A Tale of Two (Aging) Heroes: 'Logan' and 'Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny'
Let's analyze the storytelling device that writer-director James Mangold used to provide two iconic characters their cinematic swan songs
A great character introduction can become iconic, but it’s much more difficult to provide an iconic character a narrative exit — a swan song, so to say — that feels like an appropriate conclusion to their story. Filmmaker James Mangold has done it not once, but twice with the films LOGAN (2017) and INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY (2023). The storytelling device that he used to accomplish these feats is not necessarily unique to him — far from it, in fact — but he happens to do it better than most. By analyzing his use of it, one can learn a great deal about how to develop plots that service your characters rather than characters that service your plot.
OVERVIEWS OF LOGAN AND DIAL OF DESTINY
There be spoilers ahead, kiddos. But you already know that, don’t you? God, I hope you know that. How could there not be?
LOGAN
LOGAN is the final film in what amounts to a wildly uneven trilogy of films around the X-MEN character of Wolverine/Logan (Hugh Jackman). It’s also the final film in the Fox X-MEN series in which the character exclusively appeared - at least until the Mouse House bought the place.
The story is set in the near future, one where mutants are on the verge of extinction. Logan — let’s just stick with the titular name — is a broken-down old drunk who drives a limo as a way to pay for the medical care of the neurologically degenerating Charles “Professor X” Xavier (Patrick Stewart). His healing factor is a pale shadow of what it used to be; the adamantium that coats his bones has slowly been poisoning him and death, we sense, is now a painful crawl away. He is a man at the end of everything for himself and his kind, haunted in every waking and sleeping moment by his violent, murderous, beastly past. This has been the central conflict of his existence, in fact – is Logan a man or an animal? Suddenly saddled with a daughter he never knew he had, a child who hasn’t made the same mistakes that he has, he’s forced into a final confrontation with his savage nature.
INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY
INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY is the fifth and final film in a series that most people were content with ending at three films in. Its predecessor, INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL — despite having a title I love — disappointed most fans and, while the film has been reconsidered more favorably as of late, few seem to have recovered from Shia LaBeouf as the famed archaeologist’s son Mutt Williams.
In DIAL OF DESTINY, we find Indiana at the tail-end of his life. It’s the late sixties, the Space Age has made the study of history — and, by extension, archaeology — seem trivial, and his wife Marion (Karen Allen) has left him for reasons we don’t learn until late in the film. His adventuring days are behind him and all that’s left to look forward to is dying drunk and alone in his tiny New York apartment rather than in some exotic locale. But the arrival of his estranged goddaughter, Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), forces him to come out of “retirement” and chase down the Antikythera mechanism – the titular “dial”, which Helena’s dead father believed could detect time fissures and make time travel possible. In other words, Indy’s MacGuffin in DIAL OF DESTINY is the literal past he has spent his whole life investigating.
THE JAMES MANGOLD WAY
Again, to be clear, we’re not here to discuss a storytelling device that James Mangold actually innovated. But what makes Mangold so interesting is that he used this approach with two different aging movie heroes to tremendous effect and studying what he did is, I believe, hugely edifying to screenwriters at any stage of their craft.
The storytelling device, narrative approach — whatever you want to call it — works in the following manner (which I’m sure will sound reductive, but I want to simplify it as much as possible so we’re all on the same page). It applies to characters’ final acts, such as Logan’s and Indiana’s, but can just as easily be applied to protagonists in general depending on what kind of story you’re trying to tell (there is no universal template for any kind of script, remember).