(Least) Favorite Movie Mistakes

Guns don’t fire just from being rattled around. Unless you buy a cheap piece of crap for 5 bucks. Most modern handguns will shatter before they fire from being dropped.

My guess is that since the machines advanced sufficiently to make such a sophisticated terminator, maybe they improved the time vortex also. Or, maybe they wanted to make a movie about a liquid metal robot, so they just wrote it into the script.


There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all,
but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust.
– Demosthenes

Joe Cool

Independence Day, when the Jeff Goldblum character is going to introduce a virus into the alien computer. Hey, is that a Mac or a PC?

And I too think it’s stupid to bring a gun onto a space ship. The bullet is either going to ricochet around inside until it lodges in someone or smashes some essential equipment, or until it breaches the hull. Think I’d rather use a knife.

Well, I guess if you’re using hollow points the bullet COULD lodge in the person you’re shooting (at very close range) but I’d hate to stake MY life on it.

Star Trek: we’re at warp speed, which means FTL, and the Borg are chasing us. Somehow we can SEE them “on-screen.” Here they come … and there they go.

I’d bet my life that a hollow point would lodge in a body and stop. I would NOT bet my life that I’d hit my target 100% of the time though.

As for the star trek question, we have equipment that lets us take visible photographs of invisible objects (IR, x-ray and gamma sources, ultrasound, etc), and we’re only in the 20th century. I imagine that by the 23rd or 24th century, they’ll be able to use FTL radiation (subspace) to “visualize” other objects moving FTL.


There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all,
but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust.
– Demosthenes

Joe Cool

Hi, Joe.

I still contend that, at very close range, and if you happen to inflict only a flesh wound, the hollow point bullet might pass through. It’ll bloom out and slow down, but it might not lodge. (And can you imagine firing a gun with any kind of recoil, under weightless conditions? Unless you’d practiced extensively, you’d probably flip backwards, strike your head, and knock yourself out.)

It’s probably not even fair to bring up an MST3K experience, but the title is beyond belief:

“Attack Of The
The Eye Creatures!”

For pity’s sake, people. This is also one of those movies where the nasty monster’s zipper is clearly evident.

Cogita tute

Some of my favorites -

  • In “Vacation,” Chevy Chase opens the shower curtain and does a “Psycho” stabbing thing with a banana to his wife, Beverly D’Angelo. She’s topless (which certainly isn’t a bad thing), but if you look carefully a little lower, you can see she is wearing a flesh-colored G-string.

  • In “Stripes,” when Bill Murray goes to escape the base and his buddy in the underwear tackles him and says he has to say because he talked him into joining, from one camera angle, Murray has a canvas bag under his head, then from another, he doesn’t. Then does, then doesn’t, back and forth.

  • Even a great movie like “Saving Private Ryan” can have these glitches. I personally didn’t notice this, but I saw a show on TV where a guy mentioned it. In the scene in the bombed-out town, right after they went through the thing with “should they take the French child or shouldn’t they?” one of the soldiers in the squad is shot and killed.

Later, it shows them marching through a field in a line, and the full complement of soldiers can be counted.


“We are here for this – to make mistakes and to correct ourselves, to withstand the blows and to hand them out.” Primo Levi

I just thought I would jump in here. I wanted to point out something about when microphones appear in scenes. This is not the mistake of the movie makers, but rather the mistake of the projectionist. Movies are filmed so that parts of the picture will “bleed” onto the wall above or below the white movie screen. It is the projectionist’s job to frame the movie correctly on the screen. This is why you don’t have the problem when you watch a movie on TV (usually). Roger Ebert has commented on it many times in his “Ask the Movie Answer Man” columns. I don’t know what other papers carry it, but it can be found at http://www.suntimes.com His explanations, I’m sure, will make a whole lot more sense than mine.


I never hate myself in the morning. I sleep till noon.
–Sig line courtesy of Wally :slight_smile:

Well, I found myself a great site for movie mistakes…the cleverly-named Movie-Mistakes.com. Incredible number of mistakes, although some are duplicates, and some aren’t mistakes at all.

