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When "Bowman" visits his widow via television at her apartment, she's just finished watching a commercial for Pan-Am. The commercial is actually stock footage of Heywood Floyd's shuttle flight to the rotating space station in the first film, 2001. See more...
2010 (1984) - 17 mistakes
Directed by Peter Hyams, starring Helen Mirren, John Lithgow, Roy Scheider (add more)
Plot hole: When the doctors are discussing the condition of Bowman's mother, a newspaper headline on the wall displays the pictures of both Bowman and Frank Poole. These pictures are actually still shots of the two actors from an earlier conversation they had with HAL in the previous film. Since Discovery has been dormant for nine years, how did Earth manage to use these particular shots for the newspaper?
Continuity: When Max and Curnow enter Discovery through the emergency airlock, they emerge inside the pod bay to find the last remaining pod (even though all three pods were actually gone). It is in the spot next to the airlock door, but later when Floyd, Curnow, Chandra and the other Russian cosmonaut are talking, the pod has suddenly moved two spots over.
Factual error: The filmmakers here forgot how a centrifuge works to mimic the effects of gravity. It is centripetal force wherein an object is pulled away from the center of rotation (you feel its effect on a merry-go-round when it spins really fast and you are tossed off by the centripetal forces). No gravity is actually created. So when the two astronauts are walking along the outside of Discovery and Curnow announces he is getting heavier, it is impossible. First, he's not within Discovery (and if he were, the force would pull him toward the ends of the ship - correctly depicted later when the men are shown walking on the inside of the pod bay doors). The area they are walking on is dropping away from their feet. Both men should be motionless in space as the ship falls away 'below' their feet, then rotates around and kills them when it clobbers their heads half a rotation later.
Continuity: In "2001", Bowman steals aboard Discovery through the emergency airlock. In the airlock's alcove is a spare spacesuit, green in color. He takes and uses the green helmet to cross the decompressed pod bay to access HAL's memory. After disabling HAL, Dave wore his red suit and helmet to leave Discovery for the last time, and would have had no reason to move the green suit before leaving, and no one else is aboard to have done so. In this film, we see the same alcove is entirely empty - the green suit has vanished.
Continuity: When doctors are discussing the medical condition of Dave Bowman's mother, a close-up of the African-American doctor shows a framed newspaper on the wall behind him. It is the front page and has prominent pictures of Bowman and Poole taken during their mission. In the next, wider shot, we see this wall suddenly has nothing on it - the newspaper and frame have vanished. They return when Bowman's mother sits up in bed.
Factual error: While the Leonov has a centrifugal section to simulate gravity, the ship's bridge is not part of it (evidenced by the stationary views outside its portholes). Yet in various scenes, including the one when Floyd rushes in to discuss his plan to return to Earth sooner with Tanya, gravity seems quite evident. Floyd marches across the compartment onto the raised pilot area's floor, then steps down from it, his foot landing audibly. Tanya's open jacket also hangs down normally as she moves about. Yet when Floyd demonstrates his plan using two pens, they float in mid air.
Revealing: When the Russian pod is launched, a wide shot shows the Monolith at top/right with Jupiter in the background and both the Leonov and Discovery at bottom/right with the pod nearby. Just before this shot ends, all three spacecraft vanish, leaving only Jupiter and the Monolith for a very short but obvious moment.
Factual error: In the vast majority of cases, U.S. Astronauts wear the US flag on their left arm. On the rare occasion the flag is on their right arm, the flag is reversed so that the blue field remains toward the front of the person wearing it. The patch on Dr. Chandra's space suit during the launch countdown to leave Jupiter is on his right sleeve but is a left-sleeve patch.
Continuity: Dr. Chandra is in the logic circuits room reactivating HAL. He types words into a computer on the wall opposite the logic circuit panel (panel with the clear plexiglass blocks). In the movie 2001 there was no computer screen there; when Bowman is deactivating HAL you can see the flat metal wall with the red grid on the wall opposite the logic circuits.
Deliberate "mistake": Dr. Chandra returns to the Leonov at the end of the film with the device that Dr. Floyd designed to cut HAL's memory circuits. He hands the device back to Dr. Floyd, who tosses it in the air and catches it when it falls back into his hand. One problem - there was no gravity on the ship at the time.






