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Deep Impact (1998) - 17 mistakes

Directed by Mimi Leder, starring Elijah Wood, James Cromwell, Morgan Freeman, Robert Duvall, Téa Leoni, Vanessa Redgrave (add more)

Genres: Sci-fi, Thriller

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Continuity: During a scene where the boss of the TV station is talking to his staff, when he finishes he takes off his glasses and starts to move off his chair. Yet in the next shot he gets off the chair still wearing his glasses.

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Factual error: While the tidal wave is enveloping Manhattan, there is a scene where Washington Square Park is destroyed. A large arch is hit by the wave before reaching the rest of the park. The problem is the arch is on the UPTOWN side of the park, not the DOWNTOWN side which according to the movie was the direction the wave was coming from.

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Factual error: When Sarah's family is fleeing Richmond, the highway sign says "Interstate 66." That highway is about a hundred miles north of Richmond; it starts in Washington DC.

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Revealing: During the scene where the two teenage stars are outrunning the tidal wave through the hills, the girl is supposedly carrying her baby sibling strapped to her chest. However, the legs that can be seen dangling out of the baby-carrier belong to a dummy.

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Factual error: Leelee and Elijah are supposed to live in Richmond, Virginia. However, the hill supposedly behind Elijah's house is too high and too open for the Virginia piedmont and clearly looks like California. (Similarly, the hills around the Ark project, supposedly located in the Missouri Ozarks, also look very Californian.) When the couple are escaping the tidal wave on the motorcycle through the woods in the mountains to the west, they are going through a very open forest of what appears to be some kind of western pine trees found in semi-arid areas. In reality, the underbrush in the moist Virginia Blue Ridge would be too thick to drive through outside of a road or wide trail.

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Plot hole: The government would have no chance of hiding the existence of the comet for a year. Most comets are discovered when they are very faint, literally thousands of times fainter than Wolf-Beiderman when Leo found it. Long before the events in the film take place, probably even before the government itself would be notified, the comet would have been discovered, an orbit calculated, and people panicked. The whole premise of the first half of the movie is thus based on flawed logic.

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Factual error: After the initial impact of the small comet, the clouds are all blown away. Yet in every further scene there is normal cloud cover, including the shots from space.

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Continuity: At the end of the film, when the comet hits, the tidal wave washes over New York City, smashing first into the Statue of Liberty, then Downtown and the World Trade Centre, then sweeping uptown, depositing Lady Liberty's head somewhere in Midtown. The only problem with this is the fact that Manhattan Island doesn't face East. It doesn't even face the South. It lies on an angle in a Northeast/Southwest direction, top to bottom (1:00 to 7:00 on a clock face). That means a wave that started in the middle of the Atlantic would have to take a pretty sharp right turn at Brooklyn (over 90 degrees) to travel uptown in a North-easterly direction.

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Factual error: When the asteroid crashes on earth you see people looking up at it, to see it fall. In reality the asteroid would burn everything on the ground due to the heat it develops.

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Factual error: Many scenes showing the tidal wave approaching land and buildings is factually inaccurate. Its already stated that the tidal wave will be moving faster than the speed of sound, and reach a height of over 1000 ft by the time it hits land. That being the case, there would be a massive pressure wave of air in front of the tidal wave, that would clear a path long before the tidal wave hits. Buildings would start to topple and crumble before the water struck, and certainly people would not be able to stand in the path of the tidal wave, because the air pressure would blow them away.

Edit Submitted by GalahadFairlight
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Audio problem: At the end after the President gives his speech in front of the White house, you hear the crowd cheering and clapping, but looking at the crowd, they are standing still, hardly in joyous uproar.

Edit Submitted by Cybermoose
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Continuity: When Orrin the astronaut is saying his good-byes to his wife and kid, we see him reach out to the screen as if to touch them with his right hand. When we switch to the shot within mission control, he's reaching with his left hand.

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Visible crew/equipment: When the kid is on the motorcycle looking for his wife, you quite clearly see a camera and crew filming another scene. It's when we see the traffic jam and the rental van shot.

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Revealing: When Jenny Lerner is first having drinks with her mother at the beginning, her mother's cigarette is obviously fake. It is not emitting any smoke throughout the entire scene.

Edit Submitted by Jason Sieberg Time
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Continuity: Just after Jenny Lerner talks to her Dad in the rain, she hails a taxi with her left hand, in the very next shot she is hailing the taxi with her right hand.

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Continuity: When Leelee Sobiesksi gets on the motorcycle with her husband, the baby's head cushion moves from full coverage of the baby's head to partial coverage, to full coverage, back and forth, several times.

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Factual error: Otis Hefter is introduced as the Director of the mission and prior to the launch of the Space Shuttle, greets someone with, "Welcome to Houston!" Hefter is then portrayed as the person "in command" of the mission, including the countdown and lift off. This is incorrect as Ground Control at Cape Canaveral, Florida commands the mission until the spacecraft has cleared the launch tower and actually begins its flight and mission. It is only then that the command of the mission who be handed over to Hefter and the crew in Houston.

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