Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Director James Mangold explains Helena’s climactic decision during the film’s third act. Harrison Ford’s fifth and final indie performance sees the intrepid archaeologist searching for Antikythera, aka The Dial of Destiny. The thrilling third act sees Indy, Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), and Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) travel through a rift during the siege of Syracuse in 213 BC, with the wounded Indy electing to stay in the past rather than travel. Go back to 1969. Helena, however, punches him out and takes him back anyway.
Mangold now offers his explanation of Helena’s decision Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny A recent interview with THR. Ultimately, he says, the two characters need each other. See Mangold’s full comments below:
“Because she loves him and she needs a father. He needs her. If the movie has anything to say, it’s on a simple level. You have a father who has lost a son and a daughter who has lost a father and both are lost to the world. Helena is lost through cynicism, and Indy is lost through a sense of uneasiness and obsolescence. And so to me, through most of the film they desperately need each other while fighting each other.
“They also desperately need each other’s influence, and I’ve never seen Helena without a heart. I always saw her as hurt that Indy disappeared from her life at a time when she needed someone like that. He says to him, ‘Godfather, what does this mean?’ But he was the living definition of someone who needed a godfather. His father died when he was young and the godfather never showed up.
“And so this movie becomes an opportunity for this particular father to prove himself again, and in his own way, to come out of the grief he felt about his loss.”
Helena’s Indiana Jones 5 decision was the right choice
After a thrilling opening sequence set in 1944, which features Indy fighting Nazis, and again at his peak, there’s a solid 1969 cut featuring a different version of the hero. The world is changing and Indy feels like a wreck – she lives alone and no longer feels at home in the modern world. As it is later revealed how Jones reached this position, his son, Shia LaBeouf’s mutt, was killed during the Vietnam War, which subsequently led to his divorce from Marion (Karen Allen).
Indi choosing to stay in 213 BC Indiana Jones and the Dial of DestinyHer final moments, then, are really her choosing to give in to her grief and abandon any hope of a fulfilling life in 1969. After Helena brings him back, however, he is reunited with Marion and his healing journey begins. The film’s ending resonates emotionally, not only with Indy’s marriage on the mend, but also with the protagonist finding a kind of surrogate daughter with Helena, who has lost a father figure in her own life.
While Indy will have a certain poetry to spend his last days studying history, it’s more meaningful that he embraces and makes amends with the people in his life that made it worth living. It doesn’t just provide a satisfying ending for Indy Indiana Jones and the Dial of DestinyA hero that audiences have followed for more than four decades, but it also gives the likes of Marion, Helena and even Salah (John Rhys-Davies) a satisfying send-off.
