Only in this cursed timeline we live in could the first trailer for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny be the second most-talked about news story revolving around Nazis, but Kanye West had other ideas when he unleashed the latest in what’s fast becoming a never-ending line of incendiary interviews.
By the time Harrison Ford’s fifth and final outing as the legendary adventurer comes to theaters next summer, 15 years will have passed since the divisive Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, with 42 having elapsed since Raiders of the Lost Ark. As a certain fedora enthusiast would say, though, it’s not the years; it’s the mileage.
The title itself has generated plenty of questions, but as long as we’re not talking about poorly-rendered CGI aliens and Shia LaBeouf swinging from vines, then Dial of Destiny stands a great chance of being substantially superior to its widely-hated predecessor, a movie some fans still haven’t found themselves able to forgive.
And yet, watching an iconic hero battle against the threat of Nazism took on a rather unsavory contextual turn after the footage debuted at pretty much the same time Ye’s latest diatribe captured the zeitgeist for all the wrong reasons.
Obviously, it’s a turn of events nobody at Disney, Lucasfilm, and CCXP could have predicted, but it did make it that little bit more refreshing to see the longtime villains of the franchise get their comeuppance while a former superstar intent on pushing the self-destruct button puts those assholes back in the headlines for all the wrong reasons.