I am not bothered by inaccuracies. I am a trained Earth scientist and nothing about the absolute bonkers science in The Core bothered me, for example.
But one thing does bother me, and this has come up in a few threads … you people need to learn once and for all that pubic grooming wasn’t invented in the '90s.
That is inferred to be because he liked a bit of stank. But it equally could be that he was allergic to or just hated her bath scents, which were commonly used instead of plain soap.
Many experts and submariners claim that Das Boot is very realistic. OTOH, I love Down Periscope.
I’m really bothered by inaccuracies that seem half-assed. Like they tried a little bit, got things wrong, and then left it, when if they hadn’t tried at all it would have been fine.
Here’s a computer interface one. Not spoilery, I hope. The dialup computer interface in Stranger Things season 4. It should have been some text menus. That would have been fine, could have been nice and big so they could be read by the audience, and would have been totally period correct. Instead they’re blocky icons that were maybe supposed to be correct for the period, but wouldn’t have been found on a dialup connection, and would have been pretty cutting edge for an OS interface in 1986.
The other alternative, though perhaps not as cinematic would be for the characters to just say, “I’m in…and there’s the information we need…”
Or, and I’ve mentioned this on here before, the yoga instructor’s Nissan Leaf in Cobra Kai. Having him drive an old electric car was perfect car casting. Having the electric car make engine sounds as it drove away was an inaccuracy bad enough for somebody to be kicked out of the foley union. The point being, somebody thought and made a deliberate decision about using a crunchy car for a crunchy character, and then really messed it up.
For me the only inaccuracies I really care about are ones that a) are not necessary at all to advance the plot or story or entertainment value and b) are egregious. I also take issue with historical inaccuracies that intentionally obscure or distort serious problematic behaviors.
As a retired Army officer, I literally cannot roll my eyes hard enough at people who freak out over errors in uniforms, military jargon/lingo etc. These things are not important to the storytelling and are so minor that no one should care about them, you spend a chunk of your military life, especially early on, having to memorize and be grilled on some pretty tediously stupid shit–don’t project that stuff out into your civilian life. Some of the worst relate to the USMC, “there is no BOOT CAMP in the Army”, “there is no such thing as a ex / former Marine” et cetera. Just stop. To most people boot camp just means military training, they don’t understand that only the USMC really uses that term formally. To most people if you used to be in the military and are now no longer in it, they are going to use words like “former.”
Note that on uniforms, I mean things like getting slight details wrong, like a medal worn in the wrong location or a patch in the wrong place et cetera. I would consider it egregious if I watched a movie set in WWI and someone was wearing a uniform more typical of the 1960s, for example.
Minor inaccuracies in firearms fall into the same category of minor/irrelevant to me, and tedious to even hear people talk about.
Braveheart, while perfectly entertaining, is full of inaccuracies that weren’t necessary to tell the story and are also fairly egregious. It is probably fine to me that William Wallace was portrayed as more of a rustic type in the movie (he was landed nobility in real life), but the use of blue woad (while probably not actually blue woad, warpaint like that was probably associated with the pre-Christian Picts, not 13th century Scots) and the wearing of clan tartans (by lowland Scots hundreds of years before such was common among Highlanders) actually was not at all necessary to the movie and just a real egregious inaccuracy.
Gerard Depardieu’s portrayal of Christopher Columbus in 1492: Conquest of Paradise is shockingly bad in intentionally obscuring poor behavior in the past. That movie actually portrays Columbus as enlightened, and someone who was a strong advocate for indigenous rights and viewed them as his equals as humans, but was undermined by nefarious forces within his party and evildoers back in Spain who backed them. That is so at odds with historical reality it is honestly unethical to even present the story in that way.
These are from books, not movies, but what bugs me are inaccuracies where the author could have gotten it right with a one minute Google search. Or should have known.
Examples from a contest I judged:
One book had rockets taking off (about 10 years from now) next to the Manned Spaceflight Center in Houston. Rockets. Yeah, right.
Second: a character was going to Queens College in Queens, NY, just a few miles from where I grew up. It is part of the City University of New York. The author thought that the place had dorms, and worse, a football team. Not even close.
I recall a book by Meg Wolitzer that took place at Swarthmore College but the description of the library was that of Brown University’s, with the stack lights on timers, for example.
Someone puts a record on a old wind-up horn phonograph, but it’s obviously an LP (larger label size) and it’s rotating at the wrong speed, or even backwards. It’s actually rare when they get it right.
Not pebbles, no, but it’s possible to get a good clean wipe with a smooth stone. I speak from personal experience.
The things that bother me most are historical inaccuracies in biopics. Bohemian Rhapsody is a fine film, but as for historical fact it is as inaccurate as The Greatest Showman. Or Life Of Brian.
They have so many factual details wrong that don’t affect the plot, (song used in a scene that wouldn’t be written for three more years) but that they could easily get right, but they won’t. And why don’t they? It takes no effort to do it right. I think it is writer ego. “No one is going to tell me what is correct”.
