Big Bad from acquiring and harnessing the power of the MacGuffin. This still holds true with the Antikythera. But, befitting Indiana Jones' last adventure, the stakes are now higher than they've ever been before in the franchise. This time, it's not just the world at stake, but history itself should Voller succeed in altering the past and ensuring the Nazis win the Second World War.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Discussed. Indy admits that if he could travel through time, he'd stop Mutt from enlisting and dying in Vietnam.
• Shoot Out the Lock: Klaber shoots out the lock on the cage door while chasing Indy through the archives.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Since the time fissure leads to 213 BCE rather than AD 1939, Voller's plan was doomed from the start. And then their plane crashes after the Roman ships start firing upon them, killing Voller and his cohorts instantly before they have a chance to return back to the present day. Being Nazis, however, they deserve it.
• Shout-Out:
  • To Harrison Ford's other most iconic films:
    • A Freeze-Frame Bonus shows a scene that looks like the cabin of the Millennium Falcon while going through hyperspace.
    • Indy tells Voller that he should have retired him years ago. In Blade Runner, "retire" was the euphemism used to describe the killing of rogue replicants.
  • A Nazi scientist recruited during Operation Paperclip secretly reforms the Reich right under the CIA's nose. Does this sounds similar to another Disney-owned movie? Even the way Helena stows aboard a German fanatic's warplane and kills some mooks by dropping them out (with one mook being extra trouble) is also very similar to another movie from the same franchise.
  • When Indy first wakes up in his apartment, his TV is playing an episode of H.R. Pufnstuf.
  • While in Sicily and chasing the Nazis who kidnapped Teddy, Indy and Helena make use of a Fiat 500.
  • A couple to films of Sergio Leone:
    • Indy being saved from getting hanged due to war ordinance conveniently striking the location and wrecking the floor underneath, is like how "Blondie" once escaped from Tuco.
    • The film's prologue chapter ending on a quiet scene with the main character and the Leitmotif score playing, then switching to a nondescript setting with a jarring change to a Beatles song playing and the same character now shown to be very aged, is like the abrupt jump in decades after the prologue in Once Upon a Time in America.
• Sinister Spy Agency: All of Voller's American agents are CIA, including Mason, a black woman who poses as one of Jones's students. Shaunette Renee Wilson, Mason's actress, directly compared her character to real-life black FBI and CIA agents that tried to subvert counter-culture movements during the sixties.
• Small Reference Pools: Played for Laughs in-universe when Teddy, being a Moroccan youngster, asks Indy if he knew The Wright Brothers, since they were from Indiana and his name is Indiana. Indy, visibly confused, points out that not only is "Indiana" his nickname and he doesn't hail from there, but that the Wright Brothers were born during the Civil War, almost thirty years before him. Teddy, clearly also not understanding when the Civil War was, just shrugs his shoulders.
• Stable Time Loop: The climax of the film is foreshadowed and depicted in ancient carvings depicting a winged creature with propeller-like structures, and Archimedes' skeleton wearing Voller's watch. Sure enough, Voller's plane ends up in the time of Archimedes and is mistaken for a dragon, while Voller ends up dying and his watch is taken by Archimedes when he discovers his corpse which allows him to complete the inner workings of the Dial he's currently working on.
• Stupid Evil: Voller's men, Klaber in particular, are all rather trigger happy and quick to resort to violence in situations where it isn't the best option. This comes back to bite them three times over:
  • When first confronting Indy and Helena, rather than just announcing their presence and telling a partial truth (that they're CIA agents looking for the Antikythera and Helena is an artifact smuggler), they approach the duo with guns drawn. Which means that Indy's first instinct is to escape these random violent thugs, causing a big enough distraction for Helena to slip away. Mason calls out Klaber on this specifically.
  • Klaber's killing of innocent civilians just for interrupting their search of Indy's office prompts the CIA to stop humoring Voller's obsession with the Antikythera and order him and his men to submit themselves to custody. Voller manages to continue his hunt thanks to the CIA's own incompetence, but it still costs him their resources.
  • After being deposited back in time at the siege of Syracuse in their Heinkel He-111 bomber, Voller's men panic and repeatedly strafe the Roman navy for no good reason, which naturally causes the Romans to fire back with their ballistae, ultimately causing the bomber to be brought down. By contrast, Teddy's inoffensive aircraft is largely ignored.
• Stylish Protection Gear: During the diving scene, Helena's wetsuit is the only one with short sleeves, and unlike the men's, hers does not zip all the way up to the neck.
• Take That!: Indy points out the callousness of Helena's Casual Danger Dialogue when she quips following their escape from the boat on the Aegean, after Voller killed Indy's friend Renaldo; one can't help but feel that the screenwriter has some umbrage with characters that fail to take anything seriously.
• Taking You with Me: When his plane emerges in ancient Syracuse, and it becomes clear that escape is no longer an option, Voller tries to take Indy and Helena’s parachute from them at gunpoint to ensure their deaths.
• This Is Gonna Suck: One of the Nazi officers in the opening has this reaction once Voller tells them the Spear of Longinus is a fake, meaning they're going to have to go back to the incredibly unstable and desperate Hitler empty-handed. Voller pointing out they can use the Antikythera doesn't help, since nobody, not least of all Hitler, has heard of it and knows how powerful it really is. Said Nazi officer doesn't end up telling Hitler the news, mainly because he gets killed that very night.
• Those Wacky Nazis: Evident in the prologue with their almost-comedic sieg-heilling.
