Hey 3.5 readers. BQB here.
Just re-watched “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” Such a great movie. So, at the end, Indy drinks from the Holy Grail. Shouldn’t he remain immortal and never get old?
Then again, the knight said the grail can’t leave the tomb, so I’m going to guess you have to keep drinking from it to sustain immortality.
Discuss.
Bookshelf Battle 
I think the knight that said the Holy Grail couldn’t leave the tomb was just trying to keep his job. Downsizing happens even to a Knights Templar.
Maybe but the tomb does fall apart when the Nazi lady tries to take it out so…I’m going to go with the idea that you can stay alive forever, but the price is that you have to stay in the tomb and keep drinking out of the cup…which honestly, not a terrible deal. I suppose it would suck to stay it the tomb but it would suck to die also.
Right — remaining in the temple was stipulated by the knight as “the boundary and the price of immortality.” That’s why when the knight’s two brothers left the temple, 150 years after having found the Grail during the First Crusade, they died of old age on the trip back to France (per exposition early in the film). Immortality only applied within the temple.
Last Crusade is such a perfect film — one of my favorites. They got everything right with that one.
Well, now you’ve got me thinking. If the brothers lived to 150, that only could have happened from drinking from the grail…maybe it didn’t make them immortal but it prolonged their lives a lot longer than usual…so shouldn’t Indy be making it to 150 and therefore still be up to adventures today?
No. What happened was this: The three knights of the First Crusade found the Grail at the temple, drank from it — thereby attaining immortality — and stayed within the perimeter of the Great Seal for a century and a half, where they aged but didn’t die, per the “rules.”
At that point, per Indy’s expository recollection near the beginning of the movie, two of the three brothers decided to leave the temple and head back to France, only one of them surviving the journey, and that knight — before himself dying of “extreme old age” — imparted his tale to a monk who then chronicled the story on the stone tablet that sets the events of The Last Crusade in motion. (The one who stayed behind continues to live for many more centuries, through at least 1938 when Indy confronts him.)
So had Indy and Henry, both of whom drank from the Grail, remained in the temple, they would’ve continued to live indefinitely, too. The moment you step over the Great Seal, though, all bets are off, which is why Henry has passed away by the time of the events of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull two decades later. (We know from the TV series, though, that Indy himself lived to be at least a 93-year-old man, for whatever that’s worth.)
What’s so elegant about the plotting of Last Crusade is that they tell you right at the beginning of the movie the Grail isn’t a take-home prize, even if you can get to it. Consider Indy’s translation of the stone tablet: “… who drinks the water I shall give him, says the Lord, will have a spring inside him welling up for eternal life. Let them bring me to your holy mountain in the place where you dwell. Across the desert and through the mountain to the Canyon of the Crescent Moon, to the Temple where the cup that holds the blood of Jesus Christ resides forever.”
In their arrogance, they assumed “resides forever” meant that’s where the Grail has been hidden, never for a moment considering that what it in fact meant was: It ain’t leaving this temple, fellas, even if you do manage to get to it.
I think it would have been good to just stay in the tomb and live forever, even though you had to stay in the tomb. You’d have to bring some friends and family to keep you company and maybe some books, movies, does the tomb get cable? I mean, life in a tomb is dreary but hey, it’s life. It beats the alternative.
Or, you could leave the grail in the tomb and bring sick and injured people there to drink, get cured, leave, come back when they are sick and need another drink and perhaps that way extend life indefinitely.
There were totally many loopholes. Alas, that Nazi chick ruined everything.