And there are biopic movies that do get important details wrong, and they don’t care either. Not only had Freddy not been avoiding the band before Live Aid, they’d just finished a tour that year!
The things that bother me least are WWII German uniform inaccuracies. I should care, but I can’t recognize the differences unless someone tells me, and even then they are often too subtle. So if “Maj” Hochsteader is wearing a Colonel’s insignia, I can’t tell, nor care.
See, that’s fascinating and exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to hear about, because now that I think about it, I’m actually more forgiving of mistakes that aren’t essential to the plot. If you could change this one thing to make it right and not fundamentally change the story, it’s easier for me to overlook it and move on. I think the first time I got bent out of shape over something like this, it was in an early-chapter-book novel I read about a kid who had reason to believe he might be a long-lost prince kidnapped at birth. But then he realized he couldn’t be, because he didn’t speak with the royal family’s accent. Even as a young child I knew accents were learned, not inborn, and it drove me crazy because without that the book might’ve had a completely different ending.
I haven’t seen the latest season of Stranger Things, but this is what Prodigy looked like over dialup in 1986 (or even 1984):
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Hardly just text menus.
One from a play from 25 years ago still pisses me off. I was working at a theatre in San Diego and Bangor, Me was mentioned in the script. The actor pronounced it “Ban-grr.” It’s not said that way, and the character was supposed to have come from there. At a notes session after rehearsal I told the group that. The dramaturg told me it doesn’t matter.
The second syllable is said like “gore.” Well, if’n the accent is thick enough it sometimes comes out as Bang-goa.
I am not bothered by most inaccuracies in movies or books, unless they purport to be a material fact, and not always then. Hospital dramas misrepresent both medicine and the medical system. So I rarely watch them. If they are entertainment, quibbling over errors is best left to those overeager to show off their knowledge (the usual suspect) or who take too much enjoyment in criticism (also popular) of what may or may not have been a decent effort or enjoyable thing. The slightly bothersome part is when people assume the reality is like the entertainment. This is still unimportant compared to the real abuses of information by politicians or other groups.
From just a quick Google search, Quantum Link (which later became AOL) launched in late 1985, and its interface looked fairly similar to the Prodigy image you shared (I can’t seem to find a screenshot of the Quantum Link interface that isn’t blocked by my company’s firewall). Apparently they were pretty revolutionary in that they used software running on the user’s computer rather than a simple “dumb” terminal (which would have been the sort of text menus @echoreply mentioned).
It looked sort of like the icon menus on an Amiga. My thought was that they made the effort to mock up something, they could have mocked up something accurate. This is the best image I can find of the scene. (The floating computer text is part of the article and not in the show).
They were dialing into a government system. It would have needed a vt100, tn3270 or other text emulator.
Other stuff in the dialog was pretty silly, about IP addresses and location tracking and such. Sure, a government site could definitely be on the internet in 1986, but they were calling a phone number, and nothing in the dialog about setting up a SLIP connection (which if there had been would have been awesome).
The floating part is cut from a few other frames in the scene, and seems to show html, which was…later.
Watching the movie ‘Black Snake Moan’ I couldn’t get past the pristine white underwear Christina Ricci sported throughout, despite being tossed onto a dirt road. Totally trivial, not at all relevant to the plot, but so wrong, my brain just kept saying ‘Really, how could they do that?!’. Ruined the movie.
The use of C#, PHP, and HTML is definitely an anachronism. C++ just barely squeezes in.
I suppose I agree; they could have been more accurate there. Combining a real OS (Amiga Workbench) with GUI network access isn’t a huge stretch, but they did try to be accurate in so many other ways that it stands out.
Inaccuracies don’t both me unless they are used to resolve plot points. My objection to Mad Men was that in the first episode the resolved the big issue by “inventing” a slogan that had been used for 40+ years at that point and which anyone in advertising would have known all about. And it’s treated as a clever insight.
But generally, I can often spot anachronisms and am usually amused by them.
I don’t really care about “that’s not how it really happened!” in “true story” movies. I’m perfectly fine watching them knowing that it’s a fictional story influenced by a real event.
However, I do get annoyed when they turn a real person into a villain when they weren’t, just to put a roadblock to the main character. That’s just lazy storytelling.
One category of error that apparently bugs some people, but bugs me not at all, is errors made by characters. For instance, in one episode of Firefly, they need to use a man-portable gun on an EVA to hit an enemy space-thing. But Vera (the gun) needs air to fire. And so they end up having to put Vera in a spacesuit and fire through the faceplate.
Now, you know that gunpowder doesn’t need atmospheric oxygen, and I know that. But do Jayne and Mal know that? Not necessarily; neither of them is real big on book-larnin’. And if they didn’t know that, then what they did is completely reasonable (despite being actually unnecessary).