Best action movie mistakes of all time

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Jumping Jack Flash picture

Continuity mistake: When Terri is at the party, her blonde wig changes shape and size many times.

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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny picture

Plot hole: At the start of the film, a young Jürgen Voller gets hit square in the face, at high speed, by trackside equipment and gets knocked off the train. But somehow, he isn't killed and survives without so much as a scar on his face.

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Dune picture

Other mistake: There is a scene in which Piter DeVries is talking about the Landsraad (one of the governmental organizations in Dune). Twice he mispronounces the name, saying "Lansdraad" instead.

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Tristan & Isolde picture

Factual error: The poem Isolde recites, John Donne's "The Good-Morrow", is a 17th-century work, which is centuries later than the movie's time period.

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The Hurt Locker picture

Factual error: In one scene they are playing on an Xbox 360, but the Xbox 360 did not come out until 2005, and the game being played, Gears of War, wasn't released until 2006. The movie takes place in 2004.

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Star Trek V: The Final Frontier picture

Other mistake: Spock lifts his crew mates with the rocket boots. He passes deck numbers 35 through 78 from bottom to top. First off, deck numbers go from top to bottom. The bridge is on deck 1. Second, the Enterprise of that class only had 23 decks.

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The Core picture

Plot hole: How do they maintain communication between the ship at the centre of the earth and the surface? There's no wire, and radio waves can only travel any distance without obstacles, and the earth's crust would be a pretty hefty obstacle...

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Midnight Run picture

Plot hole: At the end of the film Mardukas reveals that he has been wearing a body belt packed with cash - "in the neighbourhood of three hundred thousand dollars" - ever since Jack detained him in New York. Are we to assume that Jack Walsh, an experienced, hard-bitten ex-police officer, now a bounty hunter who routinely chases down violent and armed bail absconders who would kill him without a second thought, didn't even perform a perfunctory search of Mardukas when he detained him? This man used to work for the Mafia! What if he was carrying a weapon? A body belt with three hundred one thousand dollar bills in it would be uncovered by even the most casual pat down.

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Suggested correction: He was using $1000 bills. That's 300 bills in the belt which spread evenly absolutely could have been missed near his waist as part of his clothing.

Rubbish. I specified $1,000 bills as that would be the smallest package he could have secreted about his person, and it would still be instantly detectable. If he used $100 bills the package would be ten times larger, and he would have to carry a rucksack under his shirt.

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Planet of the Apes picture

Plot hole: The "video history" of the crashed USAF ship makes it very clear that the planet is uninhabited when they "landed". I can understand how a race of apes develops - they had a bunch of them on board. I can understand how a race of humans develops - they are descendants of the original crew. What I don't understand is...where the heck did all the horses come from?

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Suggested correction: Humans refer to parts of their own planet as uninhabited even though they are crawling with animals - vast areas of the Arctic are "uninhabited" even though polar bears and seals are found there. Were we to find a planet with nothing but primitive horses on it, we would label it as uninhabited. Apes and humans came from the crashed spaceship, horses were always there.

Which still makes no sense whatsoever.

Charles Austin Miller

I agree with you Charles. Horses are native to Earth but, the Oberon lands on a planet light years from Earth so it's a big plot hole how horses from one planet could end up on another when the planet was not only uninhabited but, the Oberon was believed to be lost.

Again, the Oberon was a massive space station, genetically experimenting with many earthly lifeforms, including horses, apparently. The time/space-rift was very near Earth (Mark Wahlberg made the journey in about 25 seconds at the end of the film. Not years but seconds). The implication is that the Oberon passed through the rift, and much of the crew survived to continue their genetic research on what later became the Ape Planet. So, the Oberon initially arrived on a barren planet and introduced all of the biological and botanical species, including apes, horses, and everything else.

Charles Austin Miller

Suggested correction: According to the backstory, the space station Oberon was dedicated to genetic modification sciences. They were actually experimenting with animal genes in the safety of space (which kind of makes sense). Given that the Oberon was a truly gigantic space station, it's not too much of a speculation that they were experimenting on many different types of animals (not just apes). When the Oberon crashed on Ashlar, half its crew was killed, but half survived with a number of ship's systems still functional, and they continued their genetic research, possibly producing a number of Earthly species on the otherwise uninhabited planet.

