Corrected entry: During the broadcast at the beginning, you see shots of soldiers behind the text on the screen before they go to the live feed from the battlefield on Klendathu. One is of Dizzy saluting Rico after he selects her as squad leader after he kills the giant, fire-spewing beetle. However, at the time of that broadcast, that part of the film hadn't even happened yet.
Corrected entry: When the shuttles are descending on the bug planet for the first time, the troopers are shown sitting in their restraints. Just a few seconds later, the shuttles land on the planet. The doors swing open, and the troopers storm onto the planet. There isn't near enough time for them to go from sitting to standing in line, ready to attack the bugs in the time allotted.
Correction: Films often jump cut to skip an otherwise-boring period of time. Not much point showing a potentially dreary trip to the surface.
Corrected entry: In the scene when they are doing the live fire training course and the big guy gets shot in the head the bullets rip about 1/4 of his head off, but in the aerial view you can see his head is completely intact.
Correction: The bullet does not rip off 1/4 of his head. If you watch the shot in slow motion, the bullet goes into his eye and pulverizes the top left part of his skull. In the aerial shot it is clear the part of his skull that should be missing is indeed missing. At full speed the effect that shows the bullet entering his head has some unrealistic gore splatter that goes in all directions, giving the impression that the head was mostly blown apart, but it is quite easy to tell that's not what happened when viewed in slow motion.
Corrected entry: In the telecast at the beginning, you see a shot of some soldiers in a promotional recruiting video. One shot, if you look closely, is of Dizzy saluting Rico after he kills the fire spewing bug and saying "I'm your girl, sir," when he decides to make her squad leader. But at the time when the telecast takes place, that hasn't happened yet.
Correction: Dizzy's salute did indeed already take place. The telecast at the beginning of the movie is set in the future. In fact, at the end of the telecast, there is a nice subtitle saying "One year earlier" - in which the movie actually begins.
Corrected entry: Repeatedly in the movie we are shown media broadcasts which spare nothing in showing mangled and mutilated bodies. Media reports from the battlefield show Bugs dismembering humans and biting them in two. However, when the Bug is feed a cow, it is censored. Likewise, the experiments on the Brain Bug are censored.
Correction: The mutilated bodies would be shown in order to encourage more people to join the military and thus the war. The cow being censored may be due to groups like PETA still existing (we're an odd bunch us humans) and the Brain Bug may have been censored as classified rather than for any violence reason. Remember this is a Fascist Military producing propaganda not a free media reporting facts.
Corrected entry: The sheet of paper that Johnny's comrades press against the water tank says that "Johnny Rico" was killed in action. An official federal document would supposedly not have a nickname like "Johnny" on it.
Correction: Rico's first name IS Johnny. It is what his parents chose to name him at birth, and so, it shows up like that on all records of him.
Corrected entry: How much ammo can one gun hold? It seems that a single clip can hold enough ammo to run fully-automatic fire for a full minute or more. Example: soldiers need hundreds of rounds to kill one bug, and a soldier can kill several without reloading. Even a conservative 100-200 rounds would be about as much as could physically fit in the clips, yet they seem to provide as much as a thousand rounds each.
Correction: This is future tech you are talking about here. It is not unlikely they had made guns that can hold several hundreds of rounds of ammunition when fighting an enemy that doesn't go down easily. The bullets are probably not big at all and the force behind them causes the most damage. That way one of those quite large weapons can hold up to a thousand bullets easily.
When the Troopers hand out their guns and ammo to a bunch of kids, the rounds are shown and they are large, so I think this is a valid mistake.
Those rounds don't have to be rounds from those guns. They don't appear to be live rounds anyway.
Corrected entry: Rico is riding on the back of the acid bug, when he blows a hole in the back of it and drops a grenade he is thrown off. As soon as he hits the ground he ducks behind a dead bug that is maybe 3 feet away from him. The camera shows him getting thrown off at a wide angle and that bug wasn't there previously.
Correction: Just watched the widescreen version. When Rico lands, you can see the bug to his front left as he lands.
Corrected entry: At times during the movie, the "bugs" are referred to as Arachnids. Arachnids are not bugs. And none of the bugs particularly look like arachnids.
Correction: It's meant as slur against the enemy, it doesn't have to be taxonomically correct.
Corrected entry: In the English DVD subtitles, when Rico meets Xander and Carmen on the ship, Xander's line "copacetic" is misspelled "coposetic". (00:56:05)
Correction: Copasetic has no defined spelling, but was originally and is most commonly spelled "copasetic".
Corrected entry: When Private Ace Levy gets the knife thrown through his hand, look at the angle of it. The knife's at a slight angle, but when he pulls his hand away the hole left in the wall is perfectly vertical. (00:28:55)
Correction: There's no visible hole in the wall; only blood.
Corrected entry: In the punishment scene, Zim puts the coiled piece of leather into Rico's mouth - the leather looks like a backwards '9'. The angle switches to the reverse view and the lather is reversed - it should have the cross section like a '9' but it is still backwards. (00:43:10)
Correction: There was enough time in between the shots for him to adjust it in his mouth.