One that’s not listed on there that’s bugged me from the first time I saw it: in Jurassic Park, Muldoon the big-game hunter dude comes to talk to Hammond and the visiting party while the raptors are being fed. Just after he climbs the stairs, he rests his hand on the electric fence. The lights are still on in the background, indicating that the fence is on. Plus, it wouldn’t make sense for them to shut the fence off at any time, given that the raptors are just so darn smart, as Muldoon testifies.

I’m watching Army Of One right now (which I bought at the suggestion of one of you Dopers :slight_smile: ) and at one point the camera makes a point of showing you that Dolph Lundgren’s shotgun is being thrust smack-dab between Kristian Alfonso’s breasts. Switch camera angles: it’s barely above her navel.


Mayor of Snerdville, the home of Mortimer Snerd

“I’m just too much for human existence – I should be animated.”
–Wayne Knight

My favorite is in “The Ten Commandments,” when Moses is throwing his staff into the Red Sea he has a watch on.


If at first you don’t succeed you’re about average.

In Medieval Britain everybody has an American accent except for the Norman baddie of French descent ,HE speaks perfect English.

Tree branches always grow just high enough for the persued to duck but too low for the pursuer.

Richard the lionheart returns to merrie England with only a man servant as retinue.I believe he never even set foot on these isles.

That last one reminds me of an observation made of superheroes whose chosen means of travel is to swing on a rope from building to building:

“In the world of Batman (or Spiderman), there is always a taller building.”


Mayor of Snerdville, the home of Mortimer Snerd

“I’m just too much for human existence – I should be animated.”
–Wayne Knight

In the Movie SPEED there are two scenes that drive me crazy.
1st in the begging when jack wants to stop the elevator from dropping him and his partner go to the roof, guns drawn.
You can clearly see a third person’s hand in the righ of the screen. Where did he come from. The next scene this extra person is gone.
Also right before the bus makes the leap over the big ole gap in the freeway you see the bus rush in front of the camera, super fast. In the back ground you see the flat bed of cops also moving at hyper speed, the editors didn’t slow down the film, so every one is in hyper speed.
In Disney’s Aladin, on the balcony scene Before they go on the carpet ride, if you turn up the volume really high there’s a pause and you can here a strange man’s voice say “take your clothes off”
I’m not kidding, kinda creepy but its there.

Okay, the movie geek has to throw in on this one…

First, a general principle:

This, I think, accounts for some of those little annoyances, like how there’s a convenient parking space right where the hero needs to go, or how nobody ever has to reload their weapon, or whatever. William Goldman, in his new book on screenwriting Which Lie Did I Tell? (a sequel to Adventures in the Screen Trade; both are highly recommended), goes into this topic with some depth. His point is this: What is the scene about? If it’s about Mel Gibson going into the courthouse to confront the bad guy, then storytelling efficiency demands that we get him there as quickly as possible. There’s no point wasting five minutes showing him circling the parking lot, looking for a space, even if that’s “realistic.” Me, I question why it’s even necessary to show him parking in the first place; just have him drive past, thereby establishing the exterior, and then cut inside as he walks in. We the audience will fill in the blank – he had to have just parked – but we don’t need any more information than that to follow what’s going on. Solves both problems at once.

The only movie I’ve seen where this really started to work was Broken Arrow, where Christian Slater is in the canyon while the helicopter circles, and he has to frantically reload or he’s dead. Unfortunately, Slater’s such a weak actor that he doesn’t capture the urgency, and the moment doesn’t play. Still, it’s a moment worth stretching a lot more than Hollywood does.