Charles Austin Miller

I think this should've been posted as a question, rather than a plot hole.

Charles Austin Miller

That's just a wild guess. There hasn't been a single mention of horses on board the Oberon. Even if there were, why only horses?

lionhead

Wild guess? The Oberon was experimenting in genetic modification, which implies a broad range of research...and not just on great apes. The Oberon was gigantic enough to be an Ark.

Charles Austin Miller

So where are all the other animals?

lionhead

Exactly. Where are the birds, lions, lizards, etc?

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Resident Evil: Afterlife picture

Continuity mistake: Right after Bennett takes off in the plane, Claire throws a gun to Alice. Between the slow-motion shots, the gun switches position in mid-air before Alice catches it. In the shot of Claire throwing it, the barrel is facing to the right, meaning that it should be facing to the left in the shot of Alice catching it. But it still faces the right when she does. (00:58:30)

THGhost

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Star Wars: The Last Jedi picture Star Wars: The Last Jedi mistake picture

Continuity mistake: When Finn is going to an escape pod to run away, he puts his pack down in front of it, seen again in a later shot. When Rose realises he's trying to run away, his pack has moved itself inside the pod.

Awesomolocity

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Tarzan's Greatest Adventure picture

Continuity mistake: In the scene towards the end of the film where we see Slade's body fall, it falls onto a submerged rock just below the surface of the water and there is a splash of water. In the next shot Tarzan looks down from the cliff above and Slade's body is on a large dry rock, a little distant from where the body originally fell.

keiko

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XXX (2002)

XXX picture

Visible crew/equipment: When Xander and Yelena are in the restaurant and they are shown through the window from outside you can see the reflection of a film crew member in the window. (01:04:35)

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World War Z picture

Factual error: An An-12, the aircraft the main character uses to fly all over the world, has a maximum range of about 3,500 miles. Hardly enough to fly from the US to South Korea or from South Korea to Israel. The An-12 also miraculously transforms into a C-130 in a couple of filler scenes. And why is this ex-Soviet aircraft marked in USAF markings, assigned to McGuire AFB?

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Suggested correction: Can't speak to the second half of your paragraph (should really post as 3 separate mistakes) but as for the first, a range of 3500 miles, aircraft such as the kc-135 exist and aerial refueling is fairly common place. Considering it's a mission supported by the acting UN Secretary General to stop a world crisis, resources could have been diverted for refueling.

The initial launch from the carrier is a C-130 which can do this (if empty, minimal fuel, has the full length of the flight deck and the carrier is steaming full ahead into the wind). It then morphs into an AN-12 and back to a Hercules. They make the point that this small fleet is what is known to remain of allied forces so not sure where any tanker support will come from. Many movies have ridiculous range issues with aircraft anyway.

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Pearl Harbor picture

Factual error: In the scene where Admiral Kimmel is inspecting the crew of the battleship an aide comes up with a message to send some ships to the Atlantic. Admiral Kimmel starts complaining about the orders. No Admiral would ever do this especially in front of enlisted men. In fact he was placed in charge of the Pacific fleet when his predecessor complained about moving the fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor.

Clarence Daugette

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The Lost City of Z picture

Plot hole: Searching for the source of the river, the raft is going downstream. Return trip it's also downstream. Generally, no matter where they are going, the rafts keep floating downstream.

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Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade picture Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade mistake picture

Visible crew/equipment: After Indy and Henry have escaped from Castle Brunwald, Indy jumps into one of the boats, pulls the motor starter cord and jumps back out, then just as he bends over to release the boat from the piling, right between Indy's legs the black covered arm of a hidden crewmember appears from under the tarp taking hold of the throttle, steering the boat away from the pier. (01:02:40)

Super Grover

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Men in Black 3 picture Men in Black 3 mistake picture

Continuity mistake: As the hand creature busts the shackles off Boris' legs in Lunar Max, you can see the bottoms of his pants over his metal prison boots. There are only a few folds and wrinkles over his left foot, and the pants over right foot are hardly wrinkled at all, or affected as the creature climbs up his right leg. But only a couple of seconds later, we see another shot of Boris' feet as the creature breaks off the metal sleeve of his arm, and suddenly his pants legs are very wrinkled. Boris was standing perfectly still the entire time. Boris' legs are also suddenly closer together. (00:03:35)

Quantom X

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