Corrected entry: Isn't it unusual that when Josh and Beck used the wire to generate electricity via the heat of the core, they didn't need any protection against that 9,000-degree wall? Even being close to such temperatures can severely burn a person.
Corrected entry: The peach that Josh charbroiled is actually an apple. You can tell by the skin.
Correction: If it is an apple, then why does it have a pit?
The pit is not visible after it is boiled/burned and dropped in water. At some point, the fruit changed. There was plenty of time for this to have occurred, so I don't think this is an error. He may have simply wanted a round fruit to burn for the demonstration rather than the one he cut in half.
Corrected entry: When the electrical storms developed over Rome, you see the Colosseum becoming electrically charged. The build-up of electricity eventually causes the Colosseum to explode. This is wrong because the Colosseum is made out of brick and rock and these materials do not retain static electricity. When was the last time you got an electrical shock from touching stone? Even though there are iron rods used in the building, brick, mortar or stone are non-conductive materials. Therefore, they are insulators against electrical discharges and static electricity. Even if the iron rods did somehow attract the static electricity, they would have acted like huge lighting rods and grounded any electrical buildup.
Correction: When the Colosseum was built, it was coated with metal. Though most of the metal is now gone there still is some metal coating left.
Corrected entry: When the virgil is ready to go into the earth's crust, they choose the Marianas Trench because they think that the crust is thinner there. That is false. The Marianas Trench is an area where one plate is subducting beneath another, and the subducting plate can reach over 500 miles into the mantle. They should have used a mid-ocean ridge, which can be only about 5-10 miles thick.
Correction: The fact that the Trench is a subduction zone is good. They would be able to follow the convection of the mantle downward. A mid-ocean ridge would have been pushing up against them, delaying them.
Corrected entry: In the scene where they are about to give up the search for Virgil but hear the whales, Rat says to follow the whales. However, they are following the wrong whales. The "singing" we hear is that of the humpback whale, but the searchers follow a pod of orcas (killer whales). Budget only had room to rent whales from marine animal facilities, the most readily available of such being the killer whale.
Correction: This is a mistake, but it wasn't because they couldn't afford humpback whales. The whales were computer generated (listen to the commentary).
Corrected entry: Virgil has 6 compartments; the locomotive, navigation, living quarters, engineering, the bombs and weapons control. The last compartment is breached, ejected and crushed with Serge in it, leaving 5. There are 5 nuclear bombs dropped off in separate compartments after the destruction of weapons control, yet they still have the locomotive to get out of the core. That makes 7. (00:41:30)
Correction: Virgil does have 7 compartments. The 6 compartments referred to earlier did not include the locomotive part of the ship.
Corrected entry: When the pigeons are flying around Trafalgar Square, there is a close-up of a bus number plate. This is not a British number plate, as it should be.
Correction: The Red 'Routemaster' bus, pictured in the Trafalgar Square scene predates the current method of UK number plates - these buses were introduced in the 1950's. This is, in fact, a correct number plate for such a bus.
Corrected entry: When the last nuke is set and ejected in its compartment, the locomotive had no power, therefore the locomotive and the navigation compartment would have been sitting almost side by side at the time of the 5th nuke's detonation. Yet they have time to rewire Virgil and start the impellers before the blast wave from the final bomb hits them.
Correction: The locomotive wouldn't just come to a dead stop, it would still have a great deal of momentum. Add that to the fact that there's at least (probably more than) 8 minutes between the separation and detonation, and Virgil could probably have put enough distance between it and the blast.
Corrected entry: Even if some metal was invented to make the ship, which could withstand 9000 degrees, how did the metal get welded together in the first place?
Correction: Well, it is possible to create very high temperatures for a very short time.
Corrected entry: When the French guy is being crushed in the damaged compartment of the ship he is having a conversation with the Dr. on the screen. You can see debris closing in around him, particularly from the front. Why is this happening if the compartment is being crushed from the back, as we can see from external shots?
Correction: It's possible that the camera could have been facing the back of the ship. If that was true, than Sairs actually could have been crushed by the front, as long as he was facing where the actually crushing was occurring. Therefore, it's certainly possible that Sairs was crushed from the front rather than the back.
Corrected entry: What the hell is up with the hull creating power? The hull changes heat into "energy"? Ya right. Welding a wire to the hull (which is full of "energy") results in an electrical current in the wire? It sure is convenient that the magical heat/energy/electricity transformation results in an alternating current to power the equipment.
Correction: A thermocouple is a wire used to generate electricity from heat. The wire is heated, which excites the atoms in the wire and causes the electrons in the atomic matrix to flow as an electrical current. An inverter to convert direct current to alternating current is available at any decent hardware store. Whether or not *enough* electricity can be generated this way is a matter for the suspension of disbelief (as the whole movie would be).
Correction: Yes, but the shell was specifically designed not to conduct heat to the inside of the ship.
Corrected entry: In the scene near the end where we see the ships looking for the Virgil in the ocean, the ships are close together in a nice, tight, circular formation. If they were on a search mission, shouldn't they have been spread out more?
Correction: It is known that the Virgil is near or around that spot were they are searching because of the whales swimming around the Virgil.
Corrected entry: There should have been a significantly reduced force of gravity experienced in the ship when it approached the core because there would have been a large mass of the earth above the ship as well as below the ship, and both sides would be exerting gravitational pulls.
