The Booby Traps make no sense


"Only the penetant man will pass" - does it have to be a man?

In any case, it's not enough to kneel, you have to do a couple of rolls in the exactly right direction at the exact right moment.

Once you do, somehow the really old, self-resetting mechanism knows someone has passed, and suddenly doesn't reset anymore. Uh, how? Why? Why let everyone through after ONE Indy-vidual figures out your traps?

Makes no sense. How would these super old traps reset themselves anyway for who knows how many decades or centuries? Why wouldn't the metal rust? How did they build and test these traps?

"Iehovah"

Why doesn't a history teacher and professor not know how to spell, and think it's spelled with 'J'? Huh?

Also, when you look at the view of the traps from below, where Indy almost falls through the "J" (no one else had this kind of close call? If it's this easy to have close calls and yet live, is it even dangerous?)..

..you can clearly see NOTHING holding up any of the letters, they just magically stay up. What?

If there WAS logically something holding up the RIGHT letters, then Indy could, while hanging down there, just look at where the path is, and walk there. No need to spell or jump clumsily, just walk through where he saw the supported letters were. Alternatively, just step with ONE foot on each letter and thus drop the ones that are not supported, so only the stable ones are left.

This trap makes no sense from any point of view I can figure. Just look at the viewpoint below Indy, when he almost falls.. how does that make sense? HOW?

"Leap of Faith"

This might be the most ridiculous thing of them all, and most nonsensical.

Light in ancient times was not easy to get. You either had to use very smoky and smelly oil, like fish oils, or candles that didn't provide much of it. The only bright light source was the 'daylight', but in a cave system like this, that would change constantly and drastically.

Would this bridge look the same on a cloudy weather? It would ONLY work at a VERY specific time of a day, at a VERY specific, sunny weather, and even then, it would be covered with dust, rocks, leaves, spider webs, you name it.

Ancient paint would most likely fade during all that time anyway, so it would still not look the same, and because your eyes show things in three dimensions, a 2D-painting would ONLY fool you if you look at it from a very specific, exact spot, one eye closed. Use both eyes and you easily see there's a bridge there.

This bridge somehow doesn't cast shadows or receive shadows?

I mean, you can find pictures of amazing trick art that is painted with a weird, forced perspective, which counters the actual perspective you see, so it looks very 3D and cool, but only through a camera lens. It doesn't work in real life, because you'd have to be at a very specific spot and close one eye and all that.

This bridge painting is basically a version of that, and ANY MOVEMENT would instantly reveal it, because a distant wall of a crevice would not seem to move much when you walk towards it, but a painting would seem to instantly move closer to you, because it's RIGHT THERE. This would change the perspective instantly..

There are SO many reasons why this bridge thing would NEVER, ever fool or convince ANYONE. There's absolutely NO WAY to paint a convincing wall not only in the proper counter-perspective back in the day, but also because the lighting is NOT constant, far from it, and it would always look fake no matter how well you paint it.

It's another movie trick that would never, ever work in real life, so Indy should not be fooled by it at all. All he has to do is look left or right, up or down, look at the bridge while walking towards or away from it, and so on.

Not that much of this movie makes sense when you think about it, although it is the best of the Indy movies.

They say that 'white torture' is psychologically really horrible. It's basically because you have no stimuli, everything is white.

This knight would have lived in almost as bad an isolation chamber without any entertainment for hundreds of years? It's not the 'getting older', but it's the 'how would he not become completely insane' kind of thing. What did he eat and drink? No matter how healthy you are, you are still going to get hungry and thirsty, and your body and organs can't function if they don't get nourishment or energy somewhere. Did this knight learn how to eat pure energy that he doesn't get much from the sun in a dark cave anyway?

How is there so much light in the cave, did this knight go to the market and buy modern oils and such to keep the flames lit?

Where did the knight get all the cups, and wouldn't they be worth something, being ridiculously old artifacts that this ARCHAEOLOGIST doesn't even glance twice?

Who devised this whole 'test'-thing anyway? I mean, it would've taken a long time and a lot of planning to create, just to wait for hundreds of years for some intruder to take the test?

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YOU'RE WEIRD.🙂

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I agree!

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I mean.. the juice is not worth the squeeze here!

If the grail can never leave the cave (and what magical power makes that rule and why?), then what's even the point of all the booby traps and the test anyway? Couldn't THAT be the protector of the grail, crumbling the whole system if anyone tries to take it away? Why would it have to be 'kept' anyway? For what purpose? Couldn't they just as well have destroyed it instead of going through ALL that trouble for no purpose or reward other than 'grail fell into crevice'?

Is that a good grand reward for hundreds of years of patience, pain, misery, toil and trouble the knights went through?

How did they gain magical powers to create a spell that strong that will collapse a whole cave if someone tries to take the grail out anyway? They weren't magicians, mages, wizards, warlocks, necromancers, witches or sorcerers. They were KNIGHTS. Since when can knights do magic?

