Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny viewers have been left stumped by a major “plot hole” in the new Harrison Ford sequel.
The film, the fifth entry in the adventure franchise, sees Dr Henry “Indiana” Jones Jr (Ford) come up against an old Nazi adversary (Mads Mikkelsen) in 1969.
Spoilers follow for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny... you have been warned!
Most of the plot of the film revolves around the hunt for the two pieces of Archimedes’ dial, an ancient device that could supposedly be used to “read fissures in time”, potentially allowing the user to travel back in time, by locating the right fissure at the right time.
By the end of the film, the villainous Jürgen Voller (Mikkelsen) has acquired the dial, and follows it towards a wormhole located somewhere in the sky. He flies through the wormhole in an airplane with Indiana Jones on board, expecting to arrive back in Nazi Germany, where he will change the course of history and win the war for the Nazis.
The plane does indeed get transported back in time – but instead arrives in ancient Greece, during the Siege of Syracuse in 213-212 BC.
It is ultimately revealed that the dial was invented by Archimedes to help direct people from the future to his location in the past, during the ancient battle.
However, while the ending clears up some of the questions posed earlier in the film – namely, how Archimedes’ entombed body was wearing a modern-day wristwatch – the nature of the time travel still seemed to leave open a large plot hole.
Given that the dial was simply a device for reading the “fissures” in time, as opposed to creating them, it remains unexplained how Voller was able to locate a portal to Archemedes’ exact time and location, just hours after the device fell into his possession. The most logical explanation would be that the “time portals” are constantly opening up all over the world, round the clock – which poses further questions as to why no one had ever noticed them, or travelled through them.
Harrison Ford and Phoebe Waller-Bridge in ‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’— (Lucasfilm Ltd)
One person shared his confusion on Reddit. “I’m not sure I really understand the time travel,” they wrote. “So archimedes was working on his dial when the Romans attacked. During the attack, the Nazi plane came out of the sky and murdered the enemy army. So archimedes knew in the future, the dial would be found and this would happen. So he built a device that allowed the user to find a worm hole to that exact moment in time?
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“But like why is there a time hole to that exact moment? Are there just time vortexes to any point in history? How did archimedes even know there was a time hole to the time of this attack. Idk maybe I don’t understand it.”
Another viewer wrote that the film featured “plot holes the size of 18-wheelers”.
In a three-star review of the film for The Independent, Geoffrey Macnab wrote: “Tonally, the film wavers. It pulls in too many different directions at once. On the one hand, this is an exercise in affectionate nostalgia.
“On the other, like its predecessors, it’s an old-fashioned matinee adventure in which characterisation is deliberately broad. Certain episodes are knowing and ironic, while others seem painfully naive.”
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is out in cinemas now.
