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Just before the big earthquake, the subway train shown arriving at the Westlake/MacArthur Park station has the number 518 on the front door, however, the train that gets damaged during the earthquake has the number 526 on it. See more...

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The lava was primarily made of methylcellulose, the thickening agent used in fast-food milkshakes, and the ash was made mostly of ground newspaper. See more...

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Volcano (1997) - 23 corrections

Directed by Mick Jackson, starring Anne Heche, Tommy Lee Jones (add more)

Genres: Action, Thriller, Drama

Comments made in brackets are corrections from other visitors. To submit your own corrections for mistakes, just click "edit" under an entry, then choose "correct entry". You can also submit corrections for corrections, if you think a mistake has been unfairly removed.

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When Dr. Barnes is down in the storm drain with her friend Rachel, who falls through the fissure, Rachel screams "I'm burning up!", despite being at least several hundred feet above the lava/magma flow. At other points in the movie, Roark, his daughter, Barnes, and the subway rescue team are all literally within a couple feet of the lava and show no effects. [Rachel is screaming in panic, because she can feel the heat and is 'afraid' to be burned. She is nowhere near the temperature for combustion, but her panic does not allow her to think that straight. Plus the enclosed space would make the heat more intense than it would have felt to Roark when he was outside.]
Edit Corrected by Twotall
At the start, when we see the two cops pull up outside the church, the cops get out of the car and start to walk past the burnt out car. The cop with the brown hair walks ahead of the cop with the blonde hair, yet in the following shot, the blonde haired cop is now ahead of the other cop. [There is a shot of broken glass on the floor. There is enough time during that shot for them to switch places.]
Edit Corrected by Starchild Time
There is a scene where it shows one of the trucks bumping into one of the concrete dividers to help hold it still whilst the lava flows. In a few shots later, the truck and the divider get shunted back by the weight of the lava. Its simply the previous sequence of the truck reversed. [The clip is not reversed. The firefighter is not moving the same way in the clips. Also the firefighter has got a hose in the first shot but no the second.]
Edit Corrected by Starchild Time
At one point we see a camera's view inside a tunnel with some lava approaching it. The lava then hits the camera, and it shows noise on the screen. However this wouldn't happen, a black screen should have shown because the camera would be severely damaged by the lava so it wouldn't be able to operate any longer. [Not so. The camera is connected to a VCR - it is not a camcorder. When the camera is destroyed the VCR will then send a disrupted signal to the monitor banks, and you get signal noise. What you see on the screen is 100% accurate.]
Edit
Many of the helicopters fly through a heavy ash fall to dump water on the lava. All that ash falling through the air should clog up the engines of the helicopters and shut them down - as was the case with all the police cars that one character said were stuck on the freeway because the ash seized up their engines. [These are fire fighting Helicopters. They routinely fly through large amounts of smoke, ash, and grit, and therefore all working parts are either sealed tight, or where airflow is needed, heavily filtered.]
Edit
The blonde volcano expert says something about rocks floating on the molten magma mantle. This is not true; the mantle is not molten magma. [She doesn't say that the mantle is molten magma; what she means is that rocks float on the magma mantle, which is molten.]
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When Kelly Roark's leg is burnt by the lava and she goes to hospital she has no marks on her face, when at the hospital she has a large graze on her left cheek, however at the end of the film when they all go out in the rain the graze has remarkably vanished again. [She fell at the hospital, resulting in the graze on her face. They cleaned up the graze. She was in the hospital, that's their job.]
Edit
In the scene where they are allowing the lava to pool, all of the firefighters are in heavy gear, while the reporters are not. The heat from the lava should have been so intense that they would have been heavily burned from it. [Not true, I've seen a volcano documentary showing people (without protective gear)about two feet from the lava and nothing happened to them except some sweating. That's it.]
Edit
When they are trying to stop the lava from flowing down the street, they make a "U" shape in the street with the cement highway dividers. If they had laid the dividers the other way, they would have supported themselves, and not need the trucks behind to hold them. [It doesn't matter. They would have used the trucks to hold off the lava anyway. It was a good idea. By the way, the barricade can be made anyway they wanted to build it. Besides, it was safer to build it the way they did.]
