And more shame on you
That might win for best reason to be annoyed at an inaccurate media portrayal. I read somewhere about how many ER doctors go to great lengths to ensure the extraordinary life-saving measures they perform every day will never be performed on them, because they’ve seen how awful it is and how little it helps. I would also imagine many good samaritans who have performed CPR without successfully resuscitating the victim may suffer guilt, or at least be reluctant to talk about it due to widespread misconceptions possibly leading others to assume they somehow did it wrong or didn’t try hard enough.
I admit, it does bug me to see technical inaccuracies in one of my fields of interest (aeronautics, for example), although I’m usually nowhere NEAR good enough to pick out the finer (or more arcane) points at a glance (“They used a Turkish F-4E to stand in for a JASDF F-4EJ! The CURS!”).
The thing that really gets me, I think, is when they make a technical mistake that 1) Could be easily avoided, 2) Without breaking the story, and 3) Might actually make the story richer or more interesting if avoided, even if only on a production design level.
I felt so smug when I watched Top Gun when it first came out, and the ‘Soviet MiGs’ appeared. I was like, ‘Hah! Those are F-5s. Obviously an aggressor squadron!’ Nope. They were really depicting MiGs.
In these days of CGI everything, you could probably make planes and tanks and what not that are historically accurate. What bothers me is when people watch old movies, which pre-CGI needed to use actual planes and tanks for such scenes, and still complain that the models used are wrong.
How many planes or tanks from the early days of WWII are still operational? I suspect very few. So using a model from later in the war, because that’s what you have, should just be accepted.
The problem is that the CGI artists have no idea how airplanes fly, and they cram three times as many aircraft into a space than is remotely realistic.
Tora! Tora! Tora! did a good job of replicating various Japanese types out of AT-6s and BT-13s.
Inaccuracies that bug me the most are when the screenwriters/filmmakers go out of their way to justify an inaccuracy by claiming that it is in fact accurate.
In the film The Battle of the Bulge the movie was filmed in Spain and so the only tanks they could get for filming were post-war American M48 Patton’s iirc which they used to depict the German King Tiger tanks. Both tanks look NOTHING alike and they didn’t even bother trying to put some metal on them in an attempt to conceal their identity.
However during the movie before we even see the supposed King Tigers a German General is showing another officer the new upcoming “Nazi Superweapons” which will supposedly win the war for them. So the ME-262 jet, V-1 and V-2 rockets, and various STG-44 assault rifles are shown in model form. They then get to a table with a model of their new “Supertank” the King Tiger. However the model actually isn’t a King Tiger, it’s just a model of the M48 Patton’s we will soon be seeing in real life. So if you literally know nothing about German tanks that might convince you they actually got “real” King Tigers for the production, when really they’re just lying to the audiences.
Or when George Lucas tried to handwave his error of using parsecs (parallax seconds) as a measure of time.
And to be clear, that’s a second of arc, not an ordinary second. I.e. 1/3600th of a degree.
Exactly. I should have mentioned that, but I assumed.
I went to a conference where they discussed real versus fictitious outcomes of CPR and the difference was significant, a factor of three? - but I do not think it translates into much else. If you quote what the numbers actually are, families seem to accept this.
This bugs me for the opposite reason: People claiming that Vera didn’t need an atmosphere could be totally wrong. Guns in the Firefly universe have ‘auto fire’ and perhaps other advanced techniques. A gun that might be used on multiple planets might need to sense everything from temperature to pressure and humidity to calculate a firing solution. We just don’t know.
The errors that really bug me are the ones that are the result of laziness or a general disdain for the audience - where you just know the director was told something wasn’t right and said, “Who cares? The audience won’t know, or won’t care.”
For example, in Die Hard 2 John McClain ejects out of a C-130. C-130s don’t have ejection seats. The plot hinges around terrorists taking control of the ILS system at Washington Dulles and reprogramming it to fly planes into the ground, forcing all the planes to apparently circle the airport until they run out of fuel. But ILS isn’t adjustable like that, even theoretically, and airplanes have enough fuel to divert to probably half a dozen different airports from Dulles. Your average person knows that airplanes carry enough fuel to divert.
