Corrected entry: The whole scene with the rat and the breathing fluid could never have happened because rats can't vomit, so the poor thing would have died.
Corrected entry: When the alien city (ARK) is rising to the surface, the deep core ship is right next to it, but when the city is above the water the oil rig (deep core ship) is on top of it near the center which is impossible. (Special Edition Version.) (02:39:05 - 02:41:05)
Corrected entry: When Bud gives Lindsay CPR, every time he gives her a breath, her cheeks puff out. When administering CPR, this is not supposed to happen. The air is supposed to go into the lungs, and the chest will rise and fall. This is how the rescuer knows that he or she is giving breaths correctly. If air is going only into the cheeks, the rescuer must reposition the victim's head and try again. (02:03:51)
Correction: This isn't really a factual error so much as just a special effects thing. Doing correct CPR on a breathing person could seriously injure them. Its just like any time in a movie someone gives chest compressions and barely moves the patients chest. Real CPR is brutal.
Corrected entry: The scene in which Lindsay drowns and must be revived using CPR and the defibrillator: the use of the defibrillator is entirely inaccurate. First of all, the body of the subject must be dry. Because an electric current always runs the path of least resistance, the use of a defibrillator on a body covered in water would only result in the current running over the outside of the body, bypassing its intended target, the heart. Secondly, with water covering the body, the floor, and several of the other crew members, there would be a high risk of electrocution for the members of the crew. Finally, even though One Night repeatedly says clear before using the defibrillator, Bud is obviously straddling Lindsay's body and never moves away. He would have been electrocuted each time the defibrillator was used. (02:01:55)
Correction: There is have been no issues found with using a defibrillator in a water filled environment. Danger to the person holding the paddles is minimal, and there is even less risk to the people around the victim. Electricity will only flow between the paddles using the path of least resistance. It will not seek a ground unless that ground provides a good path back to the other paddle. And in that case, there is no reason for a person to be a better circuit back to the other paddle, unless they're touching the victim.
Correction: Also, Lindsey's EKG was flat line, you do not shock flat line. Only pulseless v-tach of v-fib are shocked. A-fib and v-tach are cardioverted.
Corrected entry: In the scene where Bud is about to sneak up on Coffey, it cuts to a part where one of the Seals is unloading a magazine that was in the assault rifle. Later, when Coffey jumps into Flatbed, Hippy tries to fire at Coffey with the assault rifle, but the safety is on. Then Catfish takes the gun and shoots bullets at Coffey. Didn't they unload the bullets from the magazine?
Correction: The magazine the Seal emptied was from Coffey's pistol, which is why when he tried to shoot Bud nothing happened. The Seal was simply showing them he'd disarmed Coffey.
Corrected entry: Several times in the film it is mentioned that the rig is on the ocean floor some seventeen hundred feet below the surface. Yet Lindsy swims without any protection from the wrecked submersible to the rig, and Bud and others swim from one module to another. The absolute maximum depth the unprotected human body can stand is less than six hundred feet, and that is in the case of superfit divers who spend years training for their record dives (and some die trying). At seventeen hundred feet the water pressure would crush an unprotected human being like a schnitzel.
Correction: As a deep sea SAT diver I have worked on many rigs as in the film. The air pressure in the rig is the same as the water pressure. That's why the sea doesnt pour in through the moon pool. You can swim from the rig without a problem, I have done it many times with just a wet suit to stop the cold killing me. You cant swim to or from the surface though as you would change pressure to fast and your lungs would pop.
Correction: For a moon pool to work, the pressure inside of the underwater habitat the pressure inside would have to be equal to the water pressure outside. 1700' would be 518 meters underwater, with a air pressure of nearly 53 times that of the surface. FYI The deepest scuba dive to date was 332.35 m. With scuba divers, you start to be at risk of oxygen toxicity at 6-7 atmospheres and symptoms increasing the longer the exposure. So the grew of the underwater habitat would have all died from oxygen toxicity pretty quickly, let alone the effect of nitrogen at 53 atmospheres on the body.
Corrected entry: There are no fish in the entire movie except the scene in the sub with the crabs on the dead guy. Phytoplankton are attracted to artificial lights which means a whole food chain develops around submarine structures like the Deepcore rig - just look at any film of the shoals of fish feeding around the legs of an oil rig. You'd think there would be fish in the ocean at least every now and then, but we don't see a single one.
