Corrected entry: Though the movie takes place in midsummer, many of the townfolks are dressed for much cooler weather.
Corrected entry: If the shark was terrorizing the town by staying close to shore, why did Quint think that going out to sea would give them the best chance of identifying and killing the correct shark?
Correction: Quint knew that if the beaches were closed, the shark would go somewhere else for food. The most logical place would be out at sea, they just needed bait and voila! A shark on a silver platter.
Corrected entry: When Chief Brody fires the shot that hits the air tank and blows up the shark, one second before the explosion the shark is not moving.
Correction: Impossible to notice without resorting to slow motion, and mistakes which require slow motion to notice do not belong on this website.
Corrected entry: After Hooper cuts open the Tiger shark, he tells Brody that it isn't the shark. He adds "you still got a hell of a fish out there, with a mouth about this big." He indicates size of the bite by holding his hands about 2 feet apart. This estimate is based on the bite marks on the first victim. Of course, later we see the shark's bite radius is much larger, around 3 to 4 feet. Hooper is a shark expert and should be able to more accurately determine bite radius. (00:44:30)
Correction: Clearly nobody involved, including Hooper, believed a shark as large as the one later seen could exist. His estimate was based on what he concluded could be the largest shark out there.
Hooper is a shark expert. His bite radius estimate should be based on the available facts, like the actual bite marks in the victim, and not what he thought would be the biggest shark. It's pretty difficult the get the bite radius wrong by a foot or more when you have clear bite marks in the victim.
Unless a bite radius can be estimated by the distance between puncture marks, Hooper had no way of knowing how large the shark actually is. As the previous correction states, he's using his own knowledge and experience to guess the size.
Correction: All that was left of the one and only victim that he examined, Chrissy Watkins, were pieces so effectively you could argue there were no bite marks, and he was making an assessment of best judgment and experience. Either way, 2 feet is still a big mouth.
Corrected entry: Quint repeatedly calls the shark Orca, but an Orca is a killer whale, not a shark, something a shark expert should know.
Correction: That is correct. "Porkers Mr. Hooper. Are you talking Porkers?" Porkers is apparently slang for Great White Sharks. Use of the slang adds to Quint being an experienced old salt of the sea.
Corrected entry: At the beginning, Sheriff Brody walks onto the "boat" that takes people and, at most, two cars across the water to the mainland. A car joins Brody with 3 men, the medical examiner, the major and the newspaper man. Brody has been told, by the medical examiner, that it was a shark attack that killed the young woman who swam at night (the first death in the film) but now he is being coerced into saying it was a boating accident. Meanwhile, the man who handles the "boat" has already put it in reverse, heading back where they have come from Nonetheless, the mayor says, "You can take us back now." Turning around, he would have seen the folly in his words.
Correction: Rewatch this scene. Brody, Vaughn, et al., board Amity ferry scow (in reality the On Time scow). Brody tells Charlie to take him to the kids swimming off shore across the water (Chappaquiddick Island). They cast off from Dock St ferry landing, and just as the lighthouse is in the background, the Captain turns the scow to dock at the 2nd ferry landing ramp properly. Distance between the 2 ferry landings is approx 520 ft. When Vaughn says, "Take us back now," we see the 1st landing behind them.
Corrected entry: Hooper says he can't poison Bruce because his skin is too thick and he'll have to go in the water and poke him in the mouth. However, when Brody stabs him in the head with the gaff, it leaves several bloody holes. It's just a bit too convenient for the plot to be believable that Hooper would choose to go into the water with a creature so powerful and dangerous (as opposed to at least trying to drug him from the surface first). And he had enough of the drug to try more than once: he fills one syringe from a good sized bottle of the stuff.
Correction: "Get this little needle though his skin?" as quint said. Much more delicate and breakable than the "gaff."
Character mistake: Captain Quint tells Hooper and Brody that the USS Indianapolis delivered "the Hiroshima bomb" in 1945. This is a myth that has persisted for decades and right up to the present. To prevent it from being lost in one piece, the Hiroshima bomb was actually delivered in pieces by various means to Tinian Island, where the parts were reassembled before it was carried aboard the Enola Gay to its target in Japan. The USS Indianapolis delivered only the detonator for the bomb. (01:29:00)
Suggested correction: This isn't a mistake since even you say it is a commonly believed and spoken of myth, so how is the captain repeating a commonly held myth a movie mistake? That would be like calling it a movie mistake if the character of King Arthur said the world was flat.
I agree with Jason, that it was correct for the character of Quint to have truly believed it. This was submitted as a "character mistake" which is appropriate. According to MM's guidelines a character mistake is "something a character wrongly states as fact... Something more significant than a minor error anyone could make."
