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Harrison Ford is donning the hat and whipping bad guys once again in the still-untitled Indiana Jones 5. Empire revealed the first look of Ford back in Jones mode last week, but sprinkled within those photos were also our first hints about the actual plot of the film as well as a Harrison Ford first: getting de-aged through technology.
Ford will be de-aged using visual effects so that Indiana Jones appears in the film as his age from the original trilogy. That scene is only used for the film’s opening, which will be set in a castle in 1944 and has Indiana against a group of Nazis, but then segues to when the movie takes place.
“Then we fall out, and you find yourself in 1969,” said director James Mangold, who is taking over filmmaking from Steven Spielberg. “So that the audience doesn’t experience the change between the ’40s and ’60s as an intellectual conceit, but literally experiences the buccaneering spirit of those early days… and then the beginning of now.”
Empire also reported that several techniques were employed to pull the sequence off, which included brand-new ILM software that scanned through footage of a young Harrison Ford before matching it to the new footage for the film. Ford said the footage spooked him out a bit.
“This is the first time I’ve seen it where I believe it…I don’t think I even want to know how it works, but it works,” Ford said. “It doesn’t make me want to be young, though. I’m glad to have earned my age.”
Ford, who turned 80 this past July, has been playing the professor/archeologist/Nazi puncher for almost half his life, with the last time being in 2008’s Kingdom of the Crystal Skull where he fought Russians looking for alien technology. It had less than stellar reviews and entered “nuking the fridge” into our nerd lexicon.
Mads Milkenssen, Antonio Banderas, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge will join Ford on his fifth Indiana Jones adventure which is slated for summer 2023.
