When everyone gets out of their cars in the traffic jam and watches the comet pass overhead, they were really looking at a crew helicopter passing over. In post production, the helicopter was covered up with the comet.
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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. See more...
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Directed by Mimi Leder, starring Elijah Wood, James Cromwell, Morgan Freeman, Robert Duvall, Téa Leoni, Vanessa Redgrave (add more)
When everyone gets out of their cars in the traffic jam and watches the comet pass overhead, they were really looking at a crew helicopter passing over. In post production, the helicopter was covered up with the comet.
The traffic jam that Leo Beiderman travels through at the end was made up of 2,000 cars and 2,500 people on a not-yet-opened stretch of highway in northern Virginia.
If you happen to have the DVD version of the film, have a look at one of the trailers. In the movie trailer they show the comet hitting the ocean at an almost right-angle. In the actual movie the comet enters the atmosphere at an angle, thus letting the people watch the comet travel to across the sky into the ocean.
A sorta nice inside joke: At one point when the President is speaking we see a crowd watching the broadcast in New York City's Times Square. A long shot from above shows the crowd in the streets, and a nearby cinema's marquee shows that the cinema is playing "Fire In the Sky". "A Fire In the Sky" is the title of a movie from 1978 about a comet that hits Phoenix. But this is where it gets sorta tricky: I looked the title up, and noticed something: the title of the movie, notice, is "A Fire In the Sky", while the marquee read simply "Fire In the Sky". That is the name of a movie about the supposedly true story of a guy that was abducted by aliens. A inside joke that doesn't work, due to bad research (or lettering).
In a recent American TV airing of the film (January 2004), any scene depicting the former World Trade Center towers were removed, due to existing September 11 sensibilities.
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