Continuity mistake: When Donovan drinks from the grail his left hand holds the base with extended fingers. A frame later they are bent.
Continuity mistake: In the catacombs, Indy finds the tomb and blows dust away from the shield, cleaning the sides of the engraved cross, but leaving the rest very dusty. A frame later, the whole cross is spotless.
Continuity mistake: While the propeller chops the boat, Indy grabs Kazim and lifts him up saying, "This is your last chance." But from the opposite angle Kazim is still seated.
Continuity mistake: When young Indy discovers the thieves in the caves, the pot on the right swaps from laying horizontal on the ground to slanted and back to horizontal, depending on the angle.
Continuity mistake: Young Indy grabs the Coronado cross, but from the next angle his hand is away about to grab it, and also its position has changed.
Continuity mistake: When young Indy says, "Cortés gave away the cross in 1920.", the thief is holding it with both hands. A frame later he holds it with just one hand.
Continuity mistake: When Indy escapes out of his office through the window, there are no shadows around. Half a second later, from a different angle, two long shadows have appeared underneath the window.
Continuity mistake: When Indiana's dad blows up the truck beside them during the chase, there's a big explosion. However, in the next shot showing Indiana and Ernst Vogel, the same explosion behind them is smaller.
Continuity mistake: At the very end of the movie, when they all ride off through a tunnel, you can see all sorts of tassels hanging off each of the horses. When they reach the end of the tunnel and are riding off into the sun, there are no tassels at all apparent.
Other mistake: During the airplane chase Indy is seen firing his revolver at the German planes, after he crash-lands he pulls his revolver and breaks open the action to check if he's got any ammo left. He doesn't, but the issue is that a revolver doesn't eject spent shell casings, and there aren't any empty casings in his revolver, despite him firing his gun earlier and having no chance to empty the casings since.
Other mistake: When Indy is atop the tank with his father, he is facing his father. Suddenly, they show a close-up of Indy's face, head-on, with the Nazi leader behind him swinging a shovel towards Indy's head in the background. Indy gasps, and ducks. How did Indy see the shovel being swung at his head if it was completely behind him?"
Factual error: In the 'The Last Crusade', the Germans and their lackeys use MP 38 or MP 40 submachine guns extensively. The MP 38 was still a new weapon in 1938, and not around in such large numbers to arm each and every soldier with it (total of 1 million MP38/40's vs. more than 20 million troopers in WW2).
Answer: The implication is that disaster would follow them outside of the cave as well. It wouldn't make much sense if you could simply outrun the disaster.
BaconIsMyBFF
"Followed by disaster" is a kind of curse, a thing not common in Christianity. It doesn't make much sense anyhow. A seal is just a dot - OK, so let's at least grant that the seal represents a circle that the grail has to stay in. Who decided where those borders are? The grail was taken there during the first crusade. That was closer to 1938 than it was to 33 AD. The three knights could move the grail about then. Why not afterwards? The knights could have built the traps. But the borders could only have been set by god, in an unusually late and completely atypical miracle.
Spiny Norman
There are several examples of curses in the Christian Bible: Lot's wife is turned into a pillar of salt for looking back at Sodom, the plagues visited upon Egypt, Adam and Eve are cursed for eating fruit from the tree of knowledge, etc. The knights did not move the grail around after finding it, they stayed in the temple for 150 years and then two left leaving the third behind. The great seal and it's restriction was already in place when the knights got there.
BaconIsMyBFF
Where in the movie is that stated? I interpreted the knight's story as them having made that place. Looks like it isn't actually specified. But if God made it, then I submit that he would have used Greek, not Latin, for the stepping stones. (All of those curses are from the old testament. The book where god kills firstborn children as long as they're Egyptian. Grail is by definition new testament where you turn the other cheek. There simply are no curses in the gospel, that's just not how Jesus rolled).
Spiny Norman
The tests were made by the knights, but the seal had God's power in it. Just like the cup.
lionhead
It's still a bit dodgy. What if you take a shovel and dig yourself a back door? Basically this film really excels at stuff that makes no sense but helps the storytelling, or to be precise, creates dramatic effects.
Spiny Norman
Every fictional story is like that in some way. That's why it's called fictional. It's just a story.
lionhead
Not a particularly convincing argument, "stuff happens for no reason all the time", if I may say so. Why is this website even here then? The fact is that some stories are more coherent than others. (♫ "In olden days, a hole in the plot, would seem to matter, quite a lot. Now heaven knows, anything goes..." ♫);).
Spiny Norman
It's the difference in what story they want told. Is it a fairy tale or based on actual events? A huge difference in plausibility between the two. The site is there to look at mistakes, not how believable the story is.
lionhead
It is not set in another universe so plausibility isn't somehow suspended. Maybe take a look at the categories recognised by this website. Plot holes, factual errors, even stupidity. (They? Who are they?).
Spiny Norman
It is set in a fictional universe because it's not a true story. With "they" I mean the writers/director. Mistakes in a plot (plot holes) have nothing to do with how believable the story is. As long as it's plausible, it's not a mistake.
lionhead
Pretty sure it's the same universe, just with some added characters/events. What about the total lack of spaceships or orcs or talking animals for example? The seal business is not a mistake YET, but it's very dodgy because no-one knows how it works or why. Like all Indys "trapped" secret places, it's (among other things) unclear who resets the traps for the next visitor. We can't brush it ALL off as "the hand of god" every time.
Spiny Norman
Huge amounts of stuff in films isn't exhaustively explained. Doesn't mean there isn't an explanation that's perfectly believable. There's zero evidence either way to say how "followed by disaster" would manifest, and just because there's not a thorough explanation doesn't mean that it's "dodgy", and it's not worth bickering about either, because there's no concrete answer either way.
Jon Sandys ★
OK but I would like to note that not everyone who offers creative explanations has recently seen the movie; some people just invent their own. E.g. "followed by disaster" is not an actual explanation from the movie, it was just one of the suggestions made here and only here. Or the ones on my own question below. All I'm saying is, it's very hard to tell what the "rules" / "logic" of this place are supposed to be, so I understand what the OP was driving at.
Spiny Norman