Indiana Jones 5 will seemingly feature a young Indy flashback

After years and years of delays, script rewrites, and – for the first time in the franchise’s forty-year history – a change of director from Steven Spielberg, Indiana Jones 5 is finally happening. Directed by James Mangold (Logan, Ford vs Ferrari), the still-untitled sequel will be titular star Harrison Ford’s final adventure as the whip-cracking archaeologist. Up until now though, we’ve had no clue as to what that adventure will be about. However, filming commenced in the UK in the last week and the first set pics (via Daily Mail) appear to suggest a very unexpected development.

The production has been shooting during the night in the North Yorkshire Moors, and while Ford himself wasn’t on set, his stuntman was for a scene in which he’s riding a bike while dressed in a soldier uniform. Where things get interesting though is that the stuntman is wearing a Harrison Ford face mask. However, it’s not a mask that looks like the currently 78-year old Ford, but rather a much younger facsimile of the actor. This type of shooting is usually done when one actor’s head will digitally spliced onto another’s body later. Combine that with the fact that the bike the stuntman is riding is a vintage model commonly seen in WWII and additional set pics show a train emblazoned with Nazi symbology and it would appear that Indiana Jones 5 will feature some kind of scene set in WWII with a young Indy, with Ford most likely having his face digitally de-aged and then inserted into the scenes filmed by the stuntman.

Indy obviously has a long history with the Nazis as they were primary antagonists in 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark and 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. With both films set in the late 1930s, the occult-seeking Nazis were the perfect baddies. For 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull though, the timeline moved up to the late 1950s and an older Indy faced off against Soviet Union agents instead. However, in the movie, it was revealed that in the intervening years Indy actually enlisted and fought for the USA during WWII. Could this scene be a flashback to his soldier days? Or is something else going on here?

We’ll have to wait for those answers. What do know now though, is that the upcoming film has quite the cast alongside Ford as Mads Mikkelsen, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Thomas Kretschmann, Boyd Holbrook, and Shaunetter Renee Wilson have all joined the production in unspecified roles, while John Rhys-Davies returns as Indy’s longtime compatriot Sallah.

Indiana Jones 5 is directed by Mangold off a script he co-wrote with the brotherly duo of Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, while Spielberg is still involved as a “hands-on producer”. The film is currently scheduled for release on 29 July 2022 following several delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last Updated: June 8, 2021