More Thoughts On Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny

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Further spoiler alerts. Someone on another site reasoned that Phoebe Waller-Bridge's character, Helene Shw is not a Mary Sue. I think she very much is a Mary Sue. She has a smug arrogance and a one-upmanship drive throughout. It peaks in the cringeworthy sequence when she patronises the Nazis and Indie alike with a history lesson as she reveals the clues from the macguffin salvaged from the seabed just before she sets off the dynamite on the boat. - Indy could have done this stuff despite his age. She flat out leaves Indy to die in her initial attempt to take the half dial - she had no reason to lock him in the room, as she could easily run off and leave him behind unable to catch up but still leave him with a better chance to survive. She later tries to get the nazis to shoot him too - she only seems to soften when she learns of his son’s death. She mocks him for being an old timer, and later shows up Indy in his struggle to climb the cavern wall by bounding past him - there is the long bike ride pursuit of the plane where she is in effect the hero of the film, with Indy as the wounded quite passive captive on the plane - Helene orchestrates much of the rescue, sending Teddy to get the other plane, and even shoots a nazi while hanging off the plane fuselage. Helene decides Indy’s future for him - it should really have been Archimedes giving Indie some wisdom to talk him out of his effort to retire into the golden age he envisages. She mocks his age. She out-argues everyone - she shows her arrogant egotism with the magic card trick - a hint of the pre-determined outcome of all hinted out in the finale. At one odd point she lusts after a younger man who has no shirt on, which would have seemed sexist coming from a male character oggling a woman. Indy has had a treacherous female companion before, (Last Crusade), but that was handled far better. Right after the escape from the boat she is laughing about the sheer rush of it and how cool she was, with a brief momentary pull back as Indy points out that a friend and his entire crew died, but then right back to her goofing off and Smart-mouthing again. Waller-Bridge is a great actress - Fleabag was brilliant. She is terrible in this role though. How the final rescue should have gone. Teddy (his back story as a pickpocket taken in by the hero is exactly the same as Shortround’s), needn’t have been in the film at all. Helene should have had the following plane - maybe holding its pilot at gunpoint to get him to fly it. Indie overpowers the Nazis on the planes in some way himself, in effect enabling him to be the central hero of his own swansong adventure and they could/would all still end up in Syracuse, but it should Archimedes who persuades Indy to go home, not Helene - the reunion with Marion was still OK. They clearly needed a strong younger character to supplement Indy (and Ford’s) age but the extent to which she dominates the film reduces Ford to her co-star rather than the other way round. Found it irritating how the villains just kept turning up - basically the heroes had time to find some pierce of intel or mcguffin and then the bad guys arrived to initiate a showdown and chase with no indication how they pinpointed exactly where to be at just the right time. Happens in lots of films, but happens throughout this one. That return home - From being punched out, Indie is put on a plane, time jumped, landed in 1969 US, somehow transported to his New York Apartment, had his serious gunshot chest wound healed, and remained unconscious to the point of being in a coma at home while Helene has engineered his reunion with Marion. Also - The whole (Ford) Fugitive remake subplot is chucked aside. Indy is still wanted for murder and now waiting at home in his apartment for the cops to show up. Voller is remarkably Captain Scarlet/Harkness to as he is clearly smashed in the face and thrown from a fast train in the War before turning up unscathed in 1969, casually telling everyone he’s a nazi, as in his odd chat with the black guy in the hotel. At one point Indy is surrounded by several armed Sicillian police officers who seem intent on arresting him, and he is wanted for murder. He asks them nicely not to do anything and put their guns down. They do so and immediately go away???? If I'm ever about to be arrested I'll ask the police nicely to leave me alone. No doubt they will NOT! I see quite a few films where a scene in the trailer isn't in the film, but IJATDOD seems to do it with one echoing the franchise's most iconic image of all - the rolling boulder from Raiders. In the trailer Helene clearly uses a lever to dislodge and roll a big round boulder, presumably during the scene where she and Indie have to distribute weights round the plunge pool to make it drop them about a foot lower down than they are already standing. Pretty sure it didn't happen in the film itself. Arthur Around the 1.46 minute mark https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQfMbSe7F2g