Best sci-fi movie character mistakes of all time

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Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country picture

Character mistake: There's no apparent reason for Spock's conviction that the gravity boots are a damning piece of evidence that will reveal the assassins, especially considering how useless they prove to be after being found planted in an innocent man's locker.

TonyPH

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Honey I Shrunk The Kids picture

Character mistake: While pitching his shrinking machine to NASA Szalinski claims that reducing the size of a rocket's payload would result in "staggering" savings in the fuel required at takeoff. However, he makes it clear that his machine works by reducing the space between atoms, meaning that the shrunken object weighs the same as the original. Weight is the critical factor in calculating fuel consumption, not size. Anyone at NASA would pick up on that instantly.

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Interstellar picture

Character mistake: Shortly before the drone chase scene Cooper tells Murph to put the truck in second gear. She pushes the gear lever forward, however on the 6-speed manual in the Ram 3500 second gear is in the back row.

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Total Recall picture

Character mistake: When looking at the various items in his safe deposit box, one of the passports has the name Henry Reed. However the serial at the bottom of the passport is mistyped as REED/HENTY. (00:41:25)

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Demolition Man picture

Character mistake: When the alarms go off in the police station indicating the code 187 all the police officers are confused as to what is going on since they know nothing of MDKs. Zack Lamb should have already known what the code meant, yet he never says anything and just waits for everyone to figure it out.

jbrbbt

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Suggested correction: I took it as he went into almost shock that after so many years a murder had actually taken place. He says, "I don't believe it," indicating he knew what the code meant but then he kind of froze until Phoenix's name was mentioned.

Suggested correction: Zack Lamb is quite old and it's possible he simply forgot what the code meant. He was a pilot too, not a street cop.

lionhead

When Stallone first meets Lamb after being thawed in the future, he tells Spartan he was "grounded" after the events in the opening scene so had not been a pilot for 36 years.

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Alita: Battle Angel picture

Character mistake: In her first walk through the city with Dr. Ido, after feeding the dog her sandwich, Alita takes a flyer and reads it. Between the lines that read "Wanted" and "Murder" there is a line in Spanish that says "Querido para el asesinato." It should say "Querido por el asesinato".

gf.nekro

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Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure picture

Character mistake: In the movie they grab Genghis Khan in 1209 which would have been correct, he ruled Mongolia from 1206 to 1227. In the presentation at the end they say in 1269 he did this and that, that would have been Kublai Khan's reighn of terror in Mongolia.

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

Suggested correction: Bill and Ted have proven not to be that smart. Easy for them to get those things confused.

lartaker1975

It was also an excuse for a callback to the "69, dude!" joke from earlier in the film; whether Bill and Ted intentionally got that detail wrong just for the sake of a joke is anyone's guess.

zendaddy621

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Outland picture

Character mistake: The movie starts with shots of the moon Io and the company's operations, with typed descriptions at the bottom of the screen. Guess they couldn't afford a proofreader. They spell dependents as dependants, marshal as marshall, and principal as principle.

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Soldier picture

Character mistake: After killing three of the 'new' soldiers, Todd says that there are seventeen left. He then kills about another thirty.

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Back to the Future picture Back to the Future mistake picture

Character mistake: At the beginning of the movie Marty is turning on a huge guitar amplifier. The two switches for the filaments are misspelled. They are shown as "filiment." (00:03:25)

toroscan

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Darkman II: The Return of Durant picture

Character mistake: The reporter refers to a "box of ashes" being buried in Westlake's grave, whereas in the first film, all that was buried there was "an ear", which was all they could find of his body.

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Moonraker picture

Character mistake: When James enters and exits the laboratory, the door has a sign on it that warns for radioactive materials. The laboratory actually contains a biological weapon. Therefore the door should be marked with a bio-hazard symbol. (00:41:00 - 00:42:00)

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Superman picture

Character mistake: In the Air Force One scene, when lightning destroys one of the plane's engines, one of the pilots tells a co-pilot to inform Metropolis Airport that the president is on board the plane. The crew is unnecessarily repeating themselves: just a few moments before, they radioed in that "Air Force One" was on approach; the plane would only have that call sign if the president was on board.

Cubs Fan

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Alien Resurrection picture

Character mistake: When Ripley asked the doctor how they "got" her, he replies from blood samples on Fury 16. This is in reference to the planet in Alien 3, but it was called Fury 161. (00:11:00)

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Face/Off picture

Character mistake: When Troy is getting the bomb ready, the screen shows it will blow in 216 hours, which is 9 days. Yet the agent tells Archer it will blow in 6 days.

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Equilibrium picture

Character mistake: When Mary is in the execution chamber, about to be incinerated, there is a voice over of the countdown till her death. They count back from 9 seconds and say 8 seconds, 7 seconds, 6 seconds, etc. The count is too slow. Every time they say a second, it's actually two seconds having passed. (01:22:10)

Quantom X

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The War of the Worlds picture

Character mistake: On several occasions, scientist (Clayton Forrester) refers to the impacting objects as "meteors". Any scientist knows (or should), that when a meteor impacts the the ground, it becomes a "meteorite".

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