X

Great sites

Anything Hollywood

Atomic Popcorn

Banned in Hollywood

Bits & Pieces

Blockbuster Buzz

Book mistakes

CanMag

The Daily Column

Daily Stab

Defamer

Double Viking

EHOWA

The Evil Beet

Film Drunk

Filmofilia

Filmspotting

Foundry Music

Game mistakes

Geek Tyrant

Gone Hollywood

Hollyscoop

Hollywood Outbreak

I Am Bored

I Love Bacon

Joblo movie news

Movie Banter

Movie Buzz

Movie spoilers

Movie timeline

Other crap

Screenjunkies

Sky movie reviews

Something Really Funny

Tengossip

Trailer Addict

Unreality Magazine

Virtually Existing

Quotes

Jackson Curtis: When they tell you not to panic... that's when you run!

See more...

Mistakes

Jackson accidentally pushes Gordon's Porsche into a hole, however, in the overhead shot of the limousine leaving, there is no sign of the hole the Porsche fell into. See more...

Trivia

The frequency for the radio station 745 is not an error. It's like having a phone number start with '555' to prevent people from dialing or harassing the person who owns the number. Same with the radio station. They don't use real ones for good reason. See more...

Picture

Movie Mistakes blog

Popular blog posts:

Top 15 biggest Harry Potter film mistakes

The biggest mistakes in the Harry Potter movies

15 biggest mistakes in Titanic

The 20 biggest Friends mistake pictures

10 Twilight mistakes in pictures

2012 (2009) - 43 corrections

starring Amanda Peet, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Danny Glover, John Cusack, Oliver Platt, Thandie Newton, Woody Harrelson (add more)

Genres: Action, Drama, Sci-fi, Thriller

Comments made in brackets are corrections from other visitors. To submit your own corrections for mistakes, just click "edit" under an entry, then choose "correct entry". You can also submit corrections for corrections, if you think a mistake has been unfairly removed.