You forgot to mention that if the missile gets from the planet to the sun in the ten or twelve seconds it appears to, then the missile has to be flying at something like seventy-five times the speed of light. :slight_smile:

Again, artistic license. I would assert that if those sounds were missing, the movie would, paradoxically, seem less realistic. For example: I just saw a movie where someone across the room took out a cell phone and pressed the activation button. On the soundtrack, of course, we heard the faint honky beep of the phone coming on, even though, realistically, we really shouldn’t be able to hear it. I hold that if the effect hadn’t been there, we would subconsciously wonder if the phone was actually working, or be jarred in noticing it was just a non-functional prop. Ditto for almost everything else you mention, though naturally the cat meows and car horns get annoying if you really pay attention to them. Most people don’t notice; in fact, I think, more people would notice if they weren’t there. By way of illustration, go check out a really badly dubbed foreign film, where none of the environmental sounds are included, and all that’s on the soundtrack are voices and primary sounds (gunshots, doorknobs, etc.). It’s really flat and weird.

This happens in The Usual Suspects, too. Early on, when we see the passenger jet landing, as it’s coming toward the camera, it’s a big four-engine widebody; then when the angle switches around, it’s a completely different airplane. Watch the DVD with director commentary turned on, and Bryan Singer and Chris McQuarrie (the writer) get a huge laugh out of it.

Compare similar moments: In Romancing the Stone, when the Michael Douglas character swings across the ravine, the rock wall he slams into is obviously foam. And in Star Wars, when Han Solo dives into the trash chute, his foot brushes the blown-open grill, and the foam bar wiggles.

Somebody else already mentioned that this is in fact not an error, but didn’t explain why. The command to turn a given direction specifically refers to the rudder. Turn the rudder port, and the ship goes starboard, and vice versa. Cameron supposedly argued with other people on the crew as to whether or not this would be confusing, but left it historically accurate. If it were me, I wouldn’t have shown it at all; I would have cut down to people on the deck, looking at the iceberg, and skipped the order, and then cut back to the guy spinning the wheel.

There are tons of gaffes like this in Raiders. For me, the most distracting is the length of the staff. The old translator says it should be a certain number of “kadan” high, and Indy says, about 72 inches. Then the translator says, “take back one kadan.” So the staff should be around six feet long. But when we see Indy in the map room, the staff is like eight feet tall. Oops!

This is true. Originally, back in the golden days of cinema, the title was “script girl.” Sexist, yes, but given that the job was primarily secretarial (Actress A has a blue scarf, thrown over left shoulder; in the car, Actor B is on the left in the back seat; he put his sunglasses in his front pocket, not inside the jacket; etc.), it was traditionally done by a woman. In the 60’s, this title was changed to, simply, “continuity.” A while later, as special effects got more complicated, and the production needed to keep track of not just what someone was wearing or which side got the black-eye makeup, but also which foot a character was stepping with when they entered a room and all sorts of other details, the title was changed again, to “script supervisor.” Look for it in the credits.

They make fun of this phenomenon (which happens a lot) in Top Secret!, by the Airplane! guys. Val Kilmer has a fight underwater, and he literally stands up out of the water, dry. They did it by having him stand there dry, and then bend down into the water, and run the film backwards; it’s pretty subtle, but very funny.

Very true. When you look through a big Hollywood camera (or the video-tap monitor alongside), there are black lines indicating how the shot will be framed when the top and bottom edges are cut off. The film frame includes lots of extraneous material, but, as you observe, when it’s cropped, that stuff mostly disappears. If the projectionist screws up, though, that stuff slides back down on screen. To be fair, it is occasionally the filmmakers’ error; there was an episode of "The

The Thomas Crown Affair: (warning, spoilers)

Rene Russo’s character is able to ascertain the method by which the painting is stolen by using the museum’s security tapes. She sees that the museum bench had three legs before the painting was stolen, and only two after the fact–so she deduces, correctly, that the thief concealed the suitcase in which the painting would be stored by disguising it as a bench leg. Nice going, Holmes. Now do you think you could maybe rewind from when the bench has two legs to when the bench has three, so you can see who put it there??? Jeez.

Two more from that movie, actually.

