Ahem...
The idea of a Nazi going back in time to fix the Reich's mistakes is an inspired plot device, but [this] time travel mechanism has to be better established then "a few people take a glance at half of an ancient dial, and are immediately convinced, despite no evidence whatsover, that it's a workable device for such a feat." On the one hand, I appreciate that the Archimedes dial is scientific in nature, but on the other hand, there really needed to be either some supernatural basis for the idea of being able to locate/predict fissures in time, even if those fissures occur naturally, or a practical demonstration of the dial's utility/accuracy.
Since I wrote the above, shortly after seeing the movie, I keep coming back to this point, which seems to be only rarely mentioned elsewhere, either in this thread, or the usual YouTube discourse suspects (Honest Trailers, Pitch Meeting, Dan Murrell, etc.). The underlying plot to this movie is that Archimedes, with no supernatural help at all, devised a method of determining when and where a time-connecting fissure would appear, and that Voller, despite only seeing half the dial for a few minutes before being hit on the head and falling off a train, was immediately so convinced that the whole device can take him to the exact time he wants to go that he spends years in pursuit of this goal, and is willing to risk his life on the scheme working without
any experimentation. He's also somehow able to recruit a whole squad of goons into this plan, despite having
zero evidence.
The first three movies had the excuse of religion (and Hitler's inherent madness) to explain the villains' belief in the various relics, and we can assume Spalko saw enough classified material related to the Roswell Crash and Hangar 51 to justify her search for crystal aliens. But in the case of this flick, it's just one goon (a highly educated rocket scientist, at that!) believing in an extraordinary absurdity without a shred of evidence - and then Indy, after seeming not to believe in it himself for decades, suddenly also does at the exact moment the plot wants him to.
It's a hugely silly foundation on which to build a story,
even in the context of inherently silly pulp adventures. It'd be like John Hammond building the entire Jurassic Park resort, down to the introductory film starring himself, on the mere
idea that he might be able to clone dinosaurs from blood found in amber-encased mosquitoes, before actually drilling into a single such insect. It'd be like Doc Brown designing and building the time-traveling interface for the DeLorean
before conceiving of the flux capacitor. It'd be like Peter Weyland funding and secretly going on the Prometheus mission not because of well-documented impossibly identical cave-drawn star maps from around the world, but because he once overheard a drunk self-described spelunker telling a friend about such maps in a grimy dive bar. It's just dumb as dumb can be, and it hardly seem as though anyone else has noticed.
Or am
I wrong??
