How ‘The Dial of Destiny’ fits perfectly with ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’

I took a break from the office the other day and saw The Dial of Destiny.

I love the Indiana Jones movies. I think I can say that. I have some qualms with The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but climbing inside a refrigerator to survive a nuclear blast is not among them. What bothered me most had more to do with the action sequences that rested on Shia LaBeouf’s shoulders. His performances always rest on meager inadequacies, the stuff of Kendall Roy and CGI monkeys sewn together.

Because so much time had lapsed between the original three Indiana Jones films and the fourth installment in 2008, the look and feel of The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull felt jarring largely because the franchise didn’t morph alongside the technology and special effects of modern moviemaking so much as suddenly appear. The problem wasn’t so much that the movie concluded with aliens but that suspension of disbelief had become alien to the adults who had last seen Indy and his bullwhip when they were much younger — when they were young parents or adolescents or even children themselves. If it wasn’t that, then it was an inability to suspend a belief in a Christian God and his relics as displayed by a film director who is a master of the Hollywood Blockbuster and the power of illusion.