'Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny' Gets Explosive Super Bowl Trailer

By Daniel S. Levine

Disney aired a new trailer for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny on Sunday, during Super Bowl LVII. It was only the second trailer for the film and the first since December 2022. This is the fifth Indiana Jones movie and the first directed by someone other than Steven Spielberg.

The Dial of Destiny is set primarily in 1969, with the Space Race playing a major role in the plot. Henry Jones Jr. (Harrison Ford) is not happy that the U.S. government recruited Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) and other former Nazis to help NASA reach the moon before the Soviet Union. Jones is joined by his goddaughter Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) on his adventures. Indy will learn he was right to be concerned about Voller, who is using the Apollo missions for his own gain. The first trailer revealed there are scenes set in 1944, which required Lucasfilm to de-age Harrison Ford.

The rest of the cast includes Antonio Banderas, Shaunette Renee Wilson, Thomas Kretschmann, Toby Jones, and Boyd Holbrook. John Rhys-Davies, who previously starred in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, returns as Indy's friend Sallah. James Mangold (Logan, Walk the Line) directed the film and co-wrote the script with Jez Butterworth and John Henry Butterworth. The film was produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall, and Simon Emanuel. It is the first live-action Lucasfilm movie production outside the Star Wars movies since Disney bought the studio in 2012.

In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Ford revealed that the original Dial of Destiny script had a "lot of old jokes" in it. Those have been cut. The previous Indy movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), was criticized for packing in too many jokes about Indy's age.

"There is a moment where he observes himself in this situation and says, 'What the f— am I doing in here?' But I hate what I call 'talking about the story,'" Ford told THR. "I want to see circumstances in which the audience gets a chance to experience the story, not to be led through the nose with highlights pointed out to them. I'd rather create behavior that is the joke of age rather than talk about it."

Ford was also very impressed with the de-aging technology Lucasfilm used to make him look younger. "They've got every frame of film, either printed or unprinted, of me during 40 years of working with Lucasfilm on various stuff," he said. "I can act the scene and they sort through with AI every f—ing foot of film to find me in that same angle and light. It's bizarre and it works and it is my face." Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny opens on June 30.

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