The Day After Tomorrow

Corrected entry: In the movie, a news helicopter is flying somewhat close between the various Los Angeles CGI tornadoes that are tearing at the heart of the city. In real life, tornadoes are created by extreme turbulent vortex winds and heavy updrafts that affect areas two to six miles in diameter. One would not want to be flying a helicopter anywhere near an area that has just spawned a half a dozen tornadoes.

Correction: This shows more the stupidity of the people in the helicopter rather than a true mistake. Wanting good footage they probably decided to take the risk and keep going. Take the people standing around for example who were trying to film the event. Most of the people were taking the force of the tornadoes much too lightly.

Lummie

Corrected entry: In the scene where the LA skyline is first shown with the 4 or so tornadoes swirling around it, the highway at the bottom of the screen shows backed up traffic heading towards the city and hardly any moving away from it. People should not be driving towards the tornadoes. (00:27:00)

Correction: People were already stuck in the traffic when the tornadoes appeared.

Corrected entry: When you see Jack jumping over the big crack in the ice, he lands on the other side having successfully got the cores. When he falls back, his pick has saved him from falling down. But you can see he did not have the pick in his hand as he was falling. (00:05:25)

Correction: He quickly takes out his pick as he is falling, he has ample time when he is out of camera shot.

Corrected entry: When the president leaves the White House the power is off, but his desk lamp is turned on. (01:28:00)

Malaver

Correction: There's power in the White House. The shot from the outside of the White House shows that. Perhaps they're using a generator and have limited power?

Corrected entry: In the scene when Sam and co are at JD's house when you hear the report about a storm in Canada and he says,'a cold front moving down from the Arctic has created an enormous storm system in Canada',the Arctic was never mentioned that it had a problem,the ice cap that had the problem was the Antarctic. (00:42:15)

Correction: Cold fronts aren't related to ice caps melting. Most cold fronts in the Northern Hemisphere come from the Arctic, and it doesn't mean there's a problem in the Arctic.

Corrected entry: When you see all of the people leaving New York because of the blizzard there is one shot where the people are coming out of the library and close up to the screen you can see a traffic light dangling down which is obviously made from light vacuum-formed material as you can see it swinging so easily. (01:08:20)

Correction: The whole city (or most of it) was wiped out by a huge wall of water. It is most likely it had been loosened to a point where is just hanging on by a single bolt (or two).

XIII

Corrected entry: The bottom few floors of the buildings are flooded. Then it freezes. But ice takes up more space than water. So the buildings would have been raised substantially. This would have made the buildings fall over when the ice melted, yet they don't.

Correction: Ice does take up more space. However, unless it is in an enclosed space, the buildings would be fine because it had plenty of room to expand up and out (and throughout the building). And the ice never melted (at least not in the movie). The end of the movie showed everything covered in ice and snow.

shortdanzr

Corrected entry: If the northern hemisphere is going to freeze over, what is the reason behind the people from the southern states of the USA as well as the President and Vice-President only going as far as Mexico?

Correction: The entire northern hemisphere doesn't freeze, only the temperate region. The southern states get colder but don't freeze, and there's no reason to compound the difficulty of a mass migration by moving people farther than necessary.

Phoenix

Corrected entry: In the first shots in Antarctica, just after one of the scientists almost fell in the abyss, there is a shot of one of them where you can see on his jacket a patch showing he is a Canadian officer, despite the fact the only flag in the group is the United States. (00:05:50)

Malaver

Correction: The patch doesn't mean he is Canadian, the jackets that they are wearing at made by a company called Canada Goose that makes jackets that people all over the world wear.

Corrected entry: When we see Sam and the other two boys leave the library to go to the ship, they are able to exit straight from the top floor due to all the snow, which has buried most of the building. Yet when they leave, you can see two traffic lights sticking out from the under the snow. After the storms and tidal wave, how can the traffic lights be sticking out, perfectly straight, from under all of that snow? (01:33:00)

Hamster

Correction: The shot is too narrow to identify where the boys depart from, but a wide-angle shot of them returning to the library shows they are using the front and entering at the mezzanine level. A significant portion of the building is visible, perhaps two to three stories. This would also make sense, since the ship is in front, the highest drifts in the back, and it would be safer and warmer to travel through the building than on uncertain drifts.

Corrected entry: When Sam is constructing the snow shoes, the librarian asks "I thought you said it was too dangerous to go outside?" and Sam replies "I know I did". But his lips don't move. (01:32:35)

James Ollier

Correction: His lips do move, but only just. The words he used don't really require a lot of lip movement to pronounce correctly.

Corrected entry: More fresh water in the ocean wouldn't trigger a global cooling trend. Salt water actually allows the oceans to be cooler without freezing.

Correction: The point is that the alteration in the salinity of the water has stopped the North Atlantic current from flowing and bringing warmer water up from the equatorial regions, triggering the climate shift and the cooling effect. The actual heat capacity of the water doesn't have anything to do with it.

