The Indiana Jones films have always blended the line between relatively grounded scenes talking archaeology with lively heightened action, and moments of outright supernatural fantasy – from the Ark of the Covenant’s Nazi melting to the Last Crusade’s immortal knight.
SPOILERS AHEAD FOR “INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY”
Even with the switch from supernatural to more sci-fi leanings with the two recent films, it still maintained this distinction. Whereas it wasn’t an issue with Spielberg’s original trilogy, both the fourth and fifth film have been criticised for their final acts which take things potentially too far.
With the fifth film, the titular dial sees Indiana and others going back in time to Syracuse in 212 BC and talking to Archimedes before returning to the present. The film makes it clear from the get go the dial isn’t a time machine – one reveal being that it only tracks temporal fissures that go back to a single point and place in time, the time of its invention.
The film’s director James Mangold has had to shoot down one of the wilder online rumors of recent years that arose – suggesting the film would end with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Helena Shaw character using the device as a time travel-style machine to effectively insert herself into the events of the previous films and become the new ‘Indiana’.
Speaking with The Ringer recently, director James Mangold made it clear that the film’s ending we have is the one that was always there and it was never going to end any other way:
“This is the ending we wrote two years ago… When you start writing anything, you don’t know exactly how you’re going to land it. You just keep working. And there were moments where I thought about, I thought maybe they’re going to end up going back to Germany and he’ll stop Mads from doing what he’s doing, but I felt like we already did that with the opening.”
The other big moment causing debate is Dr.Jones declaring he wants to stay in the past, until Helena knocks him out and drags him back to the present. Mangold says he never had any intention of leaving Indiana Jones in the past:
“It seemed to me it would have been a kind of suicide by time warp and kind of grim. Like, is he really going to be happy? Even Phoebe says, with leeches and blah blah blah, watching people haul dung around in carts and slaves? No… The whole thing seems more like the impulse of a guy who doesn’t know what he would be going home for.”
The result is him reconnecting with Marion in the film’s final moments, partly resolving the issues that unravelled their marriage. The ending has led to debates online, Polygon going so far as to say it “bends the franchise into a navel-gazing ouroboros”.
The arguments will no doubt continue, but one person who has already sort of weighed in is original “Indiana Jones” writer George Lucas himself.
Slashfilm has found an archived 2008 interview Lucas did with Total Film in which Lucas says he strove to maintain the idea that even with otherworldly elements in these films, it was “grounded in some kind of reality”. Whilst a gold box of flesh melting ghosts walks the line of believability for him, chronodisplacement is a step too far:
“The thing is, if you believe in the Ark of the Covenant, if you believe it has some relationship to God, if you believe it strikes people down – which is all true in a certain code of reality —- then it all makes sense. But you can’t just make something up, like a time machine. That’s not what it’s about. These are supernatural mysteries, not action-adventures where you have no historical or archaeological context.”
“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” is now in cinemas worldwide.
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