Dial of Destiny gave me everything I needed from a final Indiana Jones movie
More than 40 years after its release, Raiders of the Lost Ark is still my No. 1 argument for seeing a movie in a movie theater. It’s the best example of bona fide Hollywood movie magic, the kind that becomes a lifelong memory. I saw Raiders in its first week of release back in 1981, when I was 7 years old. Raiders, for me, doesn’t begin with Indiana Jones running away from a rolling boulder, or grabbing a seaplane’s pontoon under a hail of arrows and blowgun darts. It begins with my dad cooking round steak in an electric skillet on a late-spring Saturday evening, with Siskel and Ebert on PBS at 6:30, raving about this revival of amazing high adventure inspired by 1950s serials.
Dad clapped his hands and told me and my brother, “Hot damn! Boys, we are gonna go see that.” Mom dressed us in church clothes to see Raiders and then go to a nice dinner in a bigger city. We wore the same jackets and ties to Sunday school the next day. (And after Raiders’ Old Testament finale, I sat ramrod straight when the church lady read us the story of Job, the only dude to survive being called out by God.)
The real catalyst of an Indiana Jones movie has always been what viewers bring to the theater before the opening credits roll. So I was one of the fans walking into Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny shouldering some preemptive resentment about how the franchise was exploiting my childhood nostalgia by bringing Indy back to the screen one more time. But when Dial’s credits rolled, I had only a nonplussed, middle-distance stare as my best friend asked what I thought.
“That was… actually good?” I finally said.
“Yeah… I think it was,” he replied.
With the understanding that nothing overcomes the nostalgia of the first time you watched a
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