Suggested correction: Quint likely believed the ship carried the bomb. It's unlikely he would know the details of an intricate plan to deliver the pieces separately. It may not have been factually correct, but it was correct for the character to have believed it.
Corrected entry: In the scene towards the end of the film, when they are trying to outrun the shark back to land (when Quint says something like: we'll get him in the shallows and drown him) you see a shot from the rear of the boat, and in the distance you can clearly see the shore line. But after that point in the movie, you never see the shore, even when they are swimming back at the very end.
Correction: In many shots land is visible at the horizon, in the distance, as well as in the shot when Brody and Hooper are using the barrels to assist their swim back to shore.
Correction: Just watched it again, and yes, when Hooper and Brody are swimming in at the end of the movie, you do see the land. Look at the very right upper side of the screen.
Corrected entry: When the shark is attacking Quint, the boat etc., his eyes do not roll back. Great White sharks roll their eyes back when they attack. Sharks that don't roll their eyes back have protective eyelids, but the shark doesn't close its eyes either.
Correction: Sharks only do this with some prey items, seals etc as its eyes are a weakness. The shark due to its size could not have perceived the human as a danger and in fact in reports from survivors of encounters with white sharks they often say they looked into the eyes while being bitten.
Character mistake: Chief Brody and Hooper go to the wharf to dissect a large tiger shark and examine the contents of its stomach. Finding nothing unusual, Hooper recommends they go offshore that night to search for the real killer shark because "he's a night feeder." Coming from a marine biologist, that remark really makes no sense. Hooper knew that, in addition to eating Chrissie the midnight swimmer, the shark also ate Pippin (the black Labrador retriever) and the Kintner boy in the middle of the day at a public beach. Based on all available evidence, the shark was no more likely to feed at night than in broad daylight.
Suggested correction: The statement is correct, the shark was a night feeder, as opposed to just being a day feeder, meaning the shark will likely be hunting at night.
Again, given all the evidence (including the daytime attacks), Hooper had no more reason to suspect the shark was a night feeder than a day feeder.
Except that's not what the conversation was about, he wasn't speculating on whether the shark was more likely to attack during the day or the night. He simply states they should go out at night to find the real shark responsible for the attacks because that shark will be feeding at night as well (and by going out at night they wouldn't have to face the daytime crowd). If he made an statement such as "the shark isn't a day feeder" or "the shark is strictly a night feeder", those statements could be considered mistakes.
Even when Chrissie was killed at night and two men later on in the movie tried to catch the shark for the reward...at night?
Factual error: When Hooper sees the hole in the hull of Ben Gardner's boat, he uses his knife to pry out the shark tooth. The tooth is located at the bottom of the hole, with its flat root side stuck deep in the wood and its pointy side facing up. It is completely impossible for the shark's tooth to become wedged in the wood this way, while he takes a nice bite out of the wood hull. (00:49:15)
Suggested correction: When Hooper uses the knife to pry to tooth out, it took very little effort, suggesting that the tooth wasn't wedged into that spot, but merely just resting in that spot.
The shark tooth was inserted into the wood by the prop crew with its flat root side down, which would have been impossible to have occurred during the attack on the hull. As to the statement that the tooth was "merely just resting in that spot" then Hooper would not have needed to use the blade to remove it from the wood, plus the fact that since it was underwater it would have floated away during the hours after the attack. But it did not float away, so it must have been at the very least snugly fit into the wood hull. Still impossible.
Plot hole: When Hooper and Chief Brody are trying to get the Mayor to re-close the beach after finding Ben Gardner's boat, they fail to mention they also found Ben Gardner's severed head. The Mayor would be forced to re-close the beach if yet another confirmed shark fatality had been mentioned, but Hooper and Brody never bring that important detail up. [This is still a mistake, but the explanation for this is that the scene where they find Ben Gardner's head was not in the original script. Originally, they just found his boat. Spielberg felt the scene needed a little more shock value so they shot the part with the head in a swimming pool long after the main filming had been completed.] (00:50:20)
Suggested correction: First off, it wasn't a severed head as you can still see the body attached to it, and second, what difference would that make? Two people and a dog already died, with the death of the Kitner boy being witnessed by several people, and the beaches still stayed open because the mayor was too stupid to close them. Not only that, but during the scene you mentioned, I believe it was Hooper who said that THREE incidents had occurred BEFORE the third killing takes place on-screen.
And not only that, but the mayor witnessed Hooper saying that the shark they caught was not the same one, or at least it was possible that it wasn't. Either way, shark attacks were happening, but the mayor did nothing about it.
Correction: As an island off the coast of New England, even the summer temperatures are extremely moderate. Martha's Vineyard, which Amity is based on, has an average July temperature of 63-79°. Combined with an offshore wind, it would feel even cooler.
LorgSkyegon