Pardon my ignorance and my apologies if this has been asked before. I have never really understood the ending of Raiders Of The Lost Ark. So they open the ark and it contains nothing but sand. Belloq is obviously angry. So is that to imply that it isn’t the real ark? Why would the real ark be full of sand? And since Belloq is so pissed then the ark must be a fake.
And if the ark isn’t genuine, then why do spirits come out of it? A fake ark would have no power, I assume.
Or is it just more evidence that Lucas was just a hack who got lucky and actually had no clue what he was doing?
" It came about, as soon as Moses came near the camp, that he saw the calf and the dancing; and Moses’ anger burned, and he threw the tablets from his hands and shattered them at the foot of the mountain. "
The sand is supposed to be the broken pieces of the tablets.
I guess we are supposed to think he is too stupid to realize he is looking at the remains of the tablets.
He has to of expected the tablets to be in there, I mean come on I am assuming he did read the freaking bible if he is obsessed with the ark right? So we can assume he expected tablets, and got pissed because he only saw sand being too stupid to realize what he was looking at.
We’re supposed to believe that a professional archaeologist, who has a Ph.D. and everything, and who was hired by the German government specifically to find this artifact, was too stupid to have read the primary historical source of information on it? Even though this source is a scant few lines contained in the most printed book of all time?
I’m not buying it. Either there is some other in-universe explanation for Belloq’s reaction, or this is a gaping plot hole.
If he expects to find broken but still readable tablets, and discovers instead that the tablets have crumbled all the way to dust, why wouldn’t he be pissed off? It’s not that he doesn’t realise what’s happened, it’s that he had hoped (not unreasonably, they’re STONE after all) that they’d last better.
A pile of sand is not an awfully impressive exhibit for the Berlin Reichsmuseum
I’d assumed they’d crumbled to sand over time…
…which, now that I think on it, doesn’t seem that likely, does it? I don’t suppose even soft sandstone would just collapse like that.
To me, Belloq looks more befuddled or confused by the sand than angry. And then he never really has time to digest what has just happened. It is Colonel Dietrich who immediately tosses the sand away in anger or disgust. He’s the one who looks pissed. Then they look a little explodey and melty, respectively.
Of course, Belloq called the Ark “a transmitter, a radio for speaking to God,” so maybe the tablet he expected to find was an iPhone 6 Plus.
The Ark was transported in that rickety army truck earlier in the film - maybe the tablets were rattled to dust in transit.
I think their disappointment with the sand was really the same message as at the end of the Last Crusade, where the Nazi expects the Holy Grail to be a golden piece of bling - Nazis are apparently vulgar philistines who crave gold irreverently, right in God’s face.
Not that this completely absolves Lucas from any plot holes, since he came up with the story. Kasdan’s script is based on a transcript of his meetings with Lucas and Spielberg.
No, it is NOT to imply that it isn’t the real ark. They might’ve suspected that at first, but once the sand disappears and the spirits take over, it’s pretty clear that this is the “one, true ahk.”
It wouldn’t.
You forgot the part after the spirits take over, the one angel looks at Belloq and he screams with joy, “It’s beautiful!” He was angry at first because he thought the ark was a dud, but again, once the sand disappears and the spirits take over, it’s made very clear that it’s the real ark.
You’ve answered your own question.
No, this is not more evidence that Lucas didn’t know what he was doing.
The ark was genuine otherwise there would have been no spirits, no “wrath of God” and there wouldn’t have been a huge storm showing the contents of the ark being raised back to the skies, followed by the top being slammed shut.
Watch it again and I’m sure your confusion will become clear:
Antisemites believe some very strange things, including “God hates the Jews because they killed Christ” So, yes. In the Nazis’ twisted ideology God is on the side of Jew-haters.
Actually, that makes a lot of sense. Hitler and many other Nazis were big believers in the occult, but for obvious reasons did not believe in the existence of the Jewish God. If they were convinced that something like the Ark existed, they’d probably think of it as “just” a supernatural weapon, and not something divine.