The Antikythera - Dial Was Never Voller’s Time Machine

Archimedes built the Dial to summon help to Syracuse. Jürgen Voller mistook it for a weapon that could let him rewrite the twentieth century. His colossal mistake was believing that a machine built by a genius must obey the next man clever enough to touch it.

One ancient mechanism. One fixed destination. One Nazi fantasy reduced to wreckage in 213 BC.

Jürgen Voller’s defeat in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny begins long before his plane reaches the fissure in time. It begins with his reading of the Dial itself. He sees gears, calculations, astronomical knowledge, and a machine that can be calibrated by the superior mind. He concludes that history has become a technical problem, and that he is the technician qualified to solve it.

That is why the 1944 train sequence matters. Voller exposes the Lance of Longinus as a fake. His analysis is correct. The metal is wrong. The workmanship is wrong. The relic cannot be what the Nazis claim. Yet this apparent victory of reason reveals the limit of his intelligence. He can identify a counterfeit object, but he cannot understand why the real past resists possession. The moment he finds Archimedes’ Dial, he makes the same mistake every Indiana Jones villain makes. He sees an artefact and immediately asks how it can make him more powerful.

The Dial does not malfunction at the climax. It does not betray Voller. It does not randomly throw him off course because old mathematics has gone bad. It works with terrifying precision. The machine takes him to the one place its maker designed it to reach, the Roman siege of Syracuse in 213 BC. Voller thought he had seized the controls of history. In reality, he had entered a design completed more than two thousand years before he was born.

The Dial looks like an object that can be held, divided, traded, and operated. Its deeper power lies in the purpose written into it by Archimedes.

For the wider ending and character context, see the plot twist ending of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny explained. The crucial point here is narrower. The Dial is not the franchise’s first magical or impossible artefact. It is the first Indiana Jones artefact that makes history itself the thing being fought over.

The most important thing about the Dial is what it is not. It is not a vehicle for unlimited time tourism. It is not a machine that can be pointed at 1939, 1776, ancient Rome, or any other date at the user’s pleasure. Its architecture resembles a sophisticated astronomical calculator, a piece of impossible ancient mathematics that can track the patterns of fissures in time. In the film’s language, it is closer to temporal meteorology than sorcery.

Archimedes did not create the fissures. He discovered that time has openings, recurring points at which one era can touch another.  This could be explained better in the film. His genius lies in building a mechanism capable of locating such an opening. That is already an extraordinary idea. Yet the machine’s purpose is more personal than Voller ever understands.

Archimedes is not trying to dominate all time. He is living in Syracuse under Roman siege. His city is under attack. The great mathematician, engineer, and inventor is surrounded by the immediate pressure of war. The ancient world may remember him for geometry, mechanics, and the defensive machines he devises for Syracuse. In the logic of the film, the Dial becomes his most desperate invention, a message sent forward through history in the hope that the future will answer.

That reading explains the apparent contradiction of the climax. The Dial’s equations may be real. Voller’s calculations may be technically informed. The fissure itself may be exactly where the machine says it will be. Yet no amount of operational skill can turn Archimedes’ plea for assistance into a Nazi route to Munich. The device has a destination written into its reason for existing.

This makes the Dial unusually intimate for an artefact of such massive scale. The Ark is associated with divine judgment. The Sankara Stones carry the weight of village survival and corrupted belief. The Grail offers healing and immortality under strict moral conditions. The Dial begins with cosmic possibility, but its centre is one man trying to save his home from destruction. Archimedes creates a machine that can reach across millennia because he wants help now.

Voller’s plan is sometimes softened into a generic wish to alter the war. It is much uglier than that. He does not want to stop Hitler because Hitler is evil. He wants to kill Hitler because he considers Hitler strategically incompetent. Voller believes the Reich lost because the wrong man made the wrong tactical decisions. He wants to enter 1939, remove the Führer, assume authority, and build a more successful Nazi state.

That makes Voller the final expression of a familiar Indiana Jones villain. The Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark want to weaponise the Ark. Walter Donovan wants the Grail as private insurance against death. Irina Spalko wants the Crystal Skull as a source of mental domination. Voller wants something even larger. He wants the past itself to become an instrument of fascist administration.

His Nazi uniform on the plane is not nostalgia. It is the visual statement of his intention. He is dressed for succession. He thinks he is travelling toward the moment when he can strip Hitler from history and take his place at its centre. The scientist who presents himself as rational has brought a fantasy of political omnipotence with him into the sky.

Voller sees an instrument that can be operated. Archimedes has made an instrument that can only fulfil the need hidden inside it.

