Corrected entry: In the public inquiry at the end, Ellie says she was gone "approximately 18 hours". But this contradicts what she says right after the capsule lands: "What day is this? How long was I gone?" So how did she come up with 18 hours? We do find out after the inquiry is over that her headset, conveniently, recorded 18 hours of static, but this was kept secret by the investigating committee. So Ellie didn't know that; in fact, she had no way of knowing how long she was gone.
Tailkinker
12th Mar 2006
Contact (1997)
11th Mar 2006
Star Wars (1977)
Corrected entry: In A New Hope, hologram Leia says that Obi-Wan fought with her father (Bail Organa) 30 years ago, when in reality it was 20 years earlier.
Correction: All that's said in the hologram message is "Years ago". No precise timeframe is ever stated.
9th Mar 2006
Doom (2005)
Corrected entry: Towards the end of the movie, the Rock and the gang get back to the arc station in Nevada and everyone in the staff gets infected. At one point, the Rock starts shooting at a monster and runs out of bullets. He throws his gun down and begins to pull his other gun off his shoulder. While doing this, he bangs the gun on a pipe behind him making a loud noise and a funny facial expression.
Correction: And the mistake is what, precisely? Because, let's face it, people do accidentally bang things in real life.
28th Feb 2006
Dogma (1999)
Corrected entry: During the scene where Rufus, Bethany, Jay and Bob are in the Mooby fast food restaurant and receive their food, Rufus is at first surprised upon receiving modern day fast food and asks "What do you call this shit?" Bethany answers "Egg and Mooby Muffin." Rufus later casually asks Bob "You gonna eat that hash brown?" Having seconds before shown himself to be naive about fast food, he would not have asked this question.
Correction: Hash browns were not invented by the fast-food industry - they've been around in one form or another for a long time.
18th Feb 2006
Speed (1994)
Corrected entry: In the highway scene where the older female bus passenger panics and attempts to leave the bus by getting on the flatbed truck driven by the police, right before the explosion that kills her occurs, you can see Keanu Reeves grab her arm for a split second. There is then a cut to the explosion, then another cut back to Keanu lying on the bus floor with his arm outstretched, having ostensibly been unable to grab the lady in time.
Correction: So he managed to grab her arm, but was unable to prevent her from falling, or his grip was shaken loose by the explosion. Hardly a mistake.
31st Jan 2006
Red Dwarf (1988)
Corrected entry: If you look behind Rimmer and Kryten in the cafe, you see a menu board with all the foods spelt backwards, reading right to left. Nothing wrong with that, except the letters are still all 'forwards', instead of a mirror image as would happen if everything was reversed. The same is true for the 'Nodnol 871 selim' marker.
Correction: As all the signs seen in the backwards world have the words spelled backwards, with the actual letters the correct way round, it's reasonable to say that that's just how things work in that reality.
28th Jan 2006
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)
Corrected entry: At the start of the film, the T-X kills Jose Barrera. Later, the T-850 knows his name and that the T-X killed him; he shouldn't do, because the whole point of the Terminators going back in time to kill people is that those people would never then be able to oppose Skynet in the future. So Jose, having been killed in the past, would never have fought against Skynet and the T-850 would never have heard of him. There is no consistent interpretation of time travel in which the T-850 can have heard of Jose, while not making it pointless for Skynet to kill people in the past.
Correction: Time travel films tend to operate according to their own rules - as time travel is, at best, highly theoretical, there are no hard and fast rules about how things should operate. Both the T-850 and the T-X originate in a timeline where Barrera survived to fight against Skynet - his death at the hands of the T-X means that that precise timeline will no longer come about, but, by the rules followed in the film, that doesn't mean that the two Terminators will suddenly lose all knowledge of it, wink out of existence or anything like that.
