The Day After Tomorrow corrections

The Day After Tomorrow (2004) - 105 corrections

Directed by Roland Emmerich, starring Dash Mihok, Dennis Quaid, Emmy Rossum, Ian Holm, Jake Gyllenhaal, Jay O. Sanders, Sela Ward

Comments made in brackets are corrections from other visitors. As such, any aggressive/abusive corrections (and I get quite a few) written as if they're comments I've made myself will be ignored. To submit your own corrections for mistakes, just click "make changes" when viewing mistakes, and click "correct entry". Some entries have "duplicated entry" after them - these are entries which were already listed on the main page, but were submitted again. I occasionally leave these online for a while, just in case they were moved in error, so don't worry about pointing them out to me.

In the first shots in Antarctica, just after one of the scientists almost fell in the abyss, there is a shot of one of them where you can see on his jacket a patch showing he is a Canadian officer, despite the fact the only flag in the group is the United States. [The patch doesn't mean he is Canadian, the jackets that they are wearing at made by a company called Canada Goose that makes jackets that people all over the world wear.]

When we see Sam and the other two boys leave the library to go to the ship, they are able to exit straight from the top floor due to all the snow, which has buried most of the building. Yet when they leave, you can see two traffic lights sticking out from the under the snow. After the storms and tidal wave, how can the traffic lights be sticking out, perfectly straight, from under all of that snow? [The shot is too narrow to identify where the boys depart from, but a wide-angle shot of them returning to the library shows they are using the front and entering at the mezzanine level. A significant portion of the building is visible, perhaps two to three stories. This would also make sense, since the ship is in front, the highest drifts in the back, and it would be safer and warmer to travel through the building than on uncertain drifts.]

In the library just before Sam goes for the medicine he breaks up a wooden chair to make some snow shoes. In the following scene when entering the ship from the snow these shoes are nowhere to be seen. [There is an obvious time lapse between them walking with the shows on and them entering the ship - wouldn't it make sense that they would take off the snow shoes before going into the ship?]

When Sam is constructing the snow shoes, the librarian asks "I thought you said it was too dangerous to go outside?" and Sam replies "I know I did". But his lips don't move. [His lips do move, but only just. The words he used don't really require a lot of lip movement to pronounce correctly. ]

More fresh water in the ocean wouldn't trigger a global cooling trend. Salt water actually allows the oceans to be cooler without freezing. [The point is that the alteration in the salinity of the water has stopped the North Atlantic current from flowing and bringing warmer water up from the equatorial regions, triggering the climate shift and the cooling effect. The actual heat capacity of the water doesn't have anything to do with it.] Corrected by Tailkinker

In L.A., when the janitor removes his headphones after the tornado, his shadows do it a little bit before him. [The shadow is properly synchronized, but the light on the man is from below so it makes his hands look like they're higher than they actually are. Therefore it looks like his shadow hands reach his ears before his real hands do, but it's an illusion.]

When Brian changes the TV channel in New York so that the students see coverage of the two plane crashes, he changes the channel to Fox 5, which is the same channel that Sam was watching in Washington D.C. [As a matter of fact, Fox is on channel 5 on both cities: WTTG in Washington and WNYW in New York. Not the same station, obviously, which gets around the distance problem.] Corrected by Bob Blumenfeld

After the Japanese businessman was on his phone, he runs to a nearby gate trying to escape the ice storm. He grabs the gate with both hands empty. After he is knocked out by the ice, a closeup shows his phone sliding out of his hand. [He grabs the gate with his left hand above the shot, so we can't be sure it's empty. In other shots he was holding the phone loosely in his palm and thumb, leaving his fingers free to grip.]

In the opening scene when the ice shelf starts breaking away, there is equipment on both sides of the crack. When the camera starts pulling away there is no equipment anywhere, just the actors. [There's equipment all over the place. What you are mistaking for the actors is actually a crawler and tents on the left side. The actors can barely be seen at all, they're the black spot next to the left side of the crack.]

When the camera zooms out after the Antarctic splits, the crack is far smaller than seen in the previous shot. [It's all relative. The crack was perhaps 3 meters wide when Jack jumped it and it increases by another meter or so before the wide shot. In the larger shot, the crack is still about the same size compared to the very tiny humans and their equipment.]