This is why Voller’s error is ideological before it is mathematical. He assumes history is a machine because he sees people as pieces inside one. Cities, wars, nations, and deaths become variables to be adjusted by the best operator. He cannot imagine an artefact designed by a brilliant man that is not ultimately a weapon for whoever is clever enough to use it.

Indy recognises the immediate technical danger before Voller does. Archimedes’ original calculations are ancient. They cannot account for the movement of land masses over more than two thousand years. Voller has converted the Dial’s old coordinates into a modern flight path, assuming that ancient geography can be overlaid cleanly onto the Earth of 1969.

That is a real problem inside the film’s logic. The map has changed beneath the numbers. A route intended to connect one place with another cannot be trusted when the world itself has shifted. Voller has built his plan on the assumption that precise mathematics automatically produces a precise destination.

Yet the arrival at Syracuse reveals that continental drift is only the first layer of his failure. It explains why Voller cannot simply steer into 1939 with confidence. It does not explain why the fissure delivers him to the exact moment Archimedes needs future visitors. That is the deeper truth Helena identifies. The Dial is a false deck.

The false-deck idea is the cleanest explanation of the film’s time-travel rule. A false deck lets a player think a choice has been made freely when the result has already been arranged. Voller believes he has chosen 1939. He believes he has chosen Hitler as his target. He believes he has chosen himself as the man who will inherit the Reich. The Dial has already chosen Syracuse.

That makes Archimedes’ mechanism perfectly suited to Indiana Jones. Like the Grail, it contains a rule that punishes the desire to own it. Like the Ark, it destroys the people who think sacred or ancient power can be militarised. Like the Sankara Stones, it has moral weight that becomes visible only when the wrong people try to turn it into force.

Before the climax, Indy and Helena find clues in Archimedes’ tomb that tell the audience the final journey has already happened. There is an image that looks like a bird with propellers, a future machine translated through the visual language of the ancient world. There is also a twentieth-century wristwatch on Archimedes’ remains, an object that should not exist in his century.

The watch is the clearest proof that the ending runs on a closed causal loop. Voller brings it from 1969. His plane crashes in 213 BC. Archimedes takes the watch from the wreckage. The object becomes part of the evidence later found in the tomb. That evidence helps convince Indy, Helena, and Voller that the Dial is more than a legend. They then pursue the Dial to the point where Voller carries the watch into the past.

The watch does not need to be treated as a literal instruction manual that teaches Archimedes how to build every cog and wheel. Its deeper function is proof. It tells him that the impossible future he has calculated is real. The Dial becomes a completed causal loop because the future visitors confirm the very possibility that brings them to him.

The full mechanics of that loop are explored in The Time Travel Paradox in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. The key emotional point is simpler. Voller’s most personal possession, his watch, becomes an archaeological relic on the body of the man whose design defeats him.

The Indiana Jones films are built around objects that test the character of whoever reaches for them. The Ark destroys those who mistake divine power for military hardware. The Sankara Stones expose the difference between treasure hunting and responsibility. The Grail heals Henry Jones Sr., but it cannot be carried beyond the Great Seal. The Crystal Skull punishes people who mistake knowledge for domination.

The Dial of Destiny turns that old pattern outward. It is not only a relic from the past. It is a relic that opens the past. Its danger lies in the possibility that history could become another possession, another trophy, another weapon in the hands of the person with the most money, force, or technical expertise.

Voller wants to rule history. Helena initially wants to sell it. Basil becomes consumed by it. Indy wants to remain inside it. Each desire is different, yet the Dial exposes the same underlying error. The past is not a private refuge. It is not a commodity. It is not a board on which a clever player can rearrange the pieces.

This is why the final confrontation is not really between Indy and Voller. It is between two ways of reading the past. One sees history as a source of meaning, loss, warning, and human connection. The other sees it as raw material for power. That distinction runs through the whole saga, and it is central to the themes of the Indiana Jones adventures.

Voller and Indy arrive in Syracuse for opposite reasons, yet both are trying to escape the present. Voller wants to return to 1939 because he believes the past can be improved by a stronger fascist hand. Indy wants to remain in 213 BC because his own era has become unbearable. Mutt is dead. Marion is gone. His career is ending. The moon landing celebrations make him feel like a relic standing beneath a future that has no use for him.

For Indy, ancient Syracuse is not simply the archaeologist’s dream. It is an emotional hiding place. He has spent his whole life studying the dead, reading their languages, recovering their objects, and trying to give them meaning. Now the dead world is alive around him, and he wants to disappear inside it.

