By With “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” now comfortably out for weeks on basically every home video format available, the film’s director James Mangold has spoken about the movie’s bold and controversial final act.
MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD
Whilst the third act of previous Indy films have climaxed with a ghost massacre, a collapsed rope bridge battle, an immortality cup being found, and a UFO bursting out of an ancient temple, the fifth film tries something quite different.
The film sees Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) using the titular dial to go through a time fissure to what he believes is pre-World War II Germany. In actuality, it ended up being Syracuse, Italy in 212 BC.
In a recent interview with io9, Mangold confirms that wasn’t the ending in place when he joined the film:
“When I came on the movie, they had been playing with a bunch of different things which were basically just reduxes of what had happened in the first movie. Just more apparitions and ghosts and I felt like I was just watching the first movie over again when I envisioned what was in the existing scripts.
I felt like what Steven [Spielberg] and George [Lucas] and Larry Kasdan and David Koepp as well had done successfully in the other films, was to keep kind of pulling up a rock on a different aspect of history and metaphysics and not going back to the same thing. In a way I didn’t want to do the kind of ‘Is it a Death Star again?’”
Instead, Mangold said he stuck to the film’s core theme of time and legacy for his central idea for the film’s last act. Then he started writing, the initial plan was “we would end up back in Nazi Germany in 1938”.
He quickly realised that is what the audience would anticipate and it’s effectively just a redux of the film’s opening – albeit with an elderly Indy. The solution was something more left field:
“I felt we needed something more shocking, something bolder, and something that also affected Indy. If he had gone back to Nazi Germany, he would simply be a hero trying to stop Voller from doing his plan. If he ended up where he does end up in the film, he was going to be facing bigger questions about his own life and what he studied all his life. And I thought that was going to be more interesting. And also, usually bolder is better if you can do it.”
“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” is now available on Disney+ and 4K UHD Blu-ray.
The post Mangold On That “Dial of Destiny” Ending appeared first on Dark Horizons.