When the helicopters are flying to pick up the British royal family, the helicopters shown are not real, in-service helicopters, but a hybrid of two different helicopters. The front end/cockpit is the cockpit of a Westland Seaking, the tail end of a Merlin EH101 and the main body/main rotor area a bit of both. Later in the scene, when the crewman slides open the cargo door and freezes, this is also the door of a Westland Seaking. The internal shots are also that of a Seaking. [Actually they are real in-service helicopters. The helicopter represented in the film is a Sikorsky HH-3 which does indeed look like the front end of a Sea King and the back end of a Merlin, and which has been in service with the USAF and others since 1962. The only error is that the HH-3 has not been used by the UK.]

When we see the closeup of Laura's cut leg, the skin around it is nice and smooth. However, any girl can tell you that after spending several days camped out in the library, they would be stubbly at the very least. They can't expect us to believe that she's still been shaving her legs throughout this ordeal. [She might have waxed her legs just before the contest. In that case, it would take more than a couple of days for the hair to grow back.]

When "The Eye Of The Storm" is over New York Jack looks at the flag and the flag stops fluttering. When Jack has pushed his friend down the hole he looks at the flag again and it is fluttering again, just before it freezes. [We can clearly see (and hear) a gust of wind "pick up" the flag just before it freezes.]

Near the end, "Mission Control" says there's reports of the storm dissipating over North America, but when the the guys in the Space Station look out of the window, they are looking at Europe. [The spacecrew never state they can see North America, they simply agree that the storm has dissipated. In the movie it is stated that the 3 supercells will join and create one giant supercell that will cover the entire northern hemisphere. If they could see Europe at the end, that would suggest that the supercell has dissipated.]

In the scene in the library where everyone is looking for a place to start a fire a worker at the library takes everyone to a fireplace. She says that the fireplace has not been used in 100 years. If the fireplace has not been used in 100 years surely it would have needed to be swept out prior to use or else all the smoke and CO would not have vented out the chimney. Instead it would have filled the room and killed everyone there. [The fact that we see snow fall out when he opens the fireplace suggests the chimney is clear. Thus smoke will easily escape up and out of the chimney.]

The policemen breaks the window of the taxi to help the French woman and her son, but when Laura returns to take the purse, the window is intact. [The policeman actually broke the windshield. Laura reaches in through the rear window.] Corrected by wizard_of_gore

At the end, when Jack Hall finds his son in the library, he opens a door to the room where all of them were staying. The door is completely frozen. Opening the door by it's handle should have caused the handle to break, if not shatter, at that temperature. It would not have just opened as easily as it did. [Its only frost all over the walls and door handle. The freezing point of a metal door handle is much lower than the temperature depicted in the movie. The door handle would have to be immersed in liquid nitrogen in order to fracture and break apart like you say it should.]

When New York is being frozen, the super-cooled air is just coming down from the atmosphere. But if the storms have been around for days, New York would have been frozen the second the eye arrived. [New York does freeze as soon as the eye hits, but it doesn't freeze all at once because the eye is traveling over the city, not just suddenly on top of the whole city.]

When Jack's son Sam enters the tanker and finds he cannot get into the medical room, he climbs outside the tanker and then smashes the glass of the medical room with an axe. The glass smashes but is jagged around the edges with some glass left in the frame. In the next shot we see Sam climb through the window, but the shape of the glass left in the frame has changed completely and disappeared, leaving no jagged edges on which he could cut himself. We don't see Sam remove it, so where did the glass go? [He probably removed it between camera shots. The tanker itself moved from in front of the library to between two buildings in an angle change, so why can't the glass be removed between shots?]

in the scene where there are all the tornadoes in Los Angeles, right after the reporter is talking about the Hollywood sign being ruined, there is a shot of the Capitol Records building and one next to it, with a tornado practically already tearing into the buildings. In the next shot there are no tornadoes that close to either building, the closest one is down a street to the right. In the next shot of the Capitol records building, the tornado is ripping through it again. [It just appears that way because of tricky camera angles. Notice the sign on top of one building showing that it's a hotel. In the next camera angle, the sign is still there, just bent over. Plus, notice where the words "Capitol Records" are placed on the sign in one shot relative to the next shot.]