Helena understands the danger. Indy staying in Syracuse would turn his love of history into self-erasure. He would become another lost object, a man choosing the past because he cannot bear the people still living in the present. Her decision to bring him back is abrupt, but the film’s moral logic requires it. Indy can witness history. He cannot make history his grave.

Voller receives the harsher version of the same lesson. He does not merely visit the past. He becomes debris inside it. His aircraft, his weapons, his uniform, and his watch all lose their twentieth-century authority the moment they arrive above Syracuse. The modern world he worships is reduced to wreckage. The man who wanted to direct history becomes a tiny event inside a battle he never understood.

The title Dial of Destiny does not describe a device that lets its owner choose a destiny. It describes a mechanism built around one. Archimedes has arranged for people from the future to arrive at the moment he needs them. Voller walks into that arrangement because he is convinced that technical intelligence gives him the right to redirect history.

He is wrong on every level. He cannot improve Nazism because the premise itself is monstrous. He cannot turn the past into a machine because the past contains human lives, losses, loyalties, and consequences that resist his equations. He cannot command the Dial because the Dial was never neutral. It was made by Archimedes, for Syracuse, under the pressure of a city facing destruction.

The final irony is complete. Voller wants to use the future to conquer the past. Instead, the past claims him. His watch becomes an ancient relic. His plane becomes a mythic monster in the sky. His Nazi uniform becomes a dead costume in a war two millennia older than his ideology. He does not rewrite history. He fulfils the history that made the Dial possible.

That is why the Dial belongs alongside the Ark, the Stones, the Grail, and the Crystal Skull. It is another Indiana Jones artefact with rules, limits, and a moral intelligence of its own. The person who approaches it as a prize is destroyed. The person who understands its purpose is changed.

The Astromech · Long-form film analysis since 2009.

Why the Grail Knight Could Never Leave the Temple

The final guardian of the Holy Grail has lived for seven hundred years, yet his strength has gone. The Last Crusade makes the cost clear: immortality belongs to the Temple of the Sun, the Great Seal, and an oath that turns survival into a lifelong vigil.

Two brothers went home. One stayed. The difference explains the price of eternal life.

The Grail Knight has waited beneath the Canyon of the Crescent Moon for seven hundred years. When Indiana Jones reaches the chamber, the old crusader can barely sustain a fight. He has fulfilled the oath that defined his life, though the life he received from the Grail has left him exhausted, isolated, and far older in spirit than any ordinary man could be.

His situation raises the central question of the film’s Grail lore. Why does Henry Jones Sr. receive Grail water, recover from a fatal wound, and leave the temple? Why does the Knight remain at his post for seven centuries?

The answer starts with precision. The Knight does not say that a person cannot cross the Great Seal. His warning is directed at the relic itself: “The Grail cannot pass beyond the Great Seal. That is the boundary and the price of immortality.” The cup is site-bound. The surrounding lore shows that continued life is bound to the same sacred jurisdiction.

The Temple of the Sun therefore serves as more than a hiding place. It is the condition under which the Grail’s power can exist. The cup cannot enter the outside world, where kings, armies, collectors, Nazis, and the merely desperate would turn it into property. This is the same principle running through Indiana Jones’ lesson that the real treasure is knowledge: discovery matters, possession corrupts.

The Grail Knight has been kept alive long enough to guard the cup, though the gift has never spared him the burden of time.

The Grail Knight’s vigil is foreshadowed before Indy begins the quest. Walter Donovan tells the story of three brothers of the First Crusade who found the Grail. One hundred and fifty years later, two brothers walked out of the desert and began the journey back to France. Only one completed it. He lived long enough to tell his story to a Franciscan friar, then died of extreme old age.

The third brother stayed behind. He is the Knight Indy meets. Seven centuries after the oath, he remains alive in the chamber while the men who chose the road home belong to history.

Indy reaches the final brother, a guardian who chose the Grail over the return journey home.

I · The First Crusade

Two Brothers Left. One Brother Endured.

The film leaves the exact mechanics unexplained. It never says how frequently the Grail must be used, whether immortality fades instantly beyond the Seal, or what happened to the brother who never completed the journey to France. It does establish the intended contrast. The brother who returned to the world eventually died. The brother who remained in the Grail’s presence was still alive seven hundred years later.

Donovan calls the Grail the gift of youth. The Grail Knight quietly disproves him. The guardian has not remained youthful. His body is ancient, his reflexes have dulled, and his strength has almost gone. The Grail has granted duration. It has not given him freedom from age, fatigue, or loneliness.

Donovan wants eternal youth. His choice reduces the fantasy to its ugly truth: life without wisdom has no value.