25th Jan 2006
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
Corrected entry: One look at the palantír is enough to make Pippin irresistibly drawn to it. When he steals it from Gandalf Merry takes quite a good look at it to and even looks into it while Pippin does. Merry should have been drawn to it just the same as Pippin, it's not something they could control.
Correction: Actually, it is something that can be controlled - it's down to strength of will and personality. Pippin is younger and less experienced than Merry, plus, as Merry comments on at least one occasion, his curiosity is near legendary. All of which combines to make him considerably more susceptible to the palantír than Merry is.
21st Jan 2006
The Island (2005)
Corrected entry: In the scene where Lincoln and Jones are in the cop car just before the semi hits them, you can see a picture of a Detroit Red Wings Captain on one of the buildings. Since they are supposed to be in L.A., it's doubtful they have that many Wings fans. Part of the movie was shot in Detroit.
Correction: Most teams have fans who live in places other than the team's base - it's hardly impossible for this to happen.
Correction: However, most of the city shots were done in Detroit.
Corrected entry: In the scene where Captain Jack Sparrow and Will Turner commandeer the Dauntless, and later the Interceptor, Commodore Norrington says to "search every cabin, every hull down to the bilges." As the Dauntless is obviously not a catamaran or a trimaran, it has one hull. So searching "every hull" is impossible.
Correction: Norrington says "every hold", not "every hull".
19th Jan 2006
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
Corrected entry: It is highly unlikely that a French privateer would attack a British frigate, even with an advantage in size and armament. Privateers were in the profitable business of capturing enemy merchantmen, not in the dangerous one of fighting enemy warships. The Acheron would only fight the Surprise if forced to. I can't see why the screenwriters made the Acheron a privateer - making her a French warship would have been more realistic and would have detracted nothing from the story.
Correction: Just because you think something's unlikely, it doesn't necessarily make it a mistake. While privateers did generally go after merchant vessels, there are numerous recorded examples of them attacking riskier targets - Henry Morgan, for example, successfully attacked heavily fortified towns on at least two occasions during his career, which makes attacking a smaller outgunned warship seems relatively minor. Privateers also had to think about their reputation - a better 'legend' would lead to more prestigious and more profitable assignments, to say nothing of the bragging rights among their fellow captains. If a privateer saw the opportunity to take out an enemy warship in a sneak attack (thus lessening the risk considerably), it's more than plausible that they'd do so.
15th Jan 2006
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)
Corrected entry: In the graveyard scene after Voldemort is restored, he is talking to Harry about his parents but says that Lilly, Harry's mother, is a Muggle, but she was a 'mudblood': half witch, half Muggle.
Correction: While Lily was a fully-fledged witch, she was Muggle-born (both parents were non-magical), which would earn her Voldemort's contempt - calling her a Muggle is an intentional insult.
12th Jan 2006
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Corrected entry: As the boys on MythBusters recently demonstrated, bullets that enter the water even from very short ranges shatter and travel no more than about 1 metre before they run out of energy. So the opening scenes of the Omaha landing showing troops being shot while well under the water could not have happened.
Correction: As veterans of the Omaha beach landing described how they received injuries under those exact circumstances, I think it's safe to say that not only did the Mythbusters experiment fail to accurately replicate the situation, but that what's seen on screen is entirely possible.
Whether or not it is possible for a bullet to travel that far through water would depend on a number of factors, including the water's temperature, the amount of water, the water's depth, and the distance from the water the bullet is being fired from.
The Germans were firing tracer bullets at the Americans during the Normandy scene. Tracer rounds catch fire as they travel through the air causing them to get very hot. This could have allowed them to travel very deep underwater with lethal force, if the round is shot from a great enough distance that is.
18th Apr 2004
Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987)
Where Silence Has Lease - S2-E2
Corrected entry: In this episode, the number of the USS Yamato is given as "NCC 1305 E." However, in the episode "Contagion," from later in season 2, the number is given as "NCC 71807."
