Raiders of The Lost Ark is, for the first 95% of the runtime, an action-adventure with no supernatural events. There are a few fantasy elements like an ancient temple where all the traps still work, but there isn't magic.
Then at the end God appears with a bunch of angry ghosts and kills all the bad guys. Not, like, "a" god. Like the movie is extremely explicit that this is specifically the Hebrew God, the Abrahamic one, Hashem, the Big Guy. Nothing in the previous hour and 45 minutes mattered at all; God shows up and resolves the plot by doing a miracle.
And people loved it. I love it. This movie is a classic. (I mean, what a gift to Hebrew school sleepover nights.) Even the ending is a classic. People don't talk about feeling like the ending is "cheap" or "cheating." They talk about how those Nazis' faces melted off their freakin skulls.
I feel like there's some sort of lesson here about taking too much writing advice that's like "always make sure your payoff is justified by your setup," and not enough that's like "always make sure your payoff is just, like, totally freakin righteous dude"