Edit
The lava ignites everything it touches or gets near to. Why not the little dog in the house? [Just like the reporters at the barricade, you don't just catch fire. This was the same thing I saw in the documentary.]
Edit
Near the beginning there is a train pulling into (out of?) the subway station and you can see the reflection of the cameraman and his camera in the glass of the train. [That's not a crewmember. At the beginning of the film, they are doing a news story on the Red Line. That's a newsman shooting footage of the trains.]
Edit
This is probably the most blatant mistake in the movie: The lava in the first half of the movie is MUCH hotter than it should be. The speed at which a lava flow moves is determined by its temperature, so lava moving at that speed would be much cooler. If the lava was really as hot as it is in the movie, it would be moving as fast as the lava in the Red Line train tunnel. [No. When lava first emerges, it is incredibly hot and as it keeps flowing, it cools. So the filmmakers got it right.]
Edit
In the scene where all the firemen are standing at and on top of the concrete spraying water onto the lava which is right up against the barrier- as a fireman, myself there is no way they would be able to stand anywhere near the concrete barrier due to the heat and the gases lava gives off. The water being sprayed on would also be useless due to the heat that would make the water evaporate before it went anywhere near the lava. [Not true. In Iceland when 7 volcanoes erupted, they used water and the lava subsided. I watched the documentary used to promote "Volcano."]
Edit
When the fireman is swinging the ladder with Tommy, Anne, and the other guy over the lava, the down-the-ladder shots are still, then you cut back to the wide angle and it is still moving. [That's not true. It's not still. I watched this movie today and looked at this mistake and it is not true. The lava underneath them is moving and so is the ladder.]
Edit
After Anne Heche comes out of the hole (after her friend/colleague was burned to death)she takes off her silver overall suit. Her jacket hangs off her shoulders, around her arms. In the following close-up the jacket is over her shoulders again, and in the next scene it once again hangs off her shoulders, around her arms. [She puts it back on, and then off again just in case anything happens again.]
Edit
During one of the crises in the park, Tommy Lee Jones barks about 20 rapid, frantic, complicated, matter of life and death orders to one of his people, involving evacuations, multiple phone calls, and massive co-ordination. How could any one person possibly remember all those orders much less carry them out alone in the middle of a panic situation? [Saturation training makes your actions almost instinctive.] [When he gets the orders, Emmit tells another worker the order and he works on it.]
Edit
When the co-star Anne Heche goes to check out the flow of the lava in the red line tunnel she goes to a payphone and calls Tommy Lee Jones' cellphone but his cell phone burned up in his car. The phone she calls him on is a phone that he took from a news reporter. So how did she get his number to call him. [Mike changed the number on the cell phone to his number, wrote it down on paper, and gave it to Amy in case of another emergency.]
Edit
When they are trying to find a way to stop the lava from going in to the museum, Tommy Lee Jones has an idea to push a bus up against the museum to divert the lava. The plan works but the lava does not melt the bus like it melted the Tommy Lee Jones' car or the fire truck. [The bus melts later on, but it doesn't show it.]
Edit
After getting off the phone with the girl from the subway, Tommy Lee Jones barks out a list of orders and then gets on a motorcycle and speeds off to meet the girl. The next shot shows him arriving in a Jeep or similar vehicle, but NOT on a motorcycle. [He stopped at the OEM office. That is their emergency truck.]
Edit
A volcano could never happen in Los Angeles. The earth's crust (and portions of the mantle) are made up of plates, which move about in three ways: divergent, convergent, and transform. In L.A. we have a transform boundary, which means the plates slide alongside one another, accounting for the many earthquakes in California. Volcanoes happen along convergent boundaries, where a plate subducts under another, goes deep into the mantle and hence melts, then rises back to the surface as magma. The entire "Ring of Fire" is made up of such boundaries. As this type of boundary does not exist along California, a volcano is effectively impossible until the plate movements change (which would take millions of years). [Simply put, not true. According to the USGS website, the most recent eruption of a volcano in California was in 1917. And there are many volcanoes in California.]
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