Correction: Why? They're in a noisy, huge, lit up oil rig. That would drive most, if not all fish away from the immediate area.
Plankton are attracted to artificial submarine lights which establishes a thriving food chain around submarine structure like the Deepcore rig, and fish are not scared away by noise. Just look at the films of the shoals of fish feeding around the underwater structures associated with oil rigs.
Corrected entry: During the scene after the water tentacle is discovered, the whole crew has a meeting. At this time, Coffee is cutting his right arm under the table. In the following scenes, his arm shows no signs of any cuts.
Correction: The part where they are all together, it's shown that he's cutting his LEFT forearm. These cuts can be seen clearly later on, for example, in the scene where he says "It went straight for the warhead, and they think it's cute," and during the fight at the pool with Bud.
Corrected entry: Just before Bud descends to disarm the warhead Lindsey asks him why it's he who has to go. His response is, "if not me, then who?" The answer's obvious: the Navy SEAL right next to him who's been thoroughly trained in deep-sea diving with the special breathing liquid and who would certainly know more about disarming nuclear warheads than a commercial diver.
Correction: As Bud says later - he 'always knew it was a one way trip'. It's a suicide mission and the Navy Seal, trained in the use of the liquid breathing gear, knows that too. So when Bud says 'If not me, then who?' he is asking who is willing to die in his place (though he doesn't want Lindsey to know that) and nobody is.
Also I believe that the seal injured his leg.
Corrected entry: At the end of the film the NTI's entire ship ascends from the abyss to the surface. What happened to the rest of the sea floor that Bud, Lindsay, and Coffey had to race over during their battle? All of that seems to disappear when the mothership comes up.
Correction: Maybe I didn't understand what you are describing as an error. Only the ship ascends, the sea floor stays, well, on the sea floor. Since the ship is huge and has been there for a while, it is likely that a large part of the ship was covered by silt, making it appear to be sea floor.
Corrected entry: During the scene where Bud is falling into the abyss to disarm the warhead, Hippy states that he's 12,000 ft below. Just a few seconds later, Catfish says he's now at 17,000 ft. There is no time in between the 12,000 and 17000 ft that makes you think it's been more than a few seconds of him falling. It's not possible for him to fall 5,000 ft in just a few seconds. If it were, then it would have taken Bud less than a minute to get to the warhead. Later, Hippy says that it took Bud 30 minutes to get down there. So it doesn't add up.
Correction: The sequence is obviously not in real time. Just because the film doesn't make it obvious where the breaks are, it doesn't mean that they aren't there. It's sloppy editing, sure, but that doesn't make it a mistake.
Corrected entry: When Ed Harris and Mary Elisabeth Mastrantonio (MEM) are in the wrecked utility sub deciding who will drown and who will use the dive gear to swim back, they decide it will be MEM. Why do they then sit in the sub and wait for her to drown? Why not have her hold her breath and swim until she drowns and then she won't be dead as long and would not be as hard to revive her?
Correction: If they should swim out together, she or he would drown 'en route' therefore there would be a great deal of struggling, which would waste valuable swimming time, at least she had the chance to hyperventilate from panic, supercharging her system with oxygen. At the depth they are already at, the extremely low temperature inside her lungs would help to slow down to almost hybernation state her blood decomposition, conserving the exsisting oxygen in her heart and brain, (drowning does not mean immediate brain death) therefore the technique they have decided is quite probably the most economical (in theory) in view of the circumstances. However, without doubt, she would certainly suffer from a big dose of hypothermia and be out of action for the rest of the movie, ignoring the probability of brain damage or consequential 'cold-shock' death.
Corrected entry: Ed Harris had such a miserable time making the film that after it's release, he disowned the picture and refuses to talk about it.
Correction: Nonsense. He's done publicity for the film, including being interviewed for the DVD documentary. He has publicly stated there are things that happened during filming that many of the crew didn't want to talk about, but he's never "disowned" the film.
Corrected entry: Early in the movie, when they're going to search the sub, Jammer asks how big the drop-off is and Catfish replies by saying it's "2.5 miles [13,200 ft] straight down". When Bud went over the drop-off to disarm the bomb, he went well past 13,200 ft.
Correction: 2.5 miles must be as far as anyone's measured reliably. We saw the pressure destroy Little Geek when Bud is descending showing that a submersible can only go so far. Catfish is just giving him the best answer they currently have.
