Everyone who has been in my film classes knows that my favorite film is Raiders of the Lost Ark. I saw Raiders at the age of nine in 1981 and it so captured my imagination that I walked out of the theater saying, “I want to be an archeologist when I grow up!” For years, I enjoyed the Indiana Jones movies, culminating in the underappreciated Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. (We won’t talk about Crystal Skull).

On Thursday, Abbey had tickets to an advance screening of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny in Disney Springs. It was a screening for employees of Hollywood Studios. It was a fun little event and I’m so glad that my youngest daughter chose the most important person in her life to take to the movie and not someone like her mother or sister. She chose the most important person.

But just like most films that I have seen in the last couple of years, my reaction to it was meh. It wasn’t a bad film. It was just kind of…there. Abbey asked me what I thought the film would be like before we watched it and I said, “I bet I will enjoy it, and then forget that I watched it afterward.” This turned out to be totally true. It was loud. It had good set pieces. The acting was fine. But the film as a whole was…soulless.