July 8, 2023 – What could be sillier than surviving a nuclear explosion in a refrigerator? Try time travel, using a 2,000 year-old computer. That's the premise behind the latest, and probably last, Indiana Jones movie starring Harrison Ford.

The story spans thousands of years of time, beginning in 1944 with Indiana Jones (Ford, reprising his role) helping a friend, Basil Shaw (played by Toby Jones of “Captain America”) recover stolen artifacts collected by Nazis, led by astrophysicist Jürgen Voller (played by Mads Mikkelson of “Riders of Justice”). The special effects in these early scenes are very impressive. Ford is very effectively “de-aged” to appear as he did in 1989 when he starred in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”

Then the story skips ahead to 1969, when Jones is retiring from his college professorship, and we see Ford roughly as he appears now (Ford, born in 1942, is actually a few months older than President Joe Biden). Jones is once again drawn into the world of international intrigue when Jürgen Voller suddenly shows up, along with some minions, looking for an ancient analog computer that was stolen from him by Jones and Basil Shaw in 1944.

The computer, called an Antikythera mechanism (named after a similar device found in a shipwreck near the Greek island Antikythera in 1901) or “The Archimedes Dial” was constructed by Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes some 2,000 years ago. Jones had been hiding the thing all this time, unaware of its capabilities. Voller and Shaw, however, think the device can predict the natural appearance of fissures in time, through which people can travel to different eras.

Voller wants to use the device to travel back in time in order to use his knowledge of history to help the Nazis win World War II. Shaw has since passed away, but his daughter (and Jones' goddaughter) Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge of “Solo: A Star Wars Story”) is also after the device, with plans to sell it to the highest bidder, and she is being followed by Voller and his men.

Voller, Shaw and Jones all end up at the location of the device at the same time and they end up chasing each other, and the device, around the world for the rest of the movie. It turns out that Jones had only half of the device, and the device is useless without the other half. Finding the other half is all part of the international chase.

If this plot seems a bit over complicated, it is actually a lot more complicated than this brief description of it, but fortunately, there is also a lot of action surrounding this complexity. The action, like the plot itself, is not believable, but it is entertaining. This film rates a C+.

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