Factual error: When the shuttles are approaching the station, their engines are firing from the rear, meaning they are in constant acceleration toward the station. When arriving at a station, you would need to slow down as you approach, meaning the engines should be firing forward (or the shuttle should reverse direction). This happens in all scenes where shuttles are approaching the station.
Elysium (2013)
Directed by: Neill Blomkamp
Starring: Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley
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Suggested correction: But the station spins to create artificial gravity for the outer rim where the ships are headed. The ships approaching are just matching speed and don't need to fully brake.
Not when accelerating toward the structure. They would have to slow their approach, then match the radial velocity of the ring, which would still mean decelerating to match the structure's relative position in orbit.
Factual error: When the Armadyne computer reboots, you can see the typical bootup screen which gives away certain information about the computer: In two consecutive shots of the screen, you can see that this computer has a BIOS, a GA-MA790XT-UD4P mainboard from Gigabyte, 4 gigabytes of RAM, and apparently works with IDE drives. The successor to the BIOS is called UEFI, the mainboard and 4 GB of RAM are only remotely up to date as of 2014, and IDE drives are already dying out in favor of SATA drives. (01:39:20)
Audio problem: Throughout the film, Jodie Foster's dialogue does not sync up with the movements of her mouth, indicating most if not all of her lines were re-dubbed after filming.
John Carlyle: Droids, there appears to be some type of wheeled vehicle with one - two occupants, they are armed and I'd like them dead.
Question: The method of identifying citizens by a "tattoo" burned into their arm seems awfully prehistoric for such an advanced environment. The government would "know" the number of legit citizens and would know that the black market citizens were fake, right?
Chosen answer: There is virtually no system in the world that is completely foolproof when it comes to regulating a large scale system related to identification. We only know the tattoo are for certain services. There might be more high tech security features for more restricted areas. As for whether they have an accurate count of all their citizens, they might, but again, how you go about regulating these systems is generally the tougher part. At the end of the day people required special transports to even reach Elysium, so it might have not been as big a concern.
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