Corrected entry: After they attempt to rescue the reporter during the first battle, Rico shouts to the others to go. Watch behind Rico. Apparently, the stuntman in the background is supposed to react as if he got impaled by a Warrior Bug. The Special Effects Department must have decided not to add the Warrior Bug after all. (01:05:40)
Correction: After closely watching the scene, the soldier simply trips and falls to the ground. He doesn't act at all like he's being attacked.
Corrected entry: When the ship Carmen is on is hit and breaks in two, how come she and everyone else didn't immediately die from massive de-pressurisation? The air locks simply could not have kicked in in time.
Correction: Depressurization doesn't happen instantly. It takes time for the air to be evacuated from the exposed areas and the farther away from the section where the Rodger Young breaks apart, (remember that it is a BIG ship), the longer that section would have air. Also, the farther away from the damaged area the better the chance that the airlocks will come down in time to preserve some atmosphere.
Corrected entry: In the scene were everyone is running to gather around the captured brain bug one of the troopers left side pack (all the troopers have this pack attached to their left side) falls off - the trooper/extra doesn't notice it but another trooper/extra sees the pack and picks it up while running. All this takes place near the bottom left of your screen. (01:55:45)
Correction: How could that possibly be considered trivia?
Corrected entry: When making the drop onto Klendathu (Chapter 13), the drop ships being released from the Roger Young have their thrusters pointed DOWN, towards the bottom of the screen-When orbiting a planet in space, if you release something it simply stays with you, it will NOT fall. To separate from the Roger Young to begin the decent to Klendathu, the drop ships need to have their thrusters pointed to the upper left of the screen to SLOW the drop ships down and to push them AWAY from the Roger Young. The drop ships need to slow down, so they can decrease their orbital velocity which allow them to fall towards Klendathu. (00:59:15)
Correction: The ships are in Klendathus' gravity well, which will pull the drop ships towards the planet.
Corrected entry: The large spaceships in this movie have warp capability but have no shields? This is entirely half witted as they would fly hundreds maybe thousands of light years to go fight yet not have any defense against even the most basic of weapons, like the artillery of the tanker bugs. I would think shields would be a number one priority up there with warp capability, as at those speeds the tiniest object would be a) unavoidable, and b) would seriously damage the ship. Secondly, why no weapons to fire on ground targets? The ships did have guns but nothing to take out something like a tanker bug. One would think that with ships that big you would want to take every opportunity to put any and every battle in your favor.
Correction: It's established that the Federation is the only human power of any consequence. Therefore, any military action would likely be against rebels with little but small arms, which the infantry could deal with. They had no real need to create battleships, since simple transports would suffice. They had no idea that the Arachnids could defend themselves from space (or the ground, for that matter) so well.
Corrected entry: If the Federation is so high-tech that they have mastered interstellar travel, then why don't they just destroy every single planet with a really big nuclear bomb? They could make about 200 for minimal cost and destroy pretty much every planet on the other side of the solar system - problem solved. It wouldn't cost lives, and I find it hard to believe that making a few missiles is going to be more expensive than massive starships, ammunition for the troopers and paying for all the logistical support e.g. food.
Correction: Where to start? Destroying entire planets would cause collateral damage (the loss of innocents, non-military targets) Destroying entire planets would disrupt gravitational fields. Destroying entire planets could not be done with surface nukes. The bombs would have to deep, deep underground.
Corrected entry: Just before Carmen and Xander escape from the Rodger Young, some poor officers get blown into space. While they are escaping, Carmen hits one of the officers with the escape pod. It's absolute zero out in space (-273 C/-459 F), so the victims would have been instantly frozen, shouldn't the officer have been shattered into pieces?
Correction: It is NOT absolute zero in space. In fact, if they were close enough to a heat source their bodies would be fried, not frozen.
Corrected entry: How do the "bugs" manage to invade the Earth? Supposedly they hurl meteors through space that land on Earth and cause massive destruction. But the bugs, even though they are huge and intelligent, have no technology. How could they harness the meteor, let alone make sure that it travelled through space accurately enough to hit the Earth?
Correction: There's no way of knowing if the bugs aimed the meteor at Earth, or even if the asteroid came from the bugs at all (and the federation just using it as an excuse to attack the bugs). And it is mentioned earlier in the film that the bugs send their spores through space on asteroids to create new hives. It could very well have been a completely random seeding asteroid that just happened to hit Earth, that was probably laucnhed hundreds of years before the Terran attack.
Correction: The broadcasts aren't chronological to the movie. This is proven by the fact the broadcast in the beginning also mentions the bugs send another meteor but this time they are prepared, since the previous one destroyed Buenos Aires. Also you see the live broadcast on Klendathu itself, which happens only later in the movie, which you then see in a different perspective. It is done intentionally.
lionhead