Best sci-fi movie character mistakes of all time

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Predator 2 picture

Character mistake: When Harrigan is watching the surveillance video by Bill Paxton he states that the helicopter is a silver Alouette when it is actually an AS-350.

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Infinite picture

Character mistake: The interviewer pointed out that Evan [Mark Wahlberg] is a "smart guy" and another man later said, "Homeboy knows everything. He's a freak." When Evan was telling the interviewer the circumstances under which he assaulted a man, Evan committed a basic grammatical error - a misplaced modifier: "I asked him to leave politely." Evan didn't mean he wanted the man to leave in a "polite manner"; he meant he "politely asked" the man to leave. (00:09:20 - 00:14:00)

KeyZOid

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Superman IV: The Quest for Peace picture

Character mistake: When the little girl is about to be blown away by the tornado she is crying terrified, but when she is swallowed by the tornado, spinning around violently, she stays totally calm, even bored. (Laserdisc and international extended editions).

Sacha

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Ghostbusters picture

Character mistake: When Erin pops Stay Puft, the girls get up. One of the girls says "welcome back" to Erin. She didn't leave the group.

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Suburban Commando picture

Character mistake: When Shep and Charlie need to stop the aliens from tracing the power signal, he impatiently rips the driver's door off Charlie's Festiva because he was taking too long to unlock it. However, Shep gets into the car from the passenger side before Charlie has even retrieved his keys from the detached door. Why would Charlie leave the passenger door unlocked but make a point of locking the driver's door? (00:48:20)

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X-Men: First Class picture

Character mistake: When trying to teach Banshee to fly, he is told to make his sound waves super sonic. Sound waves cannot be super sonic. Sound can only travel at the speed of sound, it always does. I guess they were trying to tell him to use a very high frequency, but the speed would still be the speed of sound.

zubarsky

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Contact picture Video

Character mistake: When they first receive the alien signal, they decode it and play it as a TV signal which shows Hitler speaking at the opening of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. Kent translates what Hitler is saying as "I declare the Games in Berlin, at the celebration of the first Olympics of the New Era, as opened." Hitler actually says "the *eleventh* Olympics of the New Era." The "New Era" doesn't refer to some Nazi concept, it's used to separate the modern Olympics from the ancient ones in Greece.

ironcito

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Re-Animator picture

Character mistake: When Cain is attempting CPR on the flatlined patient at the beginning of the film, he tells the other doctor, "She just needs a little more time for the drugs to circulate." Circulation stops at the moment of flatlining. (00:05:25)

Captain Defenestrator

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Super Tanker picture

Character mistake: Early in the movie, when they do a hard reset on the supertanker's containment system, the computer screen says "sistem reset".

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Arrival II picture Arrival II mistake picture

Character mistake: At the radio store a sign shown to Jack when he asks if they take personal checks is misspelled. It says "personnal." (00:58:55)

toroscan

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Alligator picture

Character mistake: When Marisa leaves the diner, you can see the door has a "Push" tag. However, the door opens inwards, and in fact to go outside she has to pull. (01:08:00)

Sammo

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Tremors 5: Bloodlines picture

Character mistake: In his opening prologue, Burt says the Graboids have been contained to the Northern Hemisphere, showing a map highlighting the Graboid attacks of the first film in Nevada and the second film in Mexico. However, it overlooks the Graboid/Shrieker attack in Argentina, in the Southern hemisphere, shown at the beginning of Tremors 3, an incursion Burt personally put down. It's not like it was classified - characters in that movie talk about it being reported by CNN, and characters in the Tremors TV series talk about it as well. And it's not like Tremors 3 is no longer canon, since Burt makes two references to being swallowed by the Graboid in that movie (which also becomes a plot point in Tremors 6).

Vader47000

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The Suicide Squad picture

Character mistake: David Dastmalchian is the Polka-Dot Man, hyphenated in the comics, and in the end credits of the movie. Then again, when Waller threatens to kill everyone off, the name of the character appears in print as Polka Dot Man, no hyphen. (01:49:40)

Sammo

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Ghostbusters: Afterlife picture Ghostbusters: Afterlife mistake picture

Character mistake: There are signs out front as the Spenglers arrive at the dirt farm. One of the signs is a call back to a scene in Ghostbusters 1984. In the scene, Ray quotes the book of Revelation: "And I looked, and he opened the sixth seal, and lo, there was a great earthquake. And the sun turned black as sack cloth, and the moon turned blood." When Finn Wolfhard reads it he misquotes the line saying "The sun became as black as cloth."

Sniffeh

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Under the Skin picture

Character mistake: Early in the film we are repeatedly shown the alien character flirting happily with various men, relaxed, confident, even socially forward, in fact often more articulate and socially at ease than the various Glaswegians she encounters. Yet later on, inexplicably, all this social nous mysteriously disappears and she is completely baffled and blindsided by the simplest of social interactions, almost a mute. Since the film has virtually no plot it's hard to see why this jarring turnaround should be so.

Sir John Danvers

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Evolution picture

Character mistake: In the scene where the gorilla type creature has taken out one of the security cameras, they say "one of the creatures just destroyed video four" but if you look, camera four is intact and it is camera two that has been taken out. (01:08:05)

ollig

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

Suggested correction: Monitor names and video names are not the same so monitor 2 which is out, could in fact be displaying images from video 4. On a multi monitor system, there could be tons of video feeds that could be played through those monitors.

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Transformers: The Last Knight picture

Character mistake: Namibia was said to be in West Africa. Namibia is in Southern Africa.

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You Only Live Twice picture

Character mistake: While one of the Soviet mission controllers does speak with a native-sounding level of Russian, the other controllers and the cosmonauts sound obnoxious at times; strange anglicisms or outright English words are sprinkled into the script, such as the word "pressure" in the middle of an otherwise Russian sentence, not to mention the many grammatical errors.

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