Continuity mistake: When the tank is about to go over the cliff you can see that there is no one sticking out of it, but in the next shot, Vogel can be seen sticking out and yelling.
Continuity mistake: While the German tank travels to the temple, it passes a German soldier. Inmediately after, a very wide angle shows the soldier has dissapeared.
Continuity mistake: Jones Sr. falls on the tank's chain and passes by the turret and by a round rusty thing. When the angle changes, a second before Indy saves him with the whip, you see Sr. has moved half a meter back instead of forward, and is passing by the same elements as before.
Continuity mistake: When the Zeppeliner turns back towards Berlin, it is over snow covered mountains. But when the Joneses escape in the biplane there is no sign of snow anywhere.
Factual error: When Hitler signs the diary, he writes in a modern way of writing. But in the late 30s there was a different style of writing called "Suetterlin". The letters looked quite different from nowadays. (01:10:25)
Continuity mistake: Indy throws the German officer out of the zeppelin window and Senior stands up to watch it all better. Then he sits down. Angle changes to a wider view and Senior is back on his feet, head almost out of the window, repeating the previous movements.
Continuity mistake: Indy and a soldier fall down on the tank, right where some bags are. From the next angle they are half a meter before the place where the bags are.
Revealing mistake: Just as Elsa leaps from one side of the precipice to the other as the Temple collapses, a rock rolls from right to left and hits her right in the head before bouncing off. (01:56:35)
Revealing mistake: A bomb falls in front of Indy's car, creating a crater where the car falls into. Dr. Jones Sr. doesn't move forward due to the momentum of the crash, revealing he's been replaced by a dummy.
Continuity mistake: When Indy is looking up at the front of the Grail temple it is bathed in direct sunlight. Indy dismounts his horse in the shadow. However, in the shot just before dismounting, the cliffs behind Indy are also bathed in direct sunlight. That is impossible.
Continuity mistake: When Young Indy is hoisted from the lion's carriage on the train, one of the baddies is holding a gun at him, in the next shot, the gun is down by his waist.
Continuity mistake: When Indy gives his father water from the grail to drink, the grail glows from inside, and the gold inside it is bright and even. But when Indy pours water over the wound, the grail is dark inside and there are dark patches in the gold. Obviously, they had to take the light that made the grail glow out so it wouldn't be seen when Indy pours the water over his father.
Revealing mistake: When Kazim dies, his shirt is all bloody, but there are no holes in it. The bloodstains looks painted on. (01:26:30)
Continuity mistake: The 109s that are animated are shaped like the original German fuel injected ones. The shots where it's a real plane show the modified one with a RR Merlin engine that gives it a weird square nose.
Continuity mistake: As Sallah pulls Dr. Jones senior off the tread of the tank, Indy lets go of his whip and turns towards the German colonel and they continue fighting face-to-face. You can see that Indy punches the colonel so that he loses his balance and stumbles backwards. A split second later, the colonel is standing behind Jones with his arm around Indy's neck. They did not have nearly enough time to so radically change positions. (01:32:15)
Other mistake: When Indy and Kazim are fighting on the the boat as it is being chewed up by the giant propeller, the propeller is more than half way out of the water; if the ship was in dry-dock the smaller boats wouldn't be able to go up to the larger ship, on the other hand if it had run aground it would not be running its engines.
Continuity mistake: The lion approaches Indy from the rear of the circus car and walks towards the center. Next shot, the lion approaches from the back of the car again.
Continuity mistake: The Joneses take off in the Zeppeliner from Berlin. Shortly after takeoff they are over tall snowy mountains but there are no tall snowy mountains that close to Berlin.
Continuity mistake: When Indiana pushes the Nazi colonel out of an open window, if you look carefully, the colonel fell a few metres out of the zeppelin before landing on a pile of suitcases, but when the colonel looks up, the zeppelin is several hundred metres above him, in too short a time to ascend that much.
Continuity mistake: When Indy enters the beach he steps on dry sand and then on the wet part. A frame later, in a wide angle, he is still stepping on dry sand.
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