Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: Everything you need to know about the fifth instalment of the fanchise

It’s the first Indiana Jones film not to be directed by Steven Spielberg – James Mangold is now in the director’s chair – but despite that, the new movie has quite a bit of vim, zip and narrative ingenuity with a kind of jocular silliness that the last one (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) ostensibly lacked.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge (who wrote the award-winning TV series Fleabag) has a co-star turn here as Indiana’s feisty, rebellious goddaughter, Helena Shaw, who is bedecked in shorts and shirt that one critic says makes her look like a “naughty Enid Blyton heroine”.

Digital youthification technology gives Jones a fabulous opening flashback section set during the high drama and wanton bloodshed of the Second World War.

It’s 1944 and as Hitler’s Third Reich begins to crumble, a much younger Mr Jones is captured by Nazis alongside his chum Prof Basil Shaw (played by Toby Jones).

They get their mitts on what the Germans are really after – a truly extraordinary object – which is to say, the extant half of a much-desired artefact created by Archimedes, the Dial of Destiny.

This magical object allows its owner to control the forces of space and time.

But it emerges that its creator, Archimedes, rather sagely and prudently split the dial in two, hiding the other half.

Following a chase with the dastardly German Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkeksen) the whole complex business is left messily unresolved.

Fast forward to the Space Age late 1960s – and now we find a grumpy Indiana Jones on the cusp of retirement and feeling increasingly downcast at his sense of growing irrelevance in a world that no longer seems to have much use for his singular skillset.

But soon Indiana must take action because the lurking threat of evil is at hand. Voller, under a pseudonym, is also the brains behind the Apollo 11 moon landing (what a guy), having conned the US federal government, and continues to dream of controlling the universe in order to reintroduce Nazism by joining the Dial’s two halves.

So far, so complicated.

And guess what?

Only Harrison Ford’s craggy yet still unutterably charming Indiana Jones can stop the villain from making his dark, apocalyptic project a reality.

Cue lots of high-energy, high-voltage, nail-biting chases amid the narrow, sun-drenched streets of Tangier, as well as rather unsavoury encounters with exotic insects in a tomb far below ground with elaborate, maze-like passageways that open with a foreboding grinding noise that can only suggest trouble (ie mortal danger) ahead.

The hotly-anticipated film’s ultra-dramatic finale is described as both “silly and entertaining” with the Dial Of Destiny ultimately put to good use in the hands of our morally-centered adventurer, who hereby manages to defy the gravitational march of time and saves us all from a potential horrific and world-shattering resurgence of Nazism.

Has Harrison Ford retained his early charm as Indiana Jones after all these years?

Well, cinemagoers can be the judge themselves when Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is released in cinemas in the UK on June 30, 2023, after premiering at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday (May 18).