Correction: The Yamato seen in When Silence Has Lease is not the real ship, but a replica created as part of a test for the Enterprise crew by the Nagilum - as part of the testing process, it contains numerous inaccuracies, such as being made from the wrong materials and has many alterations to the layout of the regular ship, including multiple versions of the bridge. The incorrect registry code is just one of these differences from the original. Later in the season, in Contagion, we see the real ship, which obviously carries the correct registry code.
8th Jan 2006
Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983)
Corrected entry: When the rebels blow up the bunker and the shield generator at the end of the battle on Endor, the explosion is enormous, and appears to scorch huge amounts of the area around it, but when Han and the rebels run out of the bunker before the explosion, they run about 20 feet before it goes off. There's no way they would have survived that huge of a fireball.
Correction: The shield generator is a large installation, as we see on screen when Luke is delivered to Vader and later when it explodes. The bunker entrance (which is described in the film as being a subsidiary entrance) is some distance away from the main installation, as none of the installation can be seen nearby - presumably a tunnel, unseen in the film because it would just be dull to watch people walk along a tunnel, connects the entrance to the shield generator control centre. The large explosion takes out the shield generator installation - a small amount of the blast energy travels down the tunnel to cause the explosion seen there, but not nearly enough to endanger the Rebels and Ewoks nearby.
7th Jan 2006
Doctor Who (1963)
Corrected entry: The English county of "Wessex" ceased to exist after the Norman Invasion in 1066. This episode is set in the 12th century (and Irongron specifically references the Normans), so the use of Wessex is an anachronism.
Correction: The earldom of Wessex ceased to exist, but the name would not have simply vanished from the language, even though it no longer referred to a specific political entity. It is, in fact, still in use today to describe the appropriate area.
7th Jan 2006
The Island (2005)
Corrected entry: When Jordan and Lincoln are being chased in the city, you can spot some Nissan Murano SUVs going by in various shots. This would be impossible, considering the film takes places in a future setting and, the Murano is a recent/present model of Nissan.
Correction: Nonsense. The film takes place in 2019, only 13 years from now. Most cars last longer than that, making it entirely plausible that that particular model could be seen on the streets.
Corrected entry: Dr. Maturin states that the lizards they see at the Galápagos are "vegetarians". This word wasn't introduced until 1847 by the first Vegetarian Society in Ramsgate, England.
Correction: As with almost all historical films, modern terms are being used to allow modern audiences to understand easily - the earlier term "Pythagorean" would have meant nothing to them. Standard movie convention, therefore this cannot really be considered a mistake.
4th Jan 2006
Alien Vs. Predator (2004)
Corrected entry: In many shots we can see spiderwebs that are wiped away by the characters to reveal hieroglyphs etc. As far as I am able to ascertain, no spiders (or any other member of the arachnid family) have ever been recorded in Antarctica, and therefore spiderwebs should not be present.
Correction: True, there are no spider species that are indigenous to Antarctica, but that doesn't mean that they wouldn't be capable of surviving there, particularly in a large structure located within an ice cave. It hardly seems unreasonable to suggest that when humans visited the pyramid to be part of the sacrificial ritual, that spiders (and many other species) could have travelled with them on their ships, entered the pyramid and survived there.
3rd Jan 2006
Shaun of the Dead (2004)
Corrected entry: When its Shaun's second walk to the store, Shaun doesn't have enough money for the beer and ice cream cone he's going to buy so he says he's going to leave about 15p. Later in the movie, the owner of the shop appears as a zombie with his hand outstretched gesturing "You owe me money".
Correction: Pointing out something that's visible to anybody watching the film is not valid trivia.
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.
Correction: It's not remotely unreasonable that she couldn't have worked out an approximate timeframe later on, once she'd had to time to reflect on her experiences. She also knows that she's travelled through what appears to be a wormhole - under those conditions time can (and, as we find out, has) run strangely, so she has no real idea how long she might have been gone from their point of view, so her question is hardly unreasonable.
Tailkinker ★