Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, John Rhys-Davies, Denholm Elliott, River Phoenix, Alison Doody, Julian Glover
Donovan shoots Indy's dad in order to force Indy to co-operate. Indy gets past the traps, and finds a knight guarding a room full of Holy Grails. Donovan asks which is the correct one, but the knight simply says that Donovan must choose himself. Donovan asks Else to choose it, and she deliberately gives him the wrong one, so that when he drinks from it he ages to death and disintegrates. Indy chooses the plainest cup there, which turns out to be the true Grail. He then uses the Grail to heal his father. Elsa then carries the Grail over a seal on the floor (which the knight had told them not to do), and the place starts breaking up. Elsa falls down a bottomless pit trying to reach the Grail, and Indy nearly does the same, only stopping when his father asks him not to. They then get out before the place explodes. It's then revealed that Indy took his nickname from the dog he owned as a kid.
DaveJB
Continuity mistake: When Sallah rides up to the tank to rescue Henry we see Indy toss the whip over the side of the tank, but after the tank falls over the cliff, when Indy climbs back up then walks over to stand between Henry and Sallah the whip is coiled and back in its place, hanging from his belt. Even Indy can't do that. (01:36:00 - 01:37:40)
[Over the deafening noise of ship engines.]
Indiana Jones: Are you crazy? Don't go between them!
Dr. Elsa Schneider: Go between them? Are you crazy?
Trivia: When Indy asks his father how he knew Elsa was a Nazi, Henry replies, "She talks in her sleep." Sean Connery ad-libbed this line. The cast and crew burst out laughing, which resulted in the scene being re-shot. The ad-libbed line remained in the film.
Question: They didn't make it out of the cave with the grail because they dawdled... I wonder, would someone be able to make it out running at a dead sprint once they crossed the seal? And if so, does that mean that they're home free? Or would disaster follow them outside of the cave?
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