Corrected entry: Officer Murdoch may have actually doomed the ship. By ordering the engines reversed he interrupted the flow of water over the rudder, making the huge ship even slower to respond and harder to steer.
Corrected entry: When Murdoch gives the order 'hard to starboard' the helmsman turns the wheel to port, consequently, the ship moves to the left and thus gets hit on the starboard side. The issue ISN'T that the wheel is spun to port instead of starboard (that's not a mistake - check the corrections section). The mistake is that the ship should NOT have turned in the direction the wheel was spun - it should have turned to starboard, in accordance with the order. (01:34:55)
Correction: In every book, movie, documentary made about the Titanic that has and explains in detail the impact, the order has been hard starboard, with the wheel turned to the port, and the ship hitting the berg on the starboard side. The orders given in the movie are all correct. The evidence supporting this are transcripts of the inquiries into the sinking.
Those orders ARE historically accurate, but only after the ship hits. The first order is port, then hard starboard to swing the stern around. The order comes too soon in the movie.
Corrected entry: In the scene where Cal is shooting at Jack and Rose, he is using a 1911A1 colt .45, which some suggest would not have been available at the time. But even if it were, the problem is that that make and model only fires 7 rounds, which is to say 6 in the magazine and 1 in the chamber. Cal fires 8 rounds, but there is no indication that he stopped to reload. Check out Jane's weapons recognition guide for more details.
Correction: I own a 1911A1, and my clips all hold seven. One in the chamber makes eight.
Corrected entry: The actors who plays Sven and his friends are not Swedish - their accent is too thick - but the guy who says "Talar fröken svenska?" probably is.
Correction: The big, blonde guy at the poker-table who fakes to hit Jack, is Norwegian.
Corrected entry: Two quotes from the movie were taken from previous Titanic films. When Molly Brown makes the joke: "Why do they always insist of a healthy dinner like a damn Cavalry charge?" it was said in 1953, in the first Titanic. And when the band is questioning why they are playing while no one is listening, the same question was asked by the band in A Night to Remember in 1958.
Correction: The quote's wrong, Molly says "Why do they always insist on announcing dinner like a damn cavalry charge?"
Corrected entry: Leo opens his mouth as he sinks into the water after Rose lets go of his hand after the ship sank. He's already meant to be dead by that stage. (02:50:10)
Correction: His mouth doesn't actually open. His lips part slightly. It really appears that it was caused by minor water pressure against his mouth as he sank.
Corrected entry: According to the film, officer Murdoch murdered a passenger and then committed suicide, a point in the film that made his home town very angry and the film company donated £5000 to a charity, but Cameron has never appologized. According to eye witness accounts, he gave his lifejacket to a passenger and went down with the ship. (02:21:45)
Correction: This is a subject of historical controversy. There were witness accounts that an officer shot a passenger then shot himself. According to various historical analyses, it could have been any one of up to a half dozen officers. Murdoch is among them. Walter Lord, author of A Night to Remember, hints strongly that it was Murdoch (for what it's worth). As historians, no one can definitively say it was or was not Murdoch. As a filmmaker, however, Cameron had a right to speculate that it was Murdoch. This is artistic license, not a factual error.
Corrected entry: There's a scene where a woman from steerage takes her 2 kids to their room as the boat is sinking and tells them a happily-ever-after story which we assume means they're giving up hope of escaping and planning to go down with the boat. Also, in the same sequence, an old couple clutches each others' hands as water wells up next to their bed. Later, after we've all cried over the death of the woman and 2 kids, they are in a large scene in the background hopping on a lifeboat.
Correction: After the woman tells the bedtime story to her kids there is no more lifeboat left where one could hop in. We tried our best to spot them in any of the mass scenes but failed. A timecode or any other specification would help.
Corrected entry: There is a shot looking down at the Titanic leaving the harbor, if you look closely, people on one side of the ship are on the other side as well.
Correction: When the Titanic leaves the harbor the (surprisingly few) people one can see in the front shot are distributed randomly. What is symmetrical are some pieces of equipment along the railing.
Corrected entry: When Jack and Rose are talking in the gym, with their backs to the windows, you can see the etched markings in the corner of various panes, showing that they are in fact modern safety glass. (01:15:25)
Correction: If you look at any actual photo of the real Titanic's gym windows you can see that the glass is correct.
Corrected entry: Near the end when they are tying the lifeboats together there is a man shining a torch on all the survivors. For a second you can see a woman in a modern red dress.
Correction: There's one women wearing a red coat, but there's nothing modern about it.
Corrected entry: If you look real closely at the brass buttons on the captain's jacket, you can see that they were apparently made in 1922 - ten years after the ship sank.
Correction: The closest you come to check the buttons on the captain's jacket is when he stirs his cup of tea shortly before the crash. It's not possible to make out any pattern on the buttons, let alone to notice that they were made in 1922.
Corrected entry: At the end when Jack sinks you can tell the body looks nothing like him.
Correction: The farther down he sinks the more his face and body look distorted due to refraction by the choppy surface, but it's still him.
Corrected entry: At the end of the movie when Rose releases Jack in the water, she hears the lifeboat with the crew coming back for survivors. She lifts her head up and sees the boat going in the opposite direction of her. She then jumps off the piece of wood and goes to her left to get the whistle. When she blows the whistle she once again looks straight up ahead and sees the boat. How could the boat have gone all the way around to her new position in a matter of a few seconds?
Corrected entry: After Rose has helped Jack to get loose from where he is handcuffed, as he is jumping over a bench one minute he has the handcuffs on, the next shot they're gone. Then they're back.
Correction: After they break the gate they jump over the bench: Fabrizio first, without handcuffs of course, and Jack next, with handcuffs.
Corrected entry: When Cal is chasing Jack and Rose by the clock, you can see he is holding Lovejoy's gun in his left hand. However, after he slipped over, you can see him picking himself up, the gun now on his right hand side. Wouldn't the gun have landed on his left?
Correction: When Cal slips the gun falls visibly to the right. That's why he picks it up with his right hand and later switches it to his left.
Corrected entry: Why oh why is one of the people getting on the life boats wearing a digital watch? Surely they weren't around in 1912?
Correction: When? Where? Man or woman? Hopping on or already sitting in a boat? We couldn't spot anybody wearing a watch, let alone a digital one.
Corrected entry: When the water crashes through the dome, although this is a very impressive effect, look at the hole the water comes through. You can see the peak of the set and a bit of the huge bucket used to tip the water.
Correction: We tried very hard to see the bucket but failed.
Corrected entry: When the grand staircase area is sinking, a close-up reveals the clock being covered with water. Seconds later a long shot shows John Jacob Astor hanging on to a pillar and the clock is visible (behind him) with a foot of water still to go before water comes crashing through the dome.
Correction: It's actually the other way round: The close-up with the submerged clock comes after the shot of J.J.Astor. Therefore, the water is rising as it should be.
Corrected entry: After Tommy is shot and Fabrizio puts on his life jacket and ends up in the water, water from a porthole is sucking people into the ship, Fabrizio is sucked near the porthole. He stops himself by placing one hand on the side of the window, and one on the top of the window. Suddenly it's a stuntman, with heavy black gloves and long sleeves. Fabrizio saves himself, and it's his arm and hand once more.
Correction: It's the bare-handed Fabrizio in all three shots. I wonder how someone saw gloves here.
Correction: With hindsight, no amount of steering or speed reduction was going to save the Titanic. Murdoch's best action would have been to Ram the iceberg head on,it would have caused many deaths but the ship would have stayed afloat. Murdoch's action's were not a contributory factor to the tragedy.