There are so many cases of geographic dislocation in movies that it would probably make more sense to talk about cases where they get it right. The thing is, the moviemakers are after a glitzy, sexy image, and most people don’t know or care. It’s only when you’re familiar with the area that it hits you.
The car-chase scene in the James Bond movie Diamonds are Forever doesn’t make a lot of sense. It switches between The Strip (much smaller back in 1971, when they film it, than today) and dowtown Vegas, and they seem to keep making circles through “Glitter Gulch”, because they wanted the scene to be full of flashing lights.
The opening scenes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade starts out at Arches National Park near Moab, Utah, but when they go to the railroad scene they’re clearly hundreds of miles away. And heck, you don’t even need to be familiar with the area to know that – just compare the scenery and the sizes of the mountains in the first scenes with the circus train chase scenes.
My favorite, though, is The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Fifth Dimension, with the enormous Yoyodyne Corporation inside little Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. With Palm Trees outside!!
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The route taken by Lola in Run Lola Run passes through random neighborhoods of Berlin, Germany which are nowhere near each other in real life.
In No Way Out, Kevin Costner tries to escape via the Metro’s Georgetown station, which doesn’t exist.
I once wrote a short story in school which took place in the “mountains overlooking Miami.” Got an A+ since my teacher apparently had also never been outside L.A. :o
In the movie Secretariat, the Belmont Stakes is obviously shot at Keeneland Race Course in Lexington. (Keeneland is used a lot in the movie as a stand-in for other track scenes; Secretariat never raced there.)
It’s pretty dumb because Secretariat’s Belmont footage is the most famous video clip in racing history. EVERY person even vaguely interested in the sport has seen it. And Belmont has huge shrubs lining the backstretch, while Keeneland has rolling farmland that can be easily seen during the “race”.
Con-Air - Apparently you can enter the tunnel down near McCarran Airport in Las Vegas and exit in Downtown Las Vegas despite that being a distance of roughly ten miles.
The classic television series Bonanza had Pa and the family riding into Virginia City from the Ponderosa Ranch even though that’s a distance of about 50-55 miles and takes a little over an hour by car (it’s down and up some very steep grades) So we are talking a 4-5 hour horse ride MINIMUM each way.
Robocop II is supposed to be set in Detroit. However, the skyline of Windsor,Ontario is never visible even in scenes where it should be (it’s just across the river from downtown Detroit) and Detroit looks strangely like Houston, Texas ( where the movie was filmed)
In Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown, Orlando Bloom lands at Louisville International Airport (Louisville, KY). Elizabethtown is SOUTH of Louisville. Bloom gets on I65 North, passes the University of Louisville on his left (which means he’s still going north). Then he passes Slugger Field (the home of the AAA team for the Cincinnati Reds) to his right, which means he’s now on I64, heading east. How he ever got to Elizabethtown, I still don’t know.
And as mentioned elsewhere, in The Hangover Part III it’s a short overnight boat ride across the Gulf of Thailand between Bangkok and Krabi province when in reality you would have to go all the way around the Malay Peninsula. (In fairness though, the movie never says where in Thailand’s South they are, but those limestone formations are not seen on the Gulf side, so it has to be the Andaman Sea side.)
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is one of the worst offenders. So bad the Transformers wiki article has its own subsection just for geographical errors.
The biggies:
While in New York City, Wheelie projects laser dots onto a map of the United States to indicate where the Seekers are located. One dot hovers over Syracuse, New York. Another hovers over Trenton, New Jersey. Yet Simmons inexplicably says the closest one is in Washington. There is no dot over Washington.
Jetfire is activated in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, which is in Washington, D.C. He walks out of the building and is immediately standing in Tucson, Arizona.
Giza, Egypt and Petra, Jordan are supposedly right next to each other, with no mention of Israel inbetween. At one point, the battle moves from the Pyramids to Luxor, 300 miles away. And the Pyramids are apparently right on the shore of an ocean.
In the 1987 sleeper hit Less Than Zero even though Robert Downey is overdosing and there are hospitals in Palm Springs, his “friends” Andrew McCarthy and Jami Gertz decide to for some reason not to take Interstate 10 back to Los Angeles but rather CA State Route 62, which while scenic, is a much longer drive (it puts them almost 100 miles out of their way)
The 2013 bomb The Lone Ranger purports to be set in West Texas. However, the first scenes of the film clearly place its setting Monument Valley, Arizona over 400 miles northeast of that area (Ship Rock, a well known butte in the valley is shown on several occasions). Also, North and Central Texas (the home of the Comanche tribe, one of the film’s antagonists) is rather hilly but not mountainous until you either get close to El Paso or further south in the Big Bend National Park area. The film was clearly shot elsewhere.
In movie-land, there are no freeways in the desert southwest. The only way to travel from L.A. to Las Vegas or Phoenix (or even S.F. sometimes, which is a major WTF?!?) is on that desolate two-lane road that goes by the windmill farm. But there’s no need for desert freeways, because as those movies show, there’s never any other traffic on that isolated two-lane road.
Because in one Colonial-ear film I saw recently, a character mounts his horse in Olde Mystick Seaport (in Connecticut) and rides off down the main street of Historic Williamsburg (in Virginia). This would not be a disconnect for anyone who does not know these sites.
Same thing with Stripes. Part of it was shot in Louisville, KY, which doubles for NYC at the start of the movie. When Bill Murray stops his cab on the bridge and throws the keys into the river, he’s on the 2nd Street Bridge, which connects Louisville to southern Indiana.
In Captain America ; The First Avenger, Cap chases the guy who assassinated Professor Erskine from the Northern Quarter in Manchester to Liverpool dock, on foot, in a couple of minutes, despite it being a distances of over 35 miles. I know he’s fast, but not that fast
