Best sci-fi movie character mistakes of all time

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Plan 9 From Outer Space picture

Character mistake: The pilot says to his wife that the flying saucer was cigar-shaped. The actual shape was more like two dishes attached together. (00:04:45 - 00:12:20)

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The Hunger Games picture

Character mistake: When Katniss is trying to destroy the supply pile, we see a close up of her drawing back on the her bow. We see she has the arrow to the left of the grip, meaning the fletchings (feathers at the end by the string) have to be facing to the left. Otherwise the fletchings will hit the grip, rip off, and make the arrow unstable in flight and go completely off course. However, the fletchings are are facing to the right and so will hit the grip. Any archer or anyone who is skilled with a bow would know this. (01:32:45)

Ssiscool

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Dark City picture

Character mistake: When Murdoch finds the correct page in the phonebook, it is not sorted correctly. e.g. "Harber G" should be before "Harber TJ" and "Harrison Dale" should be before "Harrison E" (00:44:18)

jle

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Pandorum picture

Character mistake: When Bower is banging on Payton's hyper sleep chamber from the outside it says Payton, but when it cuts to looking from inside out, it says Bower.

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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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Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country picture

Character mistake: At the trial, the witness said that "With the first shot, we lost our gravitational field. I found myself weightless, and unable to function." However, the first shot caused the ship to start listing to port. It was the second shot that caused the gravitational failure.

Movie Nut

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

Suggested correction: People misremember events all the time, especially if the events are unexpected and chaotic. At best a character mistake.

I called it a character mistake.

Movie Nut

He could also simply be lying in order to explain why he did not do whatever he should have after the 1st shot, since he was an easy target for the intruders and did not die in battle, which would have been honorable. Klingons are not the most honest of people.

It's also important to remember this was a "show" trial, where many things were manipulated to make Kirk and McCoy look guilty. Everything the Klingon witnesses say is suspect.

That I will agree with.

Movie Nut

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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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Riddick picture

Character mistake: In Pitch Black they established the system they crashed in (M-344/G) had 3 stars. Jack stated it when the 2nd sunrise started, and the solar system model also had 3 stars. In this film when Boss Johns starts asking about M-344/G he says it is "a backwater system with 2 suns and 1 habitable planet."

Scalorn

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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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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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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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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

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

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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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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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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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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The War of the Worlds picture

Character mistake: During the first big battle between the Martians & the U.S. Army, the Martians use their heat ray to vaporise people and equipment. Dr. Forrester, a physicist, then quickly speculates, "It neutralises mesons somehow. They're the atomic glue holding matter together. Cut across their magnetic lines of force and any object will simply cease to exist." During the '50s mesons were theorised to hold atomic nuclei together strongly. But if the Martian rays worked as the Dr. guessed, then objects wouldn't just vaporise. They'd explode with the ferocity of nuclear weapons.

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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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