Indiana Jones: Dial of Destiny is not on Prime Video

Watch it. Screen Rant's rewatch piece makes the case that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a fitting send-off for Harrison Ford's Henry Jones Jr., even if it never gets close to Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Last Crusade.

Getting to it takes more work than it should. Reported by Screen Rant: Prime Video's catalog now carries nearly every Indiana Jones film, and Disney's Dial of Destiny is the one left out. Five films with one holdout is a scavenger hunt, not a marathon.

The film sends Indy after the Antikythera, the dial of the title. Screen Rant describes it as a device Archimedes designed, one that can supposedly navigate fissures in time. It is not a doorway to anywhere. Archimedes built it to find one opening, the one connected to the Siege of Syracuse in 214 BC, and Screen Rant argues the narrower idea fits this series better than the wider one some viewers expected.

The opening is the best of it

Screen Rant calls the World War II sequence the closest the film gets to the original trilogy's spark. Indy climbs aboard a Nazi train hauling stolen art, hunting the Lance of Longinus, the spear said to have pierced Christ. He comes away with half the Antikythera instead. Screen Rant says the scene sets up the history between Indy and Voller long before the two meet again in 1969.

The de-aging holds up better than most, per Screen Rant, which compares the younger Indy to Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One. The effect never disappears entirely, but Ford's performance still carries it.

Mads Mikkelsen plays Voller, a Nazi scientist who later joined the American space program. Screen Rant says his cold wish to rewrite history makes him the rival this Indy needs: two men who each feel the world has moved on without them.

Waller-Bridge, the whip and Marion

Helena Shaw, Indy's goddaughter, turns up chasing fortune and glory for all the wrong reasons, and Screen Rant finds her redemption by the end satisfying. Screen Rant also likes the contrast between Waller-Bridge's charm and a grumpier Ford. Star Wars fans get a bonus: Waller-Bridge played L3-37 in Solo.

Screen Rant singles out one gag. Indy cracks his whip at a pack of thugs, who answer with drawn guns. That reverses the swordsman scene in Raiders, which a sick Ford famously turned into a single gunshot instead of a choreographed fight.

In a conversation with Helena about his career, Indy says, "it's not so much what you believe... it's how hard you believe it." Screen Rant hears an echo of Han Solo in The Force Awakens, another Ford character who stopped doubting the unexplainable.

Then there is Marion Ravenwood. Screen Rant notes that Indy and Marion split after their son Mutt died following his enlistment in the Vietnam War, and that Sallah asks a now-fugitive Indy whether he has spoken to her. Reported by Screen Rant: the film went through major story changes once Steven Spielberg left the director's chair and James Mangold replaced him, and Marion's part shrank in the process. Screen Rant's view is that more Marion would have given the film's grief more room. Her return at the end is brief, and it is the scene the ending needs.

The last adventure

Mangold directed Logan before this, another film about a hero past his prime. Screen Rant argues that a final chapter does not have to rebuild the excitement of the early ones, and that Dial of Destiny is strongest when it asks what made Indy's life mean something. He gets things wrong. He lives with regrets. He does not always fit the world he is standing in.

Watch it. It is not Raiders, and it is not trying to be. It is a real ending, which is rarer than a good chase. If a rainy Sunday is what it takes, save it for one. Just do not skip it because your subscription left it out.

• Dial of Destiny
• Disney
• Harrison Ford
• Indiana Jones
• James Mangold
• Prime Video