• Tickertape Parade: Indy and the bad guys have a chase sequence during a ticker tape parade. The parade is celebrating the Apollo 11 moon landing. Indy, on a borrowed police horse, rides right by the three astronauts sitting in the back of a convertible during the chase.
• Traintop Battle: Indy and a somewhat reluctant Basil engage Colonel Weber on top of a train in the opening.
• Trapped in the Past: Attempted by Indy in the climax, who wants to strand himself in Ancient Syracuse to live out his final days. Helena has other ideas. Voller meanwhile has completely lost it, first realising his master plan completely failed and then that he faces a far worse possibility of being stranded some 22 centuries away from his goal.
• Undying Loyalty: Even a quarter of a century after the fall of the Third Reich, Voller remains nostalgic for and loyal to the Nazi ideology. The same does not extend to its Führer, however, as Voller holds Hitler and his incompetence responsible for their loss — hence his plan of invoking Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act once they travel back to 1939.
• Unexplained Recovery: Voller is last seen in the prologue getting clipped by a low-hanging pipe and knocked off a speeding train, something that could easily be fatal or at least crippling. There is no sign of any lasting harm from this when he returns in 1969. Him being a vital cog in a Stable Time Loop might have spared him from any harm until his role in it came to an end upon completing it. That, and the fact that he exists in a world where you can survive an atomic blast by hiding in a fridge.
• Villain Ball: There is absolutely zero reason to fly at such low altitude in the climax, other than to allow the plane to be in range of the Roman and Greek siege weapons, not to mention opening fire on the people below, which leads to the only possible result — the Romans start firing back and, since it is flying so low, they easily score enough hits to bring it down.
• Villainous Breakdown: When he discovers that he has traveled to ancient Syracuse rather than Germany, Voller loses it. He spends the rest of the climax (and his life) panicking and screaming at his own men.
• Villainous Legacy: Hitler and the Third Reich. While Nazi Germany and its Führer are long gone by 1969 (when the film is set), their legacy continues to cast a shadow over history and the lives of those who both championed and opposed their evil. It's what drives Voller's agenda to use the Dial to travel back in time and ensure Germany doesn't lose World War II. However, Voller is also more interested in honoring and saving the legacy itself rather than its architect, as he blames Hitler and his mistakes for the loss rather than the Allies.
• War Is Hell: When Voller's goons are forcing Indy around, they pass through a crowd of protesters against the Vietnam War, with one sign having the trope's name. Indy joins in, and we later get to find out why — Mutt died in Vietnam.
• Waving Signs Around: Voller's men are forced to take Jones through an anti-Vietnam protest full of people doing just this, and Indy manages to briefly break away by provoking the crowd into attacking his captors.
• Weapon-Based Characterization: Klaber is always shown using a Walther P38 pistol, despite the story being set at the tail end of the 60s. Even by then it's but a vintage, and there are obviously better-suited or cheaper alternatives, but it's sooo Nazi, painting Klaber as nothing more than a rabid fanboy.
• Wham Line: Helena asks Indy, hypothetically, what he'd do with the Dial if it worked, clearly thinking along the lines of Time Travel for Fun and Profit. After a pause, Indy replies:
  Indy: I'd stop my son from enlisting.
• Wham Shot: Though foreshadowed by dialogue and what Indy and Helena discover at Archimedes' tomb, Voller still believes he's successfully travelled back in time to 1939 by flying through a temporal rift until the clouds part to reveal wooden ships from a much earlier period in history.
  Indy: Those are Roman triremes.
• What the Hell, Hero?: After Helena's Bond One-Liner, given while escaping from Voller and his men, Indy despondently laments that they just murdered Renaldo. To her credit, Helena apologizes.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: It wouldn't be an Indiana Jones film without mentioning Indy's fear of snakes but surprisingly, there are no snakes in the film at all. Instead, Indy has face off against eels during his three-minute dive for the second half of the Roman ship. Given that the eels are shaped like snakes, move like snakes, and can deliver a nasty bite... Indy doesn't fare better with eels either.
  Teddy: They look like snakes.
  Indy: No they don't!
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?:
  • The Nazis pass up repeated opportunities to just execute Indy, Helena and Teddy, notably taking Teddy with them to find Archimedes' tomb even after he can be of no further value to them, and taking Indy with them into the past after they have recovered both halves of the Antikythera.
  • In a heroic example, the protagonists pass up repeated opportunities to destroy the Antikythera despite their knowledge of the dangers of its existence.
• Wilhelm Scream: As is series tradition, the iconic scream appears, albeit pitched-down, when a Nazi falls off the train in the prologue.
• The World Is Just Awesome: Indy is absolutely overjoyed to witness the Siege of Syracuse and be a part of history, at one point getting distracted looking at a Roman ballista bolt before thinking to cut his bonds on it and geeking out over proof of Archimedes' defensive inventions. He's even more overjoyed to get to meet Archimedes himself, and even considers staying in the past so he can continue to live in the history he's always wanted to see. Helena has to knock him out to get him back.
• Write Back to the Future: An interesting variant as it isn't the time travelers but an inhabitant of the past who creates a time machine and puzzle to keep it hidden to specifically make sure that someone comes back in time from a future that is sufficiently technologically advanced to decisively interfere with the battle.
• You Already Changed the Past: Voller attempts to alter history by using the time fissure to travel to 1939 and kill Hitler and allow a more competent Führer to rise. What he doesn't realize is that the time fissure is actually a Stable Time Loop, which the film foreshadows with ancient carvings of a beast with (bent-up) propellers and Archimedes wearing a watch similar to Voller.

---

"Give 'em hell, Indiana Jones!"

---