So the knights' plan was to leave many clues so someone could find the grail, then cast a spell that keeps the grail in the cave, create a mysterious test that kills anyone that drinks from a non-grail cup (this magic is also not explained, is every cup laced with some kind of poison that stays potent for centuries?), then create booby traps to kill possible intruders, but then stop working if someone gets through..

Then leave one guy to 'guard' the grail, try to kill the one that will be then put to the test.

I am trying to figure out what they were trying to achieve by doing all this. The end result would always be 'grail falls into crevice', so couldn't the knights have just THROWN the grail into a crevice and saved themselves all the trouble?

NONE OF IT MAKES ANY SENSE!!

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The knights were religious zealots … to me that explains why they’d go to such lengths to protect the grail without destroying it. To them, it’s a sacred relic that one must protect, yet still be “worthy” to do the protecting.

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We could suspend a LOT of disbelief in the 80’s.

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Yeah those dumb 80s fans.

Now we have much more realistic films based on comic books and super heroes.

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The knights devised it. They had a lot of time thanks to the grail.

The traps don’t self-reset once someone passes them because, in their religious zealot minds, someone who’s “worthy” of the tests is worthy to protect the grail. In other words, the knights think the traps only have to be “passed” once.

As for those who fail, the knight’s just sitting there listening to everything. He’ll just wait until everyone’s dead, then go out and clean up, resetting the first two traps as necessary.

The only way the “name of god” trap works is if a lot more tiles than just I, E, H, O, V, A and H are stable and connected to one another. I don’t have a problem with that.

But there’s no explaining away the bridge. It only “works” at a certain time of day, and OP’s right about cloud cover likely ruining the illusion. It’s just something we have to accept in the service of how awesome it looks when revealed. I was in the theater, opening night in Manhattan, and still remember the gasps throughout the theater (including from me), as the camera panned around to reveal the bridge’s secret.

It was worth the suspension of disbelief in that instance.

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Once you do, somehow the really old, self-resetting mechanism knows someone has passed, and suddenly doesn't reset anymore. Uh, how? Why? Why let everyone through after ONE Indy-vidual figures out your traps?

Indy fiddled with the ropes after he passed - we see him do it. So that answers that, but it raises another question: how did he know to do that?

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He didn't just fiddle.

There was a noose on the wall -- he hooked it around one of the cog-wheels to stop the trap from working

How did he know to do that? Same way I know to kick down the doorstop leg on a door. The noose is right there next to the cog-wheel, obviously meant for that purpose.

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It wasn't a noose. He just pulled the rope and hooked it onto the wheel. But how did he know where to look for the rope? Remember, two "volunteers" had already tried to walk through and they both lost their heads. How come they didn't see anything? The original script suggests the blade moves too fast to be seen, but more importantly, Indy has more important things on his mind than to look in the crevices to the sides as he is avoiding two deadly blades. He spends no time looking for it, either. He rolls, and immediately he has the length of rope in his hands. Which, again, is not a noose, and does not hang ready for that purpose. And even if it did hang there for that purpose, complete with instructions in modern English, how would Indy know to find it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY5gkkfaHL8

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Sorry, I didn't mean it was a literal noose for execution. It was a rope that ended in a loop, like a boat's throw-rope -- the loop's braided into the rope and hooks onto the dock's pegs.

Indy only saw the rope and cog-wheel mechanism after he'd passed the trap.

It's true he spends no time looking for it, but I have no problem with that for two reasons:

(A) the stopping mechanism itself is apparently only visible after you've passed the trap, seems designed to be seen in fact, which is why I compared to to a built-in doorstop, and

(B) Indy's already an expert at primitive traps, he don't need no stinkin' instructions


Good points, though, and much easier to address after you found the actual scene

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I know what you meant by noose. It was not a loose rope, and it did not end in a noose. Or loop, if you will. It was a length of rope, the ends of which we could not see. It was not there for the purpose of stopping the mechanism, but Indy used it as such because it was physically possible. There was no stopping mechanism, nor would it make sense for there to be one.

So the question remains, how did Indy know to find it? He wasn't even looking for a mechanism, because he had no idea what was in store.

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Check your video link, right at the end, 4:43 - 4:44

In the freeze frames, you can see the loop.

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Very clearly NOT a loop. It's a length of rope. Rope loops naturally, it's not a pre-fashioned loop for that purpose.

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Looked again & you’re right, no loop

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Agreed

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Out of all the things that don’t make sense in this movie you chose to focus on the booby traps? That didn’t make sense the least out of all the dumb shit in this movie.

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The op is retarded. All of his posts are like this. Just an attention seeking user.

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Another long winded rant by you that makes no sense. The movie made it perfectly clear

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The booby traps make no sense to boobies.. Everyone else gets it.

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