It’s been forty-two years since moviegoers met Dr. Henry (Indiana) Jones—a rugged archeologist who relishes fighting over the past a little more than he seems to care for it. “That belongs in a museum,” he growls at a panama-hat-wearing villain who is clutching a precious relic, in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” “So do you,” Panama Hat replies, before going down with that argument’s ship, a rain-soaked steamer off the Portuguese coast, in 1938.
We’ll soon see if Panama Hat was finally right. “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” opens on June 30th, and the actor Harrison Ford has said that this will be his last ride as Indy. Put aside the question of whether the new film will be good, or—as the New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael clocked in the character’s first outing, “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” from 1981—whether an Indiana Jones movie markets nostalgia more than it delivers wholly coherent characters. For many, this Indy movie will feel like losing a complicated uncle, whose charm is most amusingly measured by searching the Internet for “the Indiana Jones of.” (My favorites: “The Indiana Jones of Anesthesiology” and “The Indiana Jones of Spanish Baroque Music.”)
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