III · The False Promise

Donovan Wants a Prize. The Knight Carries a Burden.

Donovan reads the Grail as private power. He wants to outlive Hitler and inherit the world after the Nazis have gone. The Knight has already learned what that dream costs. Long life carries no triumph in the temple. It means a permanent watch, an endless silence, and the knowledge that every personal connection outside the canyon has vanished into the past.

The Grail chamber gives its power moral limits. The false cup destroys the man who reaches for wealth and spectacle. The true cup restores life, though the cup itself remains humble, hidden, and beyond ownership. The Knight’s body is part of that lesson. Immortality in The Last Crusade is neither glamorous nor liberating. It is a covenant with a cost.

Indy completes three famous trials to reach the Grail. He kneels before the spinning blades because the penitent man is humble before God. He follows the correct spelling of the divine name. He walks across an invisible bridge because faith requires a step before proof arrives.

The Great Seal provides the fourth and final test. It arrives after the correct cup has been identified. The real demand is simple: leave the Grail where it belongs.

Elsa identifies the true Grail, though knowledge alone cannot save a seeker who treats it as a possession.

IV · The Boundary

Elsa Crosses the Seal Because She Sees a Prize

Elsa understands that the true cup would be plain. She sees what Donovan cannot. Her failure comes one step later, when she claims that the Grail is “ours” and crosses the Seal with it. The temple begins to collapse because she attempts to turn sacred knowledge into portable treasure. As Henry later says, Elsa found a prize. She never understood the Grail as an obligation.

That final refusal of ownership gives the Grail its moral force. The sanctuary does not merely hide the cup from the world. It keeps the world from converting the cup into empire, commodity, or private insurance against death. The same tension runs through the wider themes of the Indiana Jones adventures, where the artefact carries meaning far beyond the people trying to claim it.

Henry Jones Sr. does not enter the Grail chamber seeking endless life. Donovan shoots him to force Indy through the trials. The Grail becomes urgent because it is the only way to save Henry before the wound kills him.

Indy chooses the carpenter’s cup, fills it with water, and returns to his father. Henry drinks from it. Indy pours Grail water over the gunshot wound. The wound closes in seconds. Henry’s life is restored inside the chamber.

This is where Henry and the Knight divide. The Knight’s life has been extended across centuries through a continuing bond with the Grail and the temple. Henry’s mortal life has been restored. The film gives no sign that Henry carries the Grail’s immortality into the outside world. He leaves with what he needed: his life, his son, and the insight that the cup itself was never meant to be owned.

Elsa falls because she cannot release the Grail. Indy nearly falls because he reaches for it after her. Henry’s command, “Let it go,” ends the film’s final test and repairs the deeper damage in the father and son relationship.

Henry has spent decades treating Grail research as his whole life. Indy has spent decades believing that the dead mattered more to his father than the living. At the abyss, Henry chooses Indiana over the object that has consumed them both. He reaches for his son’s hand, calls him by his chosen name, and allows the Grail to disappear.

The Grail Knight represents the extreme edge of that life. His devotion is genuine. His sacrifice has kept the cup beyond the grasp of men like Donovan. His reward is seven hundred years spent in a single sacred room. Henry finds a way out because he learns the central truth before it is too late. The Grail must be understood, honoured, and left in place.

The Knight could probably have walked over the Great Seal. The film never shows stone walls holding him there. His real barrier is the condition attached to the Grail. Crossing out would mean walking away from the only source of his extraordinary life and abandoning the oath that has sustained him since the First Crusade.

That is why he could never truly leave the Temple of the Sun. His immortality has a boundary. His duty has a location. His life has been preserved by the Grail, and the Grail has demanded everything in return.

The Astromech · Long-form film analysis since 2009.

One Horde Per Indy Film

The Indiana Jones swarm, catalogued. Every film in the saga hands one set piece to a crawling, indifferent multitude that the hero cannot punch, shoot, outrun, or out-think. It is the only enemy he never defeats. He only ever survives it.

Snakes, insects, rats, ants, eels: the franchise's standing appointment with the dark.

There is one enemy Indiana Jones never beats. Not the Nazis, not the Soviets, not the cultists or the rival archaeologists, all of whom he out-thinks, out-runs, or out-punches before the credits. The thing that defeats him, in every single film, is small, mindless, and arrives in its thousands. He reads the dead language. He throws the whip. He takes the punch and makes the leap. And then the floor moves, and the cleverest adventurer in cinema becomes a frightened man in the dark with his hands over his face.

