Indiana Jones is the rare example of a character whose whole life, effectively, has been documented in live action under a single unified canon. The films, now classics, follow him from the prime of his adulthood through his senior years, while severely underrated “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles” spans from birth to young adulthood, featuring flashes forward to the character in his mid-90s. This gives Jones a depth and complexity damn near unmatched by his contemporaries in the same genre and medium. Over dozens of hours, viewers have had the rare opportunity to be party to all the developments and missteps, growths and regressions of what feels to be an unmistakably real life.
The nature of fictional storytelling means there are always gaps in a character’s story, no matter how comprehensive. In Indy’s case, the relative infrequency of those gaps — though they do remain — becomes more of a burden than an opportunity. While the character’s arc has come together smoothly over four decades, cohering into a totality both lifelike and legendary, that seamlessness also makes covering unexplored parts of his life in a relevant way a challenge. MachineGames’ “Indiana Jones and the Great Circle” — released last year for Xbox, PC, and PS5, as well as for the Nintendo Switch 2 on May 12 — was excellent for many reasons, but perhaps none more so than for how it confronts this problem.
Set on the heels of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Great Circle” cleverly meets the challenge of telling a brand new Indiana Jones story, setting it in one of the few unexplored moments of canon while still making it feel integral to the character’s development. The game finds Jones after his split from future wife Marion Ravenwood — a period described only off screen until now — smirking “watch me” as confidante Marcus Brody tells him he cannot run from his problems.
That is, after all, what Indy has done his whole life: retreat into the mysteries of the past to avoid the problems of the present, a doomed cycle that mirrors the father he tries so desperately to not emulate.
This game’s share of mysteries are quintessentially Indiana Jones, entailing a globe-trotting adventure spanning ancient civilizations, sects, and secrets both natural and supernatural. In this entry, Indy goes searching for the truth behind a series of archeological sites positioned in perfect sequence around the globe: The Great Circle. Like the best — or the rest — of Indy’s adventures, this treasure hunt runs parallel to a story informed by his own demons, namely his litany of dysfunctional relationships. While “Great Circle” shines on both fronts, it is the latter that makes the deeper impression for Indy lovers.
A recurring theme of the series is Indy’s personal failings in the face of his professional successes — how his drive to find meaning in history’s losses begets an inability to maintain relationships in the present, how his recognition of this always arrives perversely late, in bitter contrast to his extraordinary luck in the field.
The Young Indy chronicles show him enlisting in World War I against his father’s wishes, assuredly out of moral obligation but equally assuredly out of need — the need for autonomy, recognition, purpose. His extraordinary luck in the field carries him through harrowing horrors of war, including but not limited to fighting a vampire in Transylvania, escaping from a German prison camp in East Africa via hot air balloon, and, as an allied photographer, crossing flight paths with the Red Baron. When his son Mutt Williams enlists in the Vietnam War, assuredly obligated and assuredly out of need, Indy protests but ultimately helplessly watches his son make the same choice he did. Except Mutt is no Indiana Jones, and his luck is far from extraordinary.
In the unfairly maligned “Dial of Destiny,” Indy laments the death of his son and his inability to console his wife. Informing all of that is the knowledge that he’d done exactly what he’d spent decades avoiding — he had grown, in age, into his father. He had also, in the rashness of his own youth, set the paternally-rebellious example Mutt followed to his premature end, leaving the course of his life paved with bitter — and fatal — irony. This cosmic curl of the monkey’s paw is the end result of the Indiana Jones curse, the cost of “fortune and glory.”
This increasingly ironic franchise slogan has haunted every adventure Indy goes on: Even in earlier installments, Indy never gets away with the treasure. His exploits are more often recognized by the Nazi sneering at him across a death trap on any given week than the college he happens to work for on any given week. Fortune is wishful, glory fleeting, and thus Indy is doomed to repeat his mistakes amid the most marvelous of adventures.
“Great Circle’s” most notable achievement is its embrace of this treadmill, the weight that Indy, still in his prime, has not yet understood he carries. In one scene, we meet Indy’s friend from World War I, Vatican priest Father Antonio Morello. Morello knows him by the “Young Indy” pseudonym Henri Defense — this offers him the context to provide advice we know Indy cannot yet comprehend well enough to take. In another, indelibly sinister villain Emmerich Voss psychoanalyzes him to prophetic results: “Oh,” he realizes of Indy’s separation from Marion, “you were afraid of becoming your father.”
The game may lack enough of an emotional resolution for some, but that can be found in the ensuing four movies, which is the exact mark of a successful prequel. But this game is more than a prequel, and the fact it so wholly complements what came before it is the mark of a nigh-flawless interlude. When a character has such a clear start and end, with an ouroboros of a life in between, defining the bumps along the way is how we find more to offer from them.
What the game needed to — and does — make so bitingly clear is in that humanizing cycle of success breeding failure breeding success, Indiana Jones himself was the Great Circle all along.