Tailkinker

Corrected entry: In L.A., when the janitor removes his headphones after the tornado, his shadows do it a little bit before him.

Dr Wilson

Correction: The shadow is properly synchronized, but the light on the man is from below so it makes his hands look like they're higher than they actually are. Therefore it looks like his shadow hands reach his ears before his real hands do, but it's an illusion.

Phoenix

Corrected entry: When Brian changes the TV channel in New York so that the students see coverage of the two plane crashes, he changes the channel to Fox 5, which is the same channel that Sam was watching in Washington D.C.

Correction: As a matter of fact, Fox is on channel 5 on both cities: WTTG in Washington and WNYW in New York. Not the same station, obviously, which gets around the distance problem.

Bob Blumenfeld

Corrected entry: After the Japanese businessman was on his phone, he runs to a nearby gate trying to escape the ice storm. He grabs the gate with both hands empty. After he is knocked out by the ice, a closeup shows his phone sliding out of his hand.

Coconut

Correction: He grabs the gate with his left hand above the shot, so we can't be sure it's empty. In other shots he was holding the phone loosely in his palm and thumb, leaving his fingers free to grip.

Phoenix

Corrected entry: In the opening scene when the ice shelf starts breaking away, there is equipment on both sides of the crack. When the camera starts pulling away there is no equipment anywhere, just the actors.

Cliff Corson

Correction: There's equipment all over the place. What you are mistaking for the actors is actually a crawler and tents on the left side. The actors can barely be seen at all, they're the black spot next to the left side of the crack.

Phoenix

Corrected entry: When the camera zooms out after the Antarctic splits, the crack is far smaller than seen in the previous shot.

Craz

Correction: It's all relative. The crack was perhaps 3 meters wide when Jack jumped it and it increases by another meter or so before the wide shot. In the larger shot, the crack is still about the same size compared to the very tiny humans and their equipment.

Phoenix

Corrected entry: When the helicopters are flying to pick up the British royal family, the helicopters shown are not real, in-service helicopters, but a hybrid of two different helicopters. The front end/cockpit is the cockpit of a Westland Seaking, the tail end of a Merlin EH101 and the main body/main rotor area a bit of both. Later in the scene, when the crewman slides open the cargo door and freezes, this is also the door of a Westland Seaking. The internal shots are also that of a Seaking. (00:38:05)

Correction: Actually they are real in-service helicopters. The helicopter represented in the film is a Sikorsky HH-3 which does indeed look like the front end of a Sea King and the back end of a Merlin, and which has been in service with the USAF and others since 1962. The only error is that the HH-3 has not been used by the UK.

Corrected entry: When "The Eye Of The Storm" is over New York Jack looks at the flag and the flag stops fluttering. When Jack has pushed his friend down the hole he looks at the flag again and it is fluttering again, just before it freezes. (01:38:55 - 01:40:20)

Correction: We can clearly see (and hear) a gust of wind "pick up" the flag just before it freezes.

XIII

Corrected entry: Near the end, "Mission Control" says there's reports of the storm dissipating over North America, but when the the guys in the Space Station look out of the window, they are looking at Europe.

James Ollier

Correction: The spacecrew never state they can see North America, they simply agree that the storm has dissipated. In the movie it is stated that the 3 supercells will join and create one giant supercell that will cover the entire northern hemisphere. If they could see Europe at the end, that would suggest that the supercell has dissipated.

XIII

Other mistake: At the end of the film when they arrive in NYC looking for the library, we know that they survived because they are inside with a roaring fire burning. But where is the smoke up above, as Jack Hall approaches? There must be a chimney, or else they would have all died of asphyxiation.

kiazersoza

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

Suggested correction: As already corrected, just because we can't see an outlet for the smoke doesn't mean there isn't one. White smoke against white snow is very hard to see.

Nik Rolls

But they were still burning the books, which meant the smoke should be black, if they stop burning the books, the smoke would have been white, which isn't the case in the movie.

Just looked at a boatload of videos of burning books, including one in a fireplace, and the smoke was indeed white.

More mistakes in The Day After Tomorrow

Vice President Becker: I don't accept that abandoning half of the country is necessary!
Tom Gomez: Maybe if you'd listened to him sooner, it wouldn't be.
Vice President Becker: Bullshit! It's easy for him to suggest this plan. He's safely here in Washington.
Tom Gomez: His son is in Manhattan. I just thought you should know that before you start questioning his motives.

More quotes from The Day After Tomorrow

Trivia: The man who offers a 100 dollars to the bus driver to get on the bus is the same guy who is on MTV's Boiling Points, and hands out 100 dollars if you pass the test. (00:45:20)

More trivia for The Day After Tomorrow

Question: I noticed the librarian, Judith, never appears after the retrieval of penicillin, I say this because I missed a tid-bit of the film after they acquired it. Is she there just camera shy or did she freeze?

Answer: She is indeed alive. Take a close look at the scene when Jack Hall arrives. Judith appears in that scene.

More questions & answers from The Day After Tomorrow

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