When you first saw the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark...

[QuasarVM]

When I first saw it, my head exploded like one of those melting Nazis...

 

[RandyS]

That ending had "government cover-up" written all over it. I wasn't surprised to see it again at the beginning of Crystal Skull.

 

[FluffyUnbound]

Wow, I'm kind of surprised that the voting is running so close.

 

[jadcox@mindspring.com]

I honestly thought it was a little of both.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

I thought: Jones could have opted out of the whole adventure and it would have come out exactly the same way, with the Nazis opening the ark and getting zapped.

 

[MeanJoePhaser]

I thought: Jones could have opted out of the whole adventure and it would have come out exactly the same way, with the Nazis opening the ark and getting zapped.

You're right. The whole movie was pointless. Even the opening, he went through the traps and Belloq gets the idol.

Indiana Jones = Loser.

I'm glad they didn't bore us with the details of how Indy and Marion escaped a German-held island in the Mediterranean.

 

[Trent Roman]

Both, it was a warehouse full of other mysterious objects, but the US government had just been rounding them up and stashing them away with no intention of doing anything about them besides keep them away from bad guys, rendering it effectively a useless piece of junk.

This is what I thought, too. The way they just refuse to answer Indy ("Who?" "Top. Men.") made it pretty clear to me that 'stash it away and forget about it' was their intention, and was probably the history of all the other items in that warehouse.

Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman

 

[Gaith]

I thought: Jones could have opted out of the whole adventure and it would have come out exactly the same way, with the Nazis opening the ark and getting zapped.

It's not the destination... it's the journey.

- The Great Sage Harry Kim.

 

[Nardpuncher]

I had heard about the ending a bunch of times before I saw it, so it wasn't a surprise to me. But if you're asking what I take the meaning of the scene to be, it's more like "The Ark is disappearing into the endless bureaucracy of the U.S. government, never to be seen again." An ironic, unexpected ending-- it's just as "lost" as it was at the start of the movie.

Basically the way I saw it...it was lost again.

Though I didn't really 'get' that till I was a bit older...I first saw it at age 7.

 

[MeanJoePhaser]

Theories.

The Ark made them hide it, influenced if you will. It didn't want to be found to begin with.

It also manifested the snakes in the Well of Souls based on Indiana Jones' greatest fear. If he'd been afraid of clowns, things would've been really f'ed up.

We see in the cargo hold of the ship, it doesn't have to be opened to affect things.

 

[Alpha_Geek]

My guess was #1, and that they stockpiling unusual aritfacts. Whether that was to prevent them from falling into in the hands of the Nazis, or for their own research and use was indeterminate.

Did you guys notice the Ark's guest appearance in Kingom of the Crystal Skull?

 

[biotech]

Even blind people noticed that.

 

[Praxius]

To me I chose #1, but I didn't exactly believe that.

I figured they wern't going to get it lost in with the rest of the boxes, as I am sure that even they at the time had ways of keeping track of what they had in storage and where.

To me, it seemed all that could be learned from it was learned.

Open the thing, look and you die.

In the hands of the wrong people it could be very dangerous.

Solution?

Lock it away in a box in a hidden warehouse, mark where we put it and never mention it again, like many of the other boxes of mysterious, magical, alien things they had stored in the same place for the same reasons.

So long as they know where it is and know nobody is going to screw around with it while it's there, the problem is solved.... end of story..... just like how the movie ended right then and there as well.