Mistakes
Trivia
Pictures
Quotes
Corrections
Questions
Submit
The Ark where the main characters are aboard is going to hit the face of Mount Everest. The wave that puts them there is 1500 meters high as it is traversing across India, but the base of Mt. Everest (according to Wikipedia) ranges from 4,200 m (13,800 ft) on the south side to 5,200 m (17,100 ft) on the Tibetan Plateau. Therefore the water could not have reached this height of land. [A wave's reach onto land is determined by the amount of water following it and pushing it onwards, not by the height of the wave. In this case, a lot of water is obviously pushing the front of the wave high up into the mountains.]
Edit
Yuri brags that enormous Antonov AN-500 cargo plane is of Russian origin. Antonov is a Ukrainian aircraft design bureau and manufacturer. [Antonov's have been built since the 1940s. Kiev doesn't have a facility to built the entire plane, so they've been assembled in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Novosibirsk, Russia, or Tashkent, Uzbekistan under contract. Besides all that, the 500 is a fictional plane for the purposes of the movie. The actual plane is an An-225.]
Edit Corrected by rswarrior
NASA has dubbed 2012 ''The most ridiculous disaster movie ever'', since such small particles emitted from the sun would have absolutely no effect on the Earth's core. [From what I have read, it is indeed the most absurd movie, but not because of the SIZE of the particles, but the effect of them. The particles they say are changing, couldn't possibly change and "mutate" as they are said to in the movie, because they have no DNA or parts to be mutated, therefore they could not be changed by radiation and solar flares from the sun.]
Edit Corrected by Kimberly Mason
Near the end, when the gate to Ark 4 is stuck open and water is coming in, the compartments begin sealing themselves to stop the flooding. Tamara, who was in the compartment between the daughter/dog duo and the rest of the family, wouldn't have drowned due to rising water. [She is never shown to die or survive the event, and is not mentioned to be either dead or alive during the rest of the film.]
Edit Corrected by Knever
All throughout the movie the 1 phone you see most of the government officials using was in fact the iPhone 4! Now if you do the research you will find out that the iPhone 4 wasn't even released to the public yet. Also Apple denied even the phones existence. [So, we have a film set in 2012 where you can see government officials using a model of phone that was released in 2010. Hardly seems like a mistake to me. More importantly, given how tightly Apple locks down its releases, and that the movie would have been filmed before the iphone 3GS was even released, most likely they're just using a phone which happens to resemble the iphone 4.]
Edit Corrected by Tailkinker
As the big Russian jet falls over the cliff, Sasha makes the Catholic Sign of the Cross, not the Orthodox Sign of the Cross. In the next scene, Yuri does the same. [This has already been corrected once. Who's to say the two are not actually Catholics? They have been living in the US for some time, and has had ample opportunity to convert to Catholicism.]
Edit Corrected by Twotall
Given the amount of destruction all over the world, it is HIGHLY unlikely the use of phones by general public would be possible, especially internationally. If any lines of communication were working, they would be completely jammed. [Highly unlikely does not equal impossible. Besides, more people dying means fewer people using phones, so how are these lines being jammed?]
Edit Corrected by JC Fernandez
In the scene where the small plane is on the landing strip in Yellowstone park, the engine of it starts and stops between shots. It is seen when the camper van is approaching the plane - when we cut between the van and the cast the engine is started, then stopped, then started again within a very small time frame. [Yes, the engines were started, Gordon began taxiing, Kate and the kids convince him to stop, he shuts off the left engine (complaining all the while), and restarts it when the motorhome comes into view at the end of the runway.]
Edit Corrected by rswarrior
Tsunami waves in the deep ocean have an amplitude of only about 1 metre (3.3 ft) and a wavelength of about 200 kilometres (120 mi), so they can be hardly noticed or detected on ships. Therefore, building so expensive arks is essentially pointless and many more people could be saved using already existing ships. Building the arks in mountains makes even less sense. [This film is fiction, not a documentary. The cataclysm that occurs is fictional and much stronger than anything that could occur in reality. In the film the waves and water are strong and high enough to make the arks necessary. As we see, they work exactly as expected.]
Edit Corrected by jhoffman100@yahoo.com
When John Cusack picks up his family (plus the new husband) to escape from the ensuing mayhem, there is a scene where the limo uses a piece of broken concrete in the street as a ramp, so that the whole car is airborne for one or two seconds. In that shot you can see that the front tires are not moving at all. [The front wheels ARE moving but stop rather quickly a second after the car gets airborne. Since the back wheels are turning normally, however, one might suggest that the car has a rear wheel drive.]
Edit
Jackson should not have been able to access the Internet from the middle of Yellowstone National Park, with no internet signal. [It's the near future. It's not inconceivable that in that time wireless internet would become available in remote, but touristy areas.]
Edit Corrected by JC Fernandez Time
