Corrected entry: In the scene in the library where everyone is looking for a place to start a fire a worker at the library takes everyone to a fireplace. She says that the fireplace has not been used in 100 years. If the fireplace has not been used in 100 years surely it would have needed to be swept out prior to use or else all the smoke and CO would not have vented out the chimney. Instead it would have filled the room and killed everyone there.
Corrected entry: The policemen breaks the window of the taxi to help the French woman and her son, but when Laura returns to take the purse, the window is intact.
Correction: The policeman actually broke the windshield. Laura reaches in through the rear window.
Corrected entry: At the end, when Jack Hall finds his son in the library, he opens a door to the room where all of them were staying. The door is completely frozen. Opening the door by it's handle should have caused the handle to break, if not shatter, at that temperature. It would not have just opened as easily as it did.
Correction: Its only frost all over the walls and door handle. The freezing point of a metal door handle is much lower than the temperature depicted in the movie. The door handle would have to be immersed in liquid nitrogen in order to fracture and break apart like you say it should.
Corrected entry: When New York is being frozen, the super-cooled air is just coming down from the atmosphere. But if the storms have been around for days, New York would have been frozen the second the eye arrived.
Correction: New York does freeze as soon as the eye hits, but it doesn't freeze all at once because the eye is traveling over the city, not just suddenly on top of the whole city.
Corrected entry: When Jack's son Sam enters the tanker and finds he cannot get into the medical room, he climbs outside the tanker and then smashes the glass of the medical room with an axe. The glass smashes but is jagged around the edges with some glass left in the frame. In the next shot we see Sam climb through the window, but the shape of the glass left in the frame has changed completely and disappeared, leaving no jagged edges on which he could cut himself. We don't see Sam remove it, so where did the glass go?
Correction: He probably removed it between camera shots. The tanker itself moved from in front of the library to between two buildings in an angle change, so why can't the glass be removed between shots?
Corrected entry: In the scene where there are all the tornadoes in Los Angeles, right after the reporter is talking about the Hollywood sign being ruined, there is a shot of the Capitol Records building and one next to it, with a tornado practically already tearing into the buildings. In the next shot there are no tornadoes that close to either building, the closest one is down a street to the right. In the next shot of the Capitol records building, the tornado is ripping through it again.
Correction: It just appears that way because of tricky camera angles. Notice the sign on top of one building showing that it's a hotel. In the next camera angle, the sign is still there, just bent over. Plus, notice where the words "Capitol Records" are placed on the sign in one shot relative to the next shot.
Corrected entry: The giant tanker which comes up 5th Avenue could not have made it that far. There is no way for the ship to enter Manhattan and get to an avenue without making some sort of turn, or crashing into a building for that matter. And it's keel was so close to the road so it didn't float over buildings. The wave couldn't have carried it in either since the wave wasn't even higher than the Statue of Liberty.
Correction: The water was half frozen while the ship was floating in. That would have slowed down the ship so it would not have crashed into the buildings and directed it in different directions through the city. And making turns, it might of scraped and destroyed sides of buildings which we did not see.
Corrected entry: In the scene where the Porsche is crushed, the driver is seen starting the car with his right hand. As far as I know, Porsches all have their ignition switches on the left-hand side.
Correction: No they don't, some older Porsches have it on the right.
Corrected entry: In the shot where we see the frozen Statue of Liberty, horizontal ice picks are visible all over the statue. Ice picks don't form horizontally as any wind strong enough to shape water in that manner would simply blow it away.
Correction: This sort of ice formation is called rime ice. It can be formed in the lightest of winds as long as it's cold. An ice crystal forms on the surface of the object creating a super-cooled surface for a second. Moisture from the air forms ice on that. Wind blows more moisture onto the tip, subsequently freezing. These formations can grow to many feet in length. Try http://www.mountwashington.com/pictures/rime.html.
Corrected entry: A first aid station on a ship, like the one Sam was trying to open, should not be locked. First aid stations are designed to be as accessible as possible.
Correction: This is not a first aid station, it's an infirmary, which contains much more than what's needed to provide first aid. You wouldn't want the whole crew of the ship to have access to powerful, dangerous and possibly lethal material (if not used properly).
Corrected entry: At the beginning of the film, when Jack almost falls in the crack, he saves himself with the pick. Although he saved himself, the pick isn't strong enough to support Jack's weight. And even if it could, the pick would fall, since the ice was falling to pieces. Also, you can see that one of Jack's friends slