Best sci-fi movie character mistakes of all time

Please vote as you browse around to help the best rise to the top.

Pandorum picture

Character mistake: When Bower is banging on Payton's hyper sleep chamber from the outside it says Payton, but when it cuts to looking from inside out, it says Bower.

More Pandorum character mistakes
Riddick picture

Character mistake: In Pitch Black they established the system they crashed in (M-344/G) had 3 stars. Jack stated it when the 2nd sunrise started, and the solar system model also had 3 stars. In this film when Boss Johns starts asking about M-344/G he says it is "a backwater system with 2 suns and 1 habitable planet."

Scalorn

More Riddick character mistakes
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country picture

Character mistake: There's no apparent reason for Spock's conviction that the gravity boots are a damning piece of evidence that will reveal the assassins, especially considering how useless they prove to be after being found planted in an innocent man's locker.

TonyPH

More Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country character mistakes
Honey I Shrunk The Kids picture

Character mistake: While pitching his shrinking machine to NASA Szalinski claims that reducing the size of a rocket's payload would result in "staggering" savings in the fuel required at takeoff. However, he makes it clear that his machine works by reducing the space between atoms, meaning that the shrunken object weighs the same as the original. Weight is the critical factor in calculating fuel consumption, not size. Anyone at NASA would pick up on that instantly.

More Honey I Shrunk The Kids character mistakes
Interstellar picture

Character mistake: Shortly before the drone chase scene Cooper tells Murph to put the truck in second gear. She pushes the gear lever forward, however on the 6-speed manual in the Ram 3500 second gear is in the back row.

More Interstellar character mistakes
Total Recall picture

Character mistake: When looking at the various items in his safe deposit box, one of the passports has the name Henry Reed. However the serial at the bottom of the passport is mistyped as REED/HENTY. (00:41:25)

More Total Recall character mistakes
Wall-E picture

Character mistake: Captain McCrea tells the passengers that it's the 700th anniversary of the Axiom's first flight. The Axiom has been in flight for 255,642 days. Actually, 700 years is 255,675 days. That figure includes the additional day in 175 leap years.

Steven Lee

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

Suggested correction: Leap years only occur because of the earth's rotation around the sun. As the AXIOM is in space, there is no need to correct for the earth's rotation.

game.iq

First, rotation is the spin of the Earth (which cause day and night). Revolution is the earth orbiting the sun (which causes years). However, this correction is not valid on the premise you're trying to present. Many films set in space still use Earth time, so a day is 24-hours, even though they're in space and there is no sunrise and sunset (although it's stated the Axiom operates on a 25-hour day). So they would use Earth's year, which takes 365.256 days. Since the Axiom isn't orbiting the Sun, it wouldn't experience a year, so they're using something else. The fact that they're slightly off suggests it's a writing mistake and there's no evidence they use an arbitrary 365.203 day year.

Bishop73

That's still wrong. Even if their years were strictly 365 days, 700 years would be 255,500 days, not 255,642.

FleetCommand

More Wall-E character mistakes
Demolition Man picture

Character mistake: When the alarms go off in the police station indicating the code 187 all the police officers are confused as to what is going on since they know nothing of MDKs. Zack Lamb should have already known what the code meant, yet he never says anything and just waits for everyone to figure it out.

jbrbbt

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

Suggested correction: I took it as he went into almost shock that after so many years a murder had actually taken place. He says, "I don't believe it," indicating he knew what the code meant but then he kind of froze until Phoenix's name was mentioned.

Suggested correction: Zack Lamb is quite old and it's possible he simply forgot what the code meant. He was a pilot too, not a street cop.

lionhead

When Stallone first meets Lamb after being thawed in the future, he tells Spartan he was "grounded" after the events in the opening scene so had not been a pilot for 36 years.

More Demolition Man character mistakes
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure picture

Character mistake: In the movie they grab Genghis Khan in 1209 which would have been correct, he ruled Mongolia from 1206 to 1227. In the presentation at the end they say in 1269 he did this and that, that would have been Kublai Khan's reighn of terror in Mongolia.

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

Suggested correction: Bill and Ted have proven not to be that smart. Easy for them to get those things confused.

lartaker1975

It was also an excuse for a callback to the "69, dude!" joke from earlier in the film; whether Bill and Ted intentionally got that detail wrong just for the sake of a joke is anyone's guess.

zendaddy621

More Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure character mistakes
Soldier picture

Character mistake: After killing three of the 'new' soldiers, Todd says that there are seventeen left. He then kills about another thirty.

More Soldier character mistakes
Darkman II: The Return of Durant picture

Character mistake: The reporter refers to a "box of ashes" being buried in Westlake's grave, whereas in the first film, all that was buried there was "an ear", which was all they could find of his body.

More Darkman II: The Return of Durant character mistakes
The War of the Worlds picture

Character mistake: During the first big battle between the Martians & the U.S. Army, the Martians use their heat ray to vaporise people and equipment. Dr. Forrester, a physicist, then quickly speculates, "It neutralises mesons somehow. They're the atomic glue holding matter together. Cut across their magnetic lines of force and any object will simply cease to exist." During the '50s mesons were theorised to hold atomic nuclei together strongly. But if the Martian rays worked as the Dr. guessed, then objects wouldn't just vaporise. They'd explode with the ferocity of nuclear weapons.

More The War of the Worlds character mistakes
Alita: Battle Angel picture

Character mistake: In her first walk through the city with Dr. Ido, after feeding the dog her sandwich, Alita takes a flyer and reads it. Between the lines that read "Wanted" and "Murder" there is a line in Spanish that says "Querido para el asesinato." It should say "Querido por el asesinato".

gf.nekro

More Alita: Battle Angel character mistakes
Moonraker picture

Character mistake: When James enters and exits the laboratory, the door has a sign on it that warns for radioactive materials. The laboratory actually contains a biological weapon. Therefore the door should be marked with a bio-hazard symbol. (00:41:00 - 00:42:00)

More Moonraker character mistakes
Outland picture

Character mistake: The movie starts with shots of the moon Io and the company's operations, with typed descriptions at the bottom of the screen. Guess they couldn't afford a proofreader. They spell dependents as dependants, marshal as marshall, and principal as principle.

More Outland character mistakes
Alien Resurrection picture

Character mistake: When Ripley asked the doctor how they "got" her, he replies from blood samples on Fury 16. This is in reference to the planet in Alien 3, but it was called Fury 161. (00:11:00)

More Alien Resurrection character mistakes
Superman picture

Character mistake: In the Air Force One scene, when lightning destroys one of the plane's engines, one of the pilots tells a co-pilot to inform Metropolis Airport that the president is on board the plane. The crew is unnecessarily repeating themselves: just a few moments before, they radioed in that "Air Force One" was on approach; the plane would only have that call sign if the president was on board.

Cubs Fan

More Superman character mistakes
Back to the Future picture Back to the Future mistake picture

Character mistake: At the beginning of the movie Marty is turning on a huge guitar amplifier. The two switches for the filaments are misspelled. They are shown as "filiment." (00:03:25)

toroscan

More Back to the Future character mistakes
More The Fifth Element character mistakes
Face/Off picture

Character mistake: When Troy is getting the bomb ready, the screen shows it will blow in 216 hours, which is 9 days. Yet the agent tells Archer it will blow in 6 days.

More Face/Off character mistakes

Join the mailing list

Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.