Corrected entry: In the scene where Forrest and Jenny reunite in Washington D.C., they embrace in the lake and the camera pans away from the two of them embracing. If you look closely, there's no reflection of their silhouettes on the water of the lake as there should be.
Corrected entry: When Forrest firsts meets Jenny on the bus to school, a girl is sitting behind them, then disappears, then reappears again.. (00:12:55)
Correction: The girl is always there. The little girl's head is blocking her. In one shot you actually see a part of the girl behind her.
Corrected entry: When little Forrest runs away from the bullies he loses the braces on his right leg twice. (00:16:05)
Correction: It's a slow-motion scene and it's purposely duplicated to get the desired effect that this is a monumental moment for Forrest.
Corrected entry: After Forrest gets discharged from the Army he comes walking up to his house and greets his momma with only his duffle bag in his hand. His momma tells him, 'We've had all sorts of visitors', and shows him a ping pong paddle she wants him to hold, saying, 'Maybe you'll get used to it'. Magically, he presents his own, old paddle, and says, "Momma I only like my own paddle", but he never opens his duffle bag to get the paddle out. It's as if the paddle appears from nowhere.
Corrected entry: Shouldn't Forrest be an officer? He graduated college then went into the army: shouldn't he be an officer then, not an enlisted person?
Correction: College doesn't guarantee you a commission into the Army, there are many factors including tests and interviews that could have easily disqualified him, as well as the fact he could have simply declined the position.
Corrected entry: When Forrest runs into town after losing his braces he speeds by a cafe in the foreground where one of the patrons, an old guy with a hat, calls him a running fool. Some 20 years he takes off for his three-year run across America some 20 years later, and when he comes by the cafe we see the same old guy, who obviously hasn't aged in between. (00:17:05 - 01:48:10)
Correction: I really think that having the same guy is a statement on the lack of change in Gump's hometown in comparison with the rest of America. (I hardly think that the director is slapping his forehead thinking "oops!" over this one.).
Correction: Age shows more obviously with the young than the old, ie the difference between freshman and sophomore is much greater than 1 vs 2 years with a company.
Corrected entry: In the scene when Forest runs away and the boys are chasing him by car we can see in one shot that the car is very close to Forrest and in the next the car is much farther from Forrest. This is a direct cut, with no time for the car to drop back. (00:20:20)
Correction: This is done deliberately to imply that Forrest is just that fast. He also made a jump over a fence right afterward, that was higher than a normal man could do. These are comedic (for lack of a better description) elements, not mistakes.
Corrected entry: When we see the TV with Neil Armstrong on the moon, the video and the audio are out of sync. In the film, we see Neil jumping off the ladder, and then he says 'That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind'. However, he has only landed on the footplate of the lunar module. There is about another minute or so of audio before he actually steps on the surface of the moon.
Correction: This may be a factual error, but it's on the part of Neil Armstrong, not the movie. As I remember it, he did say it as he jumped off the ladder.
Corrected entry: When Forrest is reading the letter from Apple Computer, the date at the top of the letter says September 1975, but Apple's stock never went public until December of 1980. (01:37:55)
Correction: Forrest Gump would have been a principle investor in Apple with private shares. To make the investment, he would not have to buy publicly traded shares. He would have essentially been a venture capitalist.
Corrected entry: In the hospital, Lt. Dan would not have been in the same ward as Forrest. Forrest is an enlisted man and Lt. Dan is an officer.
Correction: I have worked in both military and VA facilities, foreign based hospitals and deployed forward - there is no separation of officers and enlisted on wards. It's quite entertaining to see recovering Vietnam, Korea, OIF and OEF vets sitting at a card table with their IV pumps - there is no rank found on a hospital gown.
Corrected entry: When Forrest sits down at his dying mother's bed, the pillow behind her back moves up significantly between shots. (01:36:15)
Correction: The pillow does not move - there two different pillows but the angle of the shot is different.
Corrected entry: While Forrest is in the hospital after being wounded in the firefight that killed Bubba, the lunar landing of 1969 is shown on a tv in the background. Later, when Forrest visits Bubba's grave, Bubba's date of death is shown on the headstone as 1967.
Correction: The part with the moon landing, happened when he was playing for the Special Services, some time after being wounded, not immediately after he was wounded. Thus, its reasonable for 2 years to have passed.