Watch the five films back to back and the pattern is unmistakable, and unbroken. Each adventure hands exactly one set piece to a crawling, biting, indifferent multitude. Snakes in Raiders. Insects in Temple of Doom. Rats in The Last Crusade. Army ants in Crystal Skull. Eels in Dial of Destiny. One horde per film, no more and no less, as reliable as the fedora and the whip. He never wins these encounters. He only survives them. Nobody talks about it, and once you have seen it you cannot stop seeing it. So here is the catalogue.

The Well of Souls: a living floor of asps, and the only horde that is also Indy's own phobia.

I · Raiders of the Lost Ark · 1981

The Snakes

The original, and the only swarm in the saga that is also a personal phobia. Indy and Sallah lever open the Well of Souls and lower a torch, and the floor moves: a living carpet of asps with a cobra rearing in the middle of it. "Snakes. Why'd it have to be snakes?" The film loaded the gun an hour earlier, in Jock's seaplane with a boa coiled across the seat, "I hate snakes, Jock, I hate 'em," so when Sallah peers over the edge and delivers the franchise's driest line, "Asps. Very dangerous. You go first," the horror is specifically Indy's. He burns a path with torches and lamp oil, tips a statue to bridge the floor, and climbs out over the writhing mass. At no point does he win. He endures. Raiders sets the template by weaponising the hero's own fear, and every sequel will generalise it.

Pankot Palace: Willie plunges her bare arm into the insect-packed recess to stop the spikes.

II · Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom · 1984

The Insects

The darkest film delivers the most tactile horror. Fleeing through the bowels of Pankot Palace, the trio crawl down a low tunnel seething with beetles and cockroaches that pour over their bodies in the dark, and then the ceiling itself turns into a wall of descending spikes, sealing Indy and Short Round in. The only release lever sits inside a recess packed solid with crawling insects, and Willie, the least heroic member of the party, has to plunge her bare arm into the worst of it to save them. It is the most physical use of the horde in the franchise: disgust as set design, the creatures not a barrier to get past but a thing you must push your hand into. There is no clever solution on offer here, only the will to reach into the squirming dark.

The Venetian catacombs: rats first, then the petrol-fire that chases them through the tunnels.

III · Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade · 1989

The Rats

Venice, in the catacombs beneath the converted library, where a Crusader knight was laid to rest above the clue Indy needs. He and Elsa wade through chambers boiling with rats to reach the tomb and its inscription, and here the swarm is married to fire: petroleum spreading across the floodwater catches light, and the rats and the flames surge together through the tunnels while the two of them race a wall of burning water to a grate and the open harbour. It is the franchise's most elegant horde, because the rats are not quite the danger themselves. They are the medium the real danger travels through. The swarm sets the stage; the fire collects the bill.

The approach to Akator: the siafu column, the only horde in the saga that actually kills.

IV · Kingdom of the Crystal Skull · 2008

The Siafu

The most lethal horde in the saga, and the most openly monstrous. On the jungle approach to Akator, a column of giant siafu army ants boils up out of the ground, bridging the gaps between roots in living ropes of bodies, swarming vehicles and combatants alike, and finally dragging a full-grown Soviet down into the seething mass and hauling him off whole. Where the earlier swarms menace and revolt, the ants simply kill, and they do it with a horrible collective intelligence, forming structures, redirecting, consuming. This is the swarm at its least personal and most elemental. Not Indy's phobia, not a test of nerve, but nature deciding who walks out of the trees.

The Aegean wreck dive: the eels erupt from the rock, the saga's final infestation.

V · Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny · 2023

The Eels

The final entry honours the rule on the way out. Diving to a sunken Roman wreck in the Aegean to recover a piece of the Antikythera mechanism, the party drops into a flooded sea-cave that turns out to be a nest of vast eels, which erupt from the rock in a single thrashing mass and cost a life before the survivors are clear of the water. By 2023 the formula is so deeply set that the film reaches for it almost dutifully, the obligatory horde checked off between one dive and the next. It is the least surprising swarm in the saga, which is itself the proof of the rule: even a film made forty-two years after Raiders cannot proceed without its one infestation.

It is worth marking what changed across the saga and what did not. Only snakes are Indy's named, personal terror, planted in Raiders and paid off on the floor of the Well of Souls. The sequels never give him a new phobia. They give the audience new revulsions instead, and let Indy stand in for all of us: no longer afraid of one specific thing so much as conscripted, film after film, into the franchise's standing appointment with the crawling dark. The personal fear became a genre convention. The phobia became a structure. That, in miniature, is the whole story of the swarm.

Five films, five hordes, one law that the saga never states and never breaks.

The Astromech · Long-form film analysis since 2009.

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.