This morning at breakfast my brother brought up a thing he saw on a TV show. Despite the fact that the two leading men are a nasal-voiced woman in drag and a bunch of snakes wearing a human skin, who are sometimes, inexplicably, the only people on the screen when Kaley Cuoco is supposed to be available, my very naive and unworldly brother swallowed the tripe this show put forth and regurgitated it at our Sunday family breakfast, to be absorbed simple-minded people like our Harvard-educated brother who is too busy at his job as a lawyer to have time to think through the ramifications of this sort of thing. And our nieces and nephews, who, while cute, lack the basic common sense to refrain from engaging from shoving matches atop the highest and most precarious piece of furniture in their grandparents' home, much less make discerning judgments when their father/uncle proclaims heresy. It's not even really his fault. Being an optician, store manager and father of four doesn't lead a lot of time for getting the plot of Raiders of the Lost Ark correct.

So, before anyone else decides that Amy Fowler (does anyone else think its weird that her effeminate boyfriend has selected for his first female romantic partner a woman who looks like a larger, deeper-voiced and more stereotypically masculine version of his roommate? ) has anything legitimate to say about a movie that was filmed by dipping celluloid into solid gold awesome, let me put it out there:

Indiana Jones is not superfluous to the plot! And the hell with any TV show creative "genius" who fires Topper Harley from one of his sitcoms.

The idea that the Nazis would have taken Marian's medallion, found the right spot where the Ark was buried, opened it and died is completely undermined by one line in the movie: The one where the Nazi commander himself expresses a reluctance to go through with the ritual that kills them all. "I am uncomfortable with the thought of this Jewish ritual."

The only reason that climactic scene took place was because Belloq, the academic, was obsessed with doing the recreation. The Nazis, being good soldiers, just wanted to get the damn thing to Berlin where proper Aryan scientists, in the country where the Bible was printed for the first time ever, might have recalled the bit about how you are not SUPPOSED to open the damn thing. "But he slew of the men of Bethsames, because they had seen the ark of the Lord" - 1st book of Samuel, 6:19

In "Last Crusade" Walter Donovan even suggests that Hitler has no real interest in personally using religious artifacts. If he doesn't want to drink from the Holy Grail, he's probably not interested in opening the Ark of the Covenant. The reason why Hitler wanted the Ark was to make his armies invincible.

In fact, real world analysis of the German military pre-war suggests that the Germans really did not plan very well for a long fight. Their tanks were second rate, and while Heinz Guderian claims they were intended as practice vehicles until better ones could be built, the fact was, the tiny tanks with machine guns and 20mm cannon were being produced concurrently with the better models (which themselves lacked sufficient firepower to breach the armor of most French tanks). The generally issued rifle was one of two variants, the Ge 98 or the Kar 98. The 98 indicates the year of the design, 1898. So their soldiers were carrying a forty-year-old rifle that they had used in World War I. They never developed a heavy bomber, and their prop fighters didn't improve much over the course of the war.

The only way this makes sense is if you believe the Rothchilds and the rest of the Illuminati tricked him into taking on the three greatest superpowers in the history of the world in order to reduce the number of players on the board and bring on the New World Order a lot faster, OR if you realize that he was counting on the Ark to make his armies invincible!

The Old Testament is full of situations where God or the Prophets deliberately handicap the armies carrying the Ark into battle so that it is clear that these guys are not winning through military might, but by the power of the Almighty. The Nazis definitely knew their source material and they amped up the difficulty settings (attacking Norway across the British dominated North Sea, attacking France across impassible terrain, allying with Italy, invading Russia late in the year, letting the allies steal their code machines and so on) to accommodate the demands of the Ark. They almost certainly would not have been stupid to ignore the admonitions to not take a peek inside.

But because Indiana Jones got involved, the Nazis called in hihs arch rival, Belloq, to help them anticipate his moves. Belloq is characterized as someone better at thinking ahead of Indy, then at actual archaeology, hence his constantly getting the better of Indy and being dumb enough to dress up like a priest selected for their bloodlines (it is an artifact that can beat armies - did he think it would not notice that he was a Frenchman, instead of one of the tribe of Levi? ), and pop the lid on a Biblical superweapon.

The Nazis didn't have him when they went after the medallion, and first encountered Indy, so Belloq must have been brought on the team once they realized Indiana Jones was out there with the whole medallion.

Had the Nazis got the medallion, they'd have found the Ark right away, boxed it up and put it on a REAL transport, rather than a submarine, and brought it to Germany, rather than some secret island to indulge their consultant's taste for Israelite cosplay, and the actual scientists, rather than Indiana Jones' personal remora, would have been in charge of what to do with it.

By taking the medallion in the first place, Indiana Jones forced the Nazis to listen to an Indiana Jones expert, rather than an expert on the Ark of the Covenant. However good Belloq is at the former, he doesn't seem to be the latter. Pretty sure the country that produced the architect who found Troy has the academic chops to figure out what Belloc couldn't. And the Nazis would have rolled right over the whole world, the end. Except Indiana Jones kept popping up to ruin the plan until the soldiers carrying out the recovery operation were willing to do anything that the one guy who could out-think Indy suggested.

And I'd also like to go on record as pointing out that the submarine trip with Indy on the conning tower is not improbable. WW2 submarines, stayed on the surface unless there was absolutely no other option. Because of the mechanical limitations, the top speed was cut in half when underwater, and of course, the risk of sinking with a precious cargo is increased, and the odds of getting said cargo off an endangered sub drop to zero once it submerges. Unless they were at war, there are almost no reasons why a U-boat would go under water when its mission was simply traveling to an island to off-load the Ark, presumably for transport to a much faster, better armed and more heavily armored destroyer or cruiser. Indy would have had no problem for the simple fact that the submarine would not have gone under. They might also have disregarded the normal procedure of keeping watchers atop the boat, because of wanting to keep all the sailors under their eyes for security concerns or something (the navy was the least politically reliable branch of the Nazi armed forces).

The real mystery of that movie is why no one has picked up on Sallah selling them out to the Nazis. I mean, he was on the short list of people who knew the real digging site, and they get through the whole day without getting noticed, only to have the Nazis find their site in the dark, take it by stealth before anyone can shout a warning down, and oh, hey, Sallah is captured but turns up alive and free once Indy & Marian escape! And Sallah seems to have arranged for their transportation - which the Nazis found easily, and seized the Ark from. Seriously, this never comes up?