Comparing and contrasting the themes that run through Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Dial of Destiny

Two films, one fable told twice. Comparing and contrasting the themes that run through Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Dial of Destiny: the past nobody can leave, the treasure that turns out to be knowledge, and the gap between wanting to know and wanting to rule.

The last two Indiana Jones adventures, read side by side.

The simplest reading of the last two Indiana Jones films is also the most durable: both run on people who cannot leave the past behind. Dial of Destiny states it in block capitals. It is 1969, the world is throwing a ticker-tape parade for men who have walked on the moon, and Indiana Jones is a relic among the celebrations, his son Mutt killed in Vietnam, his marriage to Marion broken on the grief, a retiring professor banging a broom on his ceiling at a generation that has moved on without him. His mirror, the NASA scientist Jürgen Voller, is stuck in a different past: the Nazi rocketeer who put Americans on the moon and cannot forgive that he won the wrong war under the wrong flag, and who means to climb back through time and correct it. Hero and villain, both refusing to let the past stay past.

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull plays the same chord in a cosmic key, and here the longing belongs to the aliens. Through the possessed Oxley, the interdimensional beings of Akator speak a single ache across the temple chamber: no more forever waiting, soon now. They have been suspended, frozen, waiting on a return for centuries. Around them the Cold War powers are not so much building the future as digging up the deep past, racing each other to seize ancient knowledge that might win the next war. And Indy, in 1957, is already becoming the man out of time he will fully be in 1969: the atomic age has arrived, the Red Scare is loose, and his certainties are curdling around him. The two films land on the same theme from opposite ends. Dial makes it literal and personal, a man who wants to stay in 212 BC because the present holds nothing for him. Crystal Skull keeps it political and otherworldly, with powers reaching backward for forbidden knowledge and a race of beings trapped in their own forever.

The line everyone quotes from Crystal Skull is the one the film almost throws away at the finish: the treasure was not gold, it was knowledge. Akator is not a vault of jewels. It is a museum, an archive, the hoard of beings the film frames as archaeologists themselves, collectors of knowing from across worlds. The skull, the throne of thirteen skeletons, the saucer waiting beneath the city: the prize is understanding, not bullion.

Dial of Destiny chases the identical prize in a different costume. Its treasure is not gold either. It is the Antikythera mechanism, the Dial that Archimedes built, a piece of knowing so far ahead of its age that it can locate the fissures in time. And the deepest treasure of the film is not even the artefact, it is the thing the artefact grants: the past itself, the chance to stand in front of Archimedes and simply know. Both films quietly agree on the same value. The real treasure is knowledge. What separates the people chasing it is what they intend to do once they hold it.

This is the sharpest line the two films share, and it cuts both of them clean down the middle: do you want knowledge for its own sake, or only as a means to power. Crystal Skull draws the divide through Irina Spalko, who names her side without blinking. She knows things, she says, she knows them before anyone else, and what she does not know, she finds out. But knowledge, to Spalko, is never the destination. It is the road to power over the mind of man, telepathic dominion, a weapon for the State. Indy is her exact negative, the museum man, the scholar who wants to know for no reason beyond the knowing.

Voller redraws the same line in Dial of Destiny. He does not revere Archimedes; he wants the Dial as an instrument, a key to power over history itself. He is Spalko with a slide rule, the seeker who prizes knowledge only for what it can be made to do. And Indy, once more, is the one who wants the thing itself. Set down in front of the actual past, he is not calculating, he is awed.

The contrast even survives into the films' quietest beats. Crystal Skull tells us plainly that Spalko cannot read Indy's mind, and not because his will is the stronger: she fundamentally cannot understand it. A mind that wants knowing without owning is unreadable to her, alien. Voller carries the same blind spot in a different shape. He cannot conceive that Indy would stand in 212 BC and want to stay, not to seize anything, but only to be inside the knowledge. In both films the one who wants to rule can never quite read the one who only wants to know.

Both films then arrive at the same crossroads: an offer, and a choice. In Crystal Skull the alien intelligence, grateful, offers a gift. Spalko accepts it greedily, demanding to know everything, and she is granted precisely that. The knowledge pours into her all at once, more than any mind can hold, and her ego is violently consumed; her eyes catch fire, and she is dragged into the vortex by the very thing she asked for. Indy, beside her, declines. He does not reach. He lives. The wish and the punishment turn out to be the same object, and only the one who refused to grasp walks out of the temple.

Dial of Destiny stages the identical transaction with time itself as the gift. Voller seizes the Dial, accepts the offer to travel, and is granted exactly the journey he wanted; only the destination is not the one he charted. Archimedes, who built the Dial knowing the world would drift across two thousand years, sends him not to 1939 but to the Roman siege of Syracuse in 212 BC, where his aircraft is torn out of the sky and he dies in the very war he was trying to skip. He accepted the gift, and the gift consumed him, exactly as it consumed Spalko.

And here is the contrast that makes Dial the bolder film. The version of the gift offered to Indy is the chance to stay in the past forever, and for the first time he is the one who wants to accept. He is the one reaching for the thing that would dissolve him. It falls to Helena, his goddaughter, to refuse the gift on his behalf and haul him home to 1969 when he will not refuse it himself. The rule that governed Spalko governs the whole pattern across both films: accept the gift and be consumed, decline it and survive. In 1957 Indy keeps his footing while a grasper is destroyed beside him. In 1969 he almost becomes the grasper, and is saved only because someone else makes the choice he could not.

Set the two films beside each other and they are the same fable told in two languages. Both are about people who cannot let the past be the past. Both insist the real treasure is knowledge, not gold. Both pit a seeker who wants to know against a power who wants to rule, and both let the power grasp exactly what it hungered for, and watch it be devoured.

Two films, one verdict: you are given precisely what you grasp for.

The difference between them is one of register and aim. Crystal Skull keeps its horror cosmic and its villain external. The grasper is the enemy, and Indy stands clear of the vortex that swallows her. Dial of Destiny takes the same blade and turns it inward, points it at Indy himself, until the man who always knew to decline the gift is the one reaching for it, kept alive only because the next generation refuses on his behalf.

That is the real progression across the last two adventures. In 1957 Indy watches a grasper consumed and keeps his feet. In 1969 he very nearly becomes the grasper, and learns, almost too late, that the treasure was never the gold or the skull or the Dial or the lost past. It was knowing what to want, and knowing when to let it go.

The Astromech · Long-form film analysis since 2009.