After the survivors escape from Las Vegas in the Antonov they are obviously worried about fuel and making it all the way to China. As any fool knows, lightening a plane increases range and yet, oddly, it never seems to occur to them to ditch all the heavy and now useless automobiles into the ocean. Luckily, the cars come in handy to manufacture an exciting exit from the plane at the end of the flight. [For the first leg of the trip there is no reason for them to ditch the cars, as they fully expect to be able to land and refuel in Hawaii. After they realize Hawaii is gone, there is no point in ditching the cars as they are going to be short by "thousands of miles", and lightening the plane would make no difference.]
Edit Corrected by jhoffman100@yahoo.com
In the movie, the large transport plane is marked as an Antonov AN-500. The plane seen is in fact an Antonov AN-225. It is in no way as manoeuvrable as depicted in the escape sequence from Las Vegas, especially that shortly after take-off. Nor would it be able to take off from such a short runway, even if it wasn't loaded at all. [The movie is 2 years in the future. The second An-225 may have been altered and renumbered to an AN-500. This would include making all the necessary changes for its performance in the film (stronger engines, shorter take-off distance etc).]
Edit Corrected by dablues7
The heavy cargo lifter shown is an Antonov AN-225, developed from the AN-124 to carry the Soviet space shuttles Buran. Different from the original plane, the single AN-225 built doesn't have a rear cargo door. The only access for internal cargo is in the front, where the nose and cockpit swivels up, like in the C-5 Galaxy and many 747 freighters. The second partially built AN-225 would have a rear cargo door, but it'd also have a single tail, not a dual tail. [The movie is 2 years in the future. A rear cargo door may be added in that time. Also the C-5 Galaxy has front AND rear cargo doors.]
Edit Corrected by dablues7
The Russian plane has 6 engines, yet there are only controls for 4 in the cockpit. [There are 6 Throttle Controls seen. When they throttle up the controls are as follows, Engines 1 and 2 are lower left and 3 is left high center, 4 is right high center and 5 and 6 are lower right. The knobs are numbered and can be seen WITHOUT pausing the movie.]
Edit Corrected by dablues7
After leaving the Santa Monica Airport the pilot decides for no apparent reason to fly into Downtown and fly between the buildings. Anyone from LA would know that in order to actually fly into downtown from the airport one would have to actually aim for it. It's not like you take off from the airport and then you are stuck having to fly in amongst tall skyscrapers. [With all the chaos and confusions, the pilot could have made a wrong turn (he did not decide, did he?) causing the airplane to aim for downtown.]
Edit Corrected by gblontok
Throughout most of the film John Cusack listens to a radio program on 745 KHz AM [medium wave]. In the United States, this frequency would almost certainly be impossible to hear in a car, due to U.S. frequency spacing of 10 KHz per station. [The radio station with 745kHz AM frequency is fictional and need not be scaled with the real word. To comply with the 10kHz spacing, the other fictional stations [even if not mentioned in the movie] could be 755, 765, 775kHz and so on. In the same way the telephone number prefix 555 is unused; hence, almost always used for fiction.]
Edit Corrected by gblontok
There are two scenes in which a plane narrowly manages to take off before the ground collapses into the depths of Earth. The problem with these scenes is that those holes would not only swallow the surface, they would also suck in air. Without enough altitude nor enough velocity a plane would therefore be pulled into the new craters. That's why helicopters and small planes are instructed to avoid open-pit mines. And those are just static holes. [Already submitted and corrected. The continents are breaking apart because the earth's mantle is heating up. The huge land mass falls into the heated mantle; the heated gasses would rise rapidly, counteracting the effects of the downdraught. Indeed, the plane does lose some altitude immediately after the collapse, then is able to climb again shortly after. As for the velocity, you are making an assumption to say that the plane was not going fast enough.]
Edit Corrected by BocaDavie
High amounts of microwaves hitting the Earth would cause every person on Earth with an implanted pacemaker (or icd) to have extreme heart problems and/or even death (coming from a person with one). [True, but there's no mistake here. We don't see anyone on screen experiencing heart problems, but that does not mean it doesn't happen.]
Edit Corrected by Twotall
During the later parts of this movie there is much talk about 'continental displacement' and this appears to be happening in the film. The Earth's crust is falling apart because of the heating of the inner core, and all the cities seems to be falling apart since the ground can no longer hold them. When our cast finds themselves surprised to be already over China when they figured to be over the ocean, it is explained that Asia has actually moved from where it was. If this phenomenon is taking place globally, how come the monks in China don't seem to have been disturbed at all? In fact the bell the monk rings as the ocean approaches hasn't even been shaken. The arks are built in between the mountains, but the mountains are apparently fine. Shouldn't they be falling like the rest of the crust? [The earth is falling apart along the fault lines. Why would they build these ships along a major fault line ? The most logical spot to construct this "project" is a location with minimal tactile disruptions. The geologists obviously chose China and the mountains specifically for this reason.]
Edit Corrected by XIII

1 2 3 • Next page • Show all