Corrected entry: When they are filling Bud's suit with the pink liquid and he panics, one of the seals says "we all breathed liquid for 9 months, his body will remember" or something like that. But this is incorrect. In the womb our lungs may well be filled with amniotic fluid but we don't use them to breathe at all, all the oxygen comes from the mothers bloodstream via the umbilical cord.
Correction: He's trying to reassure Bud that it's going to be alright - if he has to stretch the truth to do that, that's what has to be done. Bud would hardly appreciate it if Monk got technical at this point. Anyway, although not for 9 months, we do technically "breathe" in the womb. During the last few weeks before delivery, the fetus begins moving amniotic fluid in and out of its lungs. This matures the lungs and strengthens them for use once born. It also coats them with a surfactant that will prevent lung collapse when the newborn takes it's first breath. That is way babies are sometimes smacked or suctioned to remove the remaining amniotic fluid from their lungs (that was not expelled during delivery - especially in Cesarean section deliveries).
Corrected entry: After the nuke is disarmed, Lindsey pleads with Virgil to drop his weights and ascend back to the rig. Not possible - at extreme depths the pressure is so intense that even oxygen bubbles will not rise to the surface, being compacted to a density as great or greater than the surrounding water (water cannot be compressed to a higher density, no matter how much pressure is exerted upon it). Dropping his weights would have no effect. (02:22:30)
Correction: Water (and liquids in general) do compress under pressure, albeit not to the same extent as a gas. The Bulk Modulus of water predicts that at a depth of 36000 feet (approximately the maximum depth of Earth's oceans), water will be compressed to a density of approximately 5% more than water at sea level. Furthermore, buoyancy is not limited to that of gas bubbles, many deep sea vehicles use a liquid ballast (such as gasoline) for positive buoyance. Although a liquid ballast subjected to great depths would be slightly compressed, the surrounding sea water would be similarly compressed, and if the ballast was positively buoyant near the surface, then it would be positively buoyant at extreme depths as well.
Corrected entry: When Coffey steals the sub to take the nuclear warhead down the trench the big bearded worker fires the Seal's submachine gun at the sub. When he does he holds the gun by the extended barrel that Coffey screwed onto it earlier. This extension a suppressor and has holes drilled all along the length of it. The holes allow gas to escape the barrel. That gas is extremely hot and would have burned the worker, but he doesn't even flinch.
Correction: The barrel extension is simply that - an extended barrel with a ventilated shield to allow the firer to use a two-handed grip on the weapon as an automatic weapon that small has vicious recoil, the first one or two rounds would be on target but all the others would decorate the ceiling. It is true that a suppressed weapon has holes drilled into the barrel but they are very small and are used to allow the combustion gases to expand into a CLOSED cylinder thus reducing the noise of the shot.
Corrected entry: When Ed Harris has finished getting used to the underwater breathing fluid. He gives a thumbs up to indicate he's OK. As a diver this sign always means "surface". OK is a circle of the thumb and index finger.
Correction: Since he isn't submerged this is not an issue, he is giving the thumbs up knowing no-one would misunderstand his gesture as wanting to go to the surface.
Corrected entry: In the final scene how does the rig end up on top of the alien craft when it was on the ledge to its side?
Correction: It was dislodged from the ledge while the craft was surfacing.
Corrected entry: When Lindsey and the Seals first descend to the rig, the Seals get off of the top of the submersible and walk across the sea floor to the rig. There is sediment on the surface they're walking on (as evidenced by the marks the nuke sub left) yet none of it is stirred up. Deep sea sediment is very very fine (small clay particles) and walking across it would create large clouds of sediment.
Correction: This is akin to those postings about not getting the gravity of the moon or Mars right. Yes, there should have been big clouds of sediment. If James Cameron was making a documentary, there would have been. However, filming though a cloud of swirling mud would have been impossible. This is a concession to film making procedure, not a mistake.
Correction: Vomiting is the forceful ejection of stomach contents. It has nothing to do with ejecting substances from the lungs. That would be coughing, which rats *can* do.
JC Fernandez
Furthermore, that scene was NOT simulated. That was an actual rat breathing the actual oxygenated fluorocarbon fluid. It wasn't sci-fi; the concept exists, even if it hasn't seen much wide-scale testing on humans.