Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Suite

At eighty-one, Williams returned to Indiana Jones for the fifth and final time, and the Dial of Destiny suite performs the feat of simultaneously celebrating and mourning the franchise — the adventure theme in full voice, but in a new key, at a different tempo, with a harmonic gravity that wasn't present in 1981. The suite opens with the Raiders march as though establishing familiar territory, then gradually introduces new material that carries the film's central preoccupation: an aging man confronting what his life amounted to. The new themes are not as immediately hummable as the classic material — they are more complex, more internally turbulent, better heard than whistled. Williams's orchestration at this late stage of his career has a transparency that his early blockbuster work lacked: you can hear each section of the orchestra individually, the woodwind countermelodies that earlier arrangements buried, the harmonic movement in the brass. The suite has an elegiac quality that the film itself sometimes forgets to cultivate, as though the music understood something the screenplay didn't quite commit to. It is a document of a composer completing a relationship with his most popular character and finding, in that completion, material that goes beyond nostalgia into something more honest.