Corrected entry: In the scene where Lt.Dan and Gump are in the apartment after New Years, there is a shot of Lt. Dan with the hooker on his lap where you can see his legs.
Correction: Incorrect. The end of his pants are tied in bunches, and you see that hanging down. A few inches below that you can see the bedspread on the other side, through where his legs should have been.
Correction: Green blankets are used on his legs (green screened) and then digitally removed so they couldn't have been seen.
Corrected entry: When Forrest is recalling his time playing ping-pong in the US Army, he is playing while other soldiers are watching him instead of the moon landing on July 20, 1969. Then he says "A few years later he went to China.". Then he meets Lt. Dan in NYC at Christmas 1971, as we see New Year's Eve for 1972 happening. Then a little while later he and Lt. Dan are the only shrimp boat to survive Hurricane Camille which hit the gulf coast in August 1969. The time doesn't add up to the sequence of events - it jumps from 1969 (Moon Walk) to 1972 back to 1969.
Correction: They say Carmen not Camille (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Carmen). Carmen was in August 1974 so the timeline is fine - 1969 to 1972 to 1974.
Corrected entry: In the scene when it is New Year's Eve, it is midnight in New York where Forrest and Lt Dan are. However Jenny is in San Francisco which is three hours behind New York, but it is still midnight.
Correction: The point of those scenes is to contrast how Forrest and Jenny spent their New Years. Not really a mistake, rather a filmmakers way of showing two different lives at the same time. Also, in the Midwest, Mountain and Pacific time zones, they often show NYC's New Years ahead of their own and then go to local coverage for the "actual midnight." And the film doesn't assert both of those events are happening simultaneously, anyway.
Corrected entry: When Forrest was running from the truck, the truck came about a foot behind him in one scene. In the next scene, he's ahead of the truck quite a bit.
Correction: This is to show how fast he can be.
Corrected entry: In the scene in the club where Jenny is a "folk singer," she is supposed to be nude, but you can see the line of the flesh-colored body pants she is wearing.
Corrected entry: Throughout the whole movie they call Gump Private Gump when it is shown on his military uniform (when speaking at the hippie rally by the Washington monument) a listing of a E-5 - a sergeant. Also he went to college before the army, which means he would have been an officer, not a noncommissioned officer.
Correction: The last time some one called him Private Gump was the when he got the letter in Vietnam for the Medal of Honor. The next time someone said his rank and name was when he got his discharge papers, and he said SGT. Gump. So I see no mistake. And if you join the military after college doesn't mean your going to be automatically an officer unless you were in ROTC while in college, or you went to a Military Academy. You can be recommended for OCS (officers candidate school) if you have a college degree. Like his drill Sarge in boot camp recommended "if it was not such a waste of a fine enlisted man". So even with a college degree, if you enlist you start from the bottom.
Not true entirely. If you have a degree you start out enlisted as an E-4 SPC.
That may be true now, but probably not in the mid 60s. I knew several people in the US Navy (1990s) that came in with college degrees and weren't advanced past E3. I'd imagine it to be the same in the other branches.
You only start from the bottom if you want to. Or you don't qualify on the AFOQT. But, given his low intelligence score, he probably wouldn't have passed. But he would have still been given higher than an E-1.
Corrected entry: When Forrest's mother tries to get him into school, the principal shows her some kind of national standards chart, pointing with a pencil to the 'below average' zone where Forrest is with an IQ of 75. In the next shot, his pencil is in the 'normal' zone of the chart, not the 'below average' zone.
Correction: Here the principal is explaining to her the requirement for a normal school.
Corrected entry: In the final scene where Forrest Junior is waiting for the schoolbus, he tells Forrest that he is taking the Curious George book to school for show-and-tell because "Grandma used to read it to me." In the storyline, Forrest's mother (Forest Junior's paternal Grandmother) is dead before Forrest learns he has a son. It wouldn't have been his maternal grandmother because Forrest had the book at the bus stop he narrates the movie from, and Jenny's mom died when she was a child.
Correction: Young Forrest is waiting at the bus stop and says he is taking the Curious George book to school because "Grand-mom used to read it to YOU", referring to his father. He never said that his grandmother use to read it to him.
Correction: There is a clear reflection of them moving around.
Anastasios Anastasatos