Since Russo’s character has, unbelieveably, no idea who planted the suitcase, it’s necessary to create a plot device by which she and Thomas Crown can meet–this is accomplished because Pierce Brosnan’s character is in the museum when the decoy raid takes place, and happens to see one of the faux thiefs rushing past. The guy is caught by the museum security guards, and Crown is asked to come down to the police station so that he can pick the man out of a lineup–and that’s where he meets Russo. Never mind that identification of a suspect isn’t usually necessary when the man has been caught red-handed at the scene of the crime in the midst of dozens of witnesses, and never mind that as a multi-millionaire, Thomas Crown would hardly be bothered by the police anyway unless the identification was something only he could provide…

Finally, anyone care to explain how a priceless piece of art can be folded in half to fit into a suitcase, be kept in a folded state for a number of hours, and still retain its pristine condition and unbelieveable worth?

I hated that movie.

The Washington Post ran an article a year or two ago about liberties that moviemakers take with location details that most people wouldn’t pick up on, but local audiences find howlingly absurd. An example given in the article was in the movie 1600 Pennsylvania (I did not see this movie, so this is strictly from the article), a character attempts to escape from the White House by climbing out a window into an alley. Uh, no alley behind the White House, kids. Seomeone who has never been there might not pick up on this, but DC locals had a good time with it.
Shortly after this article came out, I went to see the movie Forces of Nature, with Ben Affleck and Sandra Bullock. In the beginning of the movie, Affleck’s character is supposed to be flying from New York, I believe it was supposed to be Laguardia Airport, but when he arrives at the terminal it is clearly Dulles Airport. If you’ve never seen Dulles, this might slip by, but if you’ve ever been there, you know its terminal is very distinctive. I saw the movie in northern VA, so the audience definitely got a good laugh out of this. I just wonder why they didn’t film it at a more generic-looking airport.


TV Reporter: Can you destroy the earth?
The Tick: I hope not. That’s where I keep all my stuff!

Anybody ever see Tombstone? I love that movie and have so far only seen one problem with it.
At the Ok Corral Fight scene, Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer) has a double shot gun. Two shots. Holliday fires the gun once to scare the horse, fires it again to shoot the man hiding behind it, and turns around and shoots AGAIN at Ike…missing him of course. That’s three successive shots. I know Holliday is fast but not THAT fast, he could not have possibly reloaded the gun because the camera never left him.


“The bitch, oh the bitch, the bitch is back…I’m a bitch cuz I’m better then you, it’s the way that I move
The things that I do…” Elton John
“People try to tell me thoughts they cannot defend…” The Moody Blues
“To start, press any key. Where’s the any key?” Homer Simpson.

Glad to see my old thread back!

One of the things I hate is when a bomb blows up a building and there are multiple blasts, as though several bombs went off instead of the one we saw prior to the blast.

I saw Clear and Present Danger again this past Sunday and when the single cellulose-encased bomb blows up the drug-lord’s home, there are multiple explosions.


Sig Alert!

Dougie… I’m definitely gonna check out George Bailey’s goof with the wreath. But my favorite one from It’s A Wonderful Life is when George whips out his trusty flashlight to search for the drowning Clarence. When the cut to the shot of the water… well, let’s just say the Bat Signal looks like a pen light next to the powerful beam that illuminates the river on this stormy night.

Another pet peeve about movie explosions… how about when the building explodes and none of the trees nearby even flinch? This is only one of about a million continuity errors that can be found in The X-Files Movie.

In Horses’ Collars, one of the really early Three Stooges shorts, the main setting is the bar at Double-Deal Decker’s Five-D Delight (“Dice Dancing, Dames Drinking, and Dunking.”)
One cowpoke tries to slip away without paying the bartender for his drink. After a couple of warning shots Decker (Fred Kohler, a left-handed actor) plugs him. The bartender makes an erasure on a small blackboard behind the bar so it now reads “DECKER–117 OPPONENTS–0.” (It had scored Decker at 115.)
Shortly after that, the Stooges come in. They stride up to the bar; the blackboard, visible again, now shows Decker’s score as 115!
Either the continuity people overlooked this, or the two cowpokes who stiffed Decker the last time were miraculously resurrected! :eek: :eek: :eek: