Deliberate mistake: In almost every movie with shootouts, highly trained soldiers, or experienced mercenaries or thugs suddenly get "Storm Trooper Aim" when shooting at the heroes. Even cops do this where they have clear shots of people running away from them, often times multiple of them with fully automatic weapons firing rapidly at a semi close target and somehow just hit all around them and even the ground.
Common movie and TV mistakes - page 6
This is a list of mistakes, things done wrong, etc. that happen so frequently onscreen we barely notice any more. 'Movie logic', stupid behaviours, and everything related.
Factual error: Whenever someone flatlines and a doctor (or nurse) grabs the defibrillator and is able to shock the person back to life. Defibrillators only work when the person still has a heartbeat, but the heart is in fibrillation. And even when doctors do use a defibrillator, they still perform regular CPR afterwards, which is rarely (if ever) shown being done. Usually in the film or show, the person comes back to life, sits up, and takes a huge gulp of air as if they had been holding their breath underwater.
Factual error: When the police are on the phone with a suspect who is using a landline and they try to keep them on the line long enough to trace the number and location. If the film takes place after the advent of Caller ID, then this information would be available instantly.
Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.
Deliberate mistake: Often in rainy scenes in movies, the crew has the rain machines set to have the rain drops far far larger than natural. Huge water drops so that they will actually be visible in the final print.
Character mistake: Chess boards being set up wrongly, or pieces being in places that make no sense and they would never have got there in the course of a normal game.
Continuity mistake: Cigarettes and food items changing size/shape between shots.
Factual error: Using a car door as a shield for bullets. They're really thin and you'd be shot right through them really easily.
Factual error: Films set in or around the middle ages depict horses being the size of modern horses. In actuality, horses during that time period were smaller, closer to modern ponies.
Factual error: When the character holding a gun keeps cocking the slide whenever they are about to get into trouble. Once a weapon is cocked, it's loaded. Every other time the slide, or cocking handle is manipulated, the weapon will extract a round from the chamber and draw a new round from the magazine. Whenever this happens in movies or shows, the weapon never extracts the round in the chamber.
Deliberate mistake: How many times have we seen cars and trucks drive through snow, dirt and mud, only to arrive at their destination perfectly clean.
Revealing mistake: Vehicles that are about to be involved in a crash have their windows cracked, shattered or blown out immediately before (a fraction of a second to 1-2 seconds). Conversely, some vehicles suffer no glass shattering when they roll over. The Good Son can serve as an example of both "mistakes." in chapter #9: "Mr. Highway", the first bus that turns on its side has no window breakage; the car that smashes into the bus has a crack in the driver's side windshield; at least two other cars get their windows blown out before ramming into the wrecked cars ahead of them.
Factual error: Women didn't start routinely shaving their legs until the 1920s, but in films and TVs shows set before then, women's legs are always hair free.
Factual error: An especially stupid but common blunder in film and TV over the decades involves a character picking up a random object from nearby and bashing a heavy padlock and steel chain a few times until the lock and chain break and fall away. Of course, steel chain and heavy padlocks are designed to withstand tons of stress that a human being couldn't possibly exert through striking alone.
Deliberate mistake: When a man and woman have sex in a movie scene, after the sex is over the woman covers her breasts with the blanket/sheet and the man covers up from the waist down. Also, if the woman gets up off the bed, she drags the bed-sheet with her to cover up. You just had sex, why would you all of a sudden have modesty? Also, they always have sex under the covers. Who has sex under the covers?
Deliberate mistake: Trains should stop when the engineer is killed or otherwise incapacitated because of a switch known as a "Dead man's" which is used in these events to stop the train. This mistake is often done purposely to keep the action going and for plot purposes. This is especially common in action films.
Deliberate mistake: Modern cars crashing without airbags going off. Probably a deliberate mistake for safety (trained stunt drivers can create the scene safely with the airbags removed) and visibility (deflated airbags would obscure the actors and getting past them would slow down the action).
Factual error: In movies where people are fighting with bows and arrows, whenever someone gets hit by an arrow, they flinch in pain and die on the spot. In most cases, the arrow injury is insufficient to cause a person's immediate death. Or they may die from the arrow wound, but only after they bleed to death, which takes time.
Revealing mistake: Often times in movies when people are watching footage recorded that was supposed to be from the perspective of someone else, ie. from their eyes or recording glasses, or from a camera, it is not shown correctly. Rather than actually showing the images from the first person perspective, it shows camera footage of that person or previous footage from the movie the people are in.
Deliberate mistake: Where as its not as common in modern movies, the 80's and 90's movies were really bad about vehicles exploding into huge balls of fire over the littlest things. Cars would hit each other and explode. One would flip over and explode. They would hit walls and boom! Or hilarious ones like Escape from LA, a motorcycle runs into a metal barrel and explodes instantly. As if the cars were filled with nitroglycerin or something.
Other mistake: Primitive people or people cut off from civilization that still have brilliantly white and perfectly straight teeth.
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Suggested correction: The spirit of this entry is correct - defibrillation is WAY overused to add drama - but the facts are wrong. First, defibrillators are rarely used unless there is electrical activity but no heartbeat, as is the case when fibrillation is occurring. In fibrillation, the heart is not beating, only twitching without rhythm. CPR is never done after restoring the heartbeat, no doctor would perform compressions on traumatized heart. Finally, most patients suffer serious complications after defibrillation. A patient who jumps up after defib only happens... in the movies.
I did oversimplify when I said heartbeat. But a twitching heart is different than a completely stopped heart. And the point of the entry is the fact that defibrillation machines are over used and patients don't jump up afterwards, which you only confirmed, so the correction is unnecessary. And, where do you get your information about not performing CPR? The general consensus is to do CPR. Here's a short article. Again, this correction is unneeded. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/25597505/.
Bishop73
I think the original points that CPR is over depicted in films and TV, and that patients are debilitated after defibrillation is valid. You can make a better case by avoiding terms like always and never, because there is always an exception, and never and end to the comments. By the way, the article you cite is a database review of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, not the hospital settings you describe, so now a correction IS needed.