Correction: We can safely assume Braz significantly modified his ship to counter gravitational pulls as you are suggesting.
Corrected entry: When they are telling Rebeccah that she has exceptional navigational skills and is reassigned to the team they keep calling her "Major" but prior to that when the Army General is talking to her about how her crew crashed the space shuttle she has a silver leaf on her epaulette. Silver is Lieutenant Colonel, major would be a gold leaf. Major (Gold Leaf) is a step down from Lieutenant Colonel (Silver Leaf). Major is an 0-4, LTCol is an 0-5. Demoting an officer is a congressional act and it wouldn't have been done until the investigation was completed; she wouldn't have been demoted out of simple suspicion of the crash being her fault.
Correction: She was a Major the whole time, she was never wearing Lieutenant Colonel rank. I watched that scene as well as other scenes where she was in her dress uniform in slow-mo just to make sure her leaves were gold and not silver.
Corrected entry: When the FBI raid Rat's apartment, he tosses the CDs in the microwave, and the timer starts at around 6 minutes and right after that the FBI comes in. About 5 seconds later you hear the FBI yell "FREEZE" to Rat and the microwave stops. The microwave was set to over 6 minutes, not under 5 seconds.
Correction: This mistake is wrong. The display on the microwave was showing the time of day, not the length of time to microwave. This is made obvious by the fact that it was showing the time (6:42) well before Rat touches anything. He doesn't set the microwave. He puts the CDs in, then hits a preset.
All well and good except one thing...when Rat hits start, the timer starts counting down from 6:42 to 6:41. He must have had it at 6:42 remaining on the last thing he cooked and just hit start on it to resume cooking.
I agree, the 6:42 is not the time of day but the cook time and begins to count down. It's even possible with everything else he had ready to destroy his equipment he kept the microwave ready too. He starts the microwave after the Feds break down the door, and there's no way a group of Feds would take over 6 minutes to find Rat in that apartment.
Corrected entry: Their whole plan is basically to save the Earth by setting off a bomb at its core to get it spinning again. The problem is, an explosion has no torque. Think of it like strapping a firecracker to a basketball; the explosion goes out in every direction. If you want to get it spinning it would be smarter to strap a bottle rocket to it. Granted you're expected to suspend some disbelief, ok a lot for this movie, but you think with all that brain power, someone could have pointed that out.
Correction: They do not expect the explosion itself to restart the core. The plan is to create pressure waves that will disturb the liquid core, or "loosen it up" so that the natural forces that originally kept it spinning can get it moving again.
The plan was to get the inner core spinning, not the outer core. Zimsky was using a figure of speech when he said "a tiny nudge in any direction will force the core back into its normal flow" when he really meant a tiny nudge in any direction will force the inner core back into its normal rotation, and the program was just an analogy of producing pressure waves to get the inner core spinning again. When Zimsky said " the core of the earth has stopped spinning" he didn't mean the outer stopped spinning (the outer core is liquid, and doesn't really spin. It simply flows in different directions.), he meant the inner core stopped spinning.
Even if the plan was to create pressure waves to get the liquid core spinning again it would take thousands of nuclear bombs to do it.
Corrected entry: When the shuttle overflies the ball game the sonic boom arrives before the shuttle. Any object travling supersonic must pass the observer before the shock wave is heard.
Correction: That wasn't the sonic boom, you could hear the ship as it passed by. If you can hear it pass by, that means there is no sonic boom(a sonic boom is ONE sound that is heard for a very short period of time, like the sound that is trying to catch up to an object that is moving faster than sound itself.) The sound was probably the ship hitting an object, I have no idea what, but maybe like a billboard or something of the sort.
Corrected entry: The vessel is designed so that when any segment is damaged, it is jettisoned (along with any segment that is behind it) to save the rest of the ship. Knowing this, they put weapons control in the rear segment meaning that if any part was damaged, weapons control would be lost. That seems like a pretty major design flaw to be overlooked.
Correction: Dr Brazzleton explains Virgil has design flaws because he and his team only had three months to design, build and test it. Siting the weapons control system in a vulnerable spot is just another design flaw due to haste.
Corrected entry: In the earth's mantle the ship has to dodge 'diamonds the size of Cape Cod'. Not possible - diamonds are made of compressed carbon molecules. Laboratory experiments have proven that when superheated, diamonds will burn. The temperature inside the earth's mantle would be more than sufficient to reduce the diamonds to charcoal residue.
Correction: Actually, if they were diamonds present in the Earth's mantle, they would be not be burnt up. The temperatures are high enough in the mantle to burn crystallized carbon (aka. diamonds), however, the mantle lacks something crucial to any object burning. Oxygen. The diamonds are buried under miles and miles of rock separating them from the atmosphere. Thus, the lack of oxygen present in the surrounding environment would preclude any diamond burning.
Corrected entry: Don't you find it weird that one of the most secret projects in the United States, that no one should ever know about, is marked "Secret", and not "Top Secret"?
Correction: It would absolutely be labeled "Top Secret." Any newly developed or experimental weapons would be classified as Top Secret.
Correction: We don't know exactly what information is in that file. It could just be info on the 6 scientists plus some details he got about Destiny. It is unlikely that he'd be in possession of the original Destiny file.
Correction: The "Unobtanium", (the material the ship was made out of) was designed not to conduct any heat or energy. Remember the mouse in the box in the beginning of the movie?