Yet another plot point was the supposed fact that because the tower radio was down, no one could communicate with the airplanes overhead. Ridiculous. How about all the aviation radios in airplanes on the ground?
And still another was a scene where a reporter outside said that the airplanes could be seen circling overhead. Uh. if the airplanes can be seen from the ground, the ground can be seen feom the airplanes. No need for instrument landing.
One character at ‘Washington Dulles’ uses a payphone - with a very large and obvious “Pacific Bell” logo on it.
Finally, the whole scheme to use the ILS as a terror instrument was planned for that specific day, months in advance, and would only work if there was a freak bad snowstorm on that particular day.
Did I mention that John McClain jumps off the wing of a 747 just as it’s beginning to rotate, with no serious injury? A 747 rotates at 180 mph, and a wingtip is over 20ft from the ground. They would have had to hose him off the runway.
The whole movie was a thumb in the eye of anyone who thought even a little bit about it. You could hear murmuring in the audience after every one of those whoppers. It pisses me off because the filmmakers had to kmow about most of the plot problems, and just didn’t care.
On the flipside, when I spot something technically correct in a movie that isn’t a major plot point and could have been faked out but wasn’t, my respect for the movie and enjoyment of it goes way up.
The movie Thief went to the trouble of not only hiring ex-bank robbers and safe crackers to consult on the techniques, but they gave the actors their own actual safe cracking tools to use, and taught them to use them correctly. When they were sampling the wiring for alarm systems, one guy was reading a voltmeter and calling out voltages - phone, alarm, etc. And all the voltages were exactly correct. The thermal lance used to burn into a safe was real, and James Caan used it to break into a real safe on camera. The exhaustion and sweat you see on him as he strips off the fire suit are real, because he really did the job. I love that.
When I see care taken on something small like that in a movie, I can trust that the stuff I can’t evaluate is also correct, and that makes it easier to enjoy. When I see a mistake that would have been easy to fix, it takes me right out of the movie.
That reminds me a little of watching 47 Meters Down and the sequel, two wildly inaccurate depictions of my hobby. Except I had a pretty good idea going in of how bad they were, and chose to watch them when I was in the mood for something fun and stupid, and so enjoyed them. (My non-diving husband did a convincing impression of enjoying my takedown.) I think if they had taken themselves seriously, and especially if they had started out good but then the climax hinged on a major inaccuracy, I would’ve been upset.
I recognized them too, but I’m not too bothered by that. The producers needed fighter planes, and you couldn’t just go out and rent a few MiGs at the time. I was bothered by the fact that they were painted gloss black with a big red star on the tail. One of the things about fighter planes is you don’t want them to be easy to see.
That was the least of Top Gun’s problems. During the combat sequences, the planes were way too close together. And there’s one engagement where the planes are flying between rock formations, then they go high, then Maverick gets in trouble for continuing the fight back down to the altitude they were already at. It didn’t make any sense. I doubt the sequel could be quite as stupid as the original, but I don’t plan to see it and find out.
There were plenty of flaws in Die Hard 2, but McClane falling off the wing wasn’t quite as you described. He slides down the engine pylon and opens a fuel dump, so he was less than 20 feet, and the plane was just turning onto the runway as he fell, so nowhere near takeoff speed. After McClane falls, Col. Stewart still has time to unjam the aileron, get back in the cabin, and close the exit before takeoff.
The death of ‘the ugly character actor’ used to bug me. Yes we still have the occasional Steve Buscemi…but leading men used to look like Ted Bessell…now casts are half filled with literal former models.
Used to bug me…but i watch so little TV i dont care.
I reckon it’s best used upside down, so the feathers catch the…stuff, instead of just gliding smoothly over it.
Star Wars took place a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
How do you know it’s not just a mistake in programming the Universal Translator?
Because we’re watching Star Wars and not Star Trek? 
I only rarely see a movie that gets Japanese people or culture reasonably close. One of the worst was Rising Run but the scene in Lost in Translation where Bill Murray’s character is filming a commercial is hilarious.
Are you talking about the whiskey ad where the director kept asking him through a translator to show more intensity? There was also one where he appeared with a silly children’s show host and looked really uncomfortable, but now that I think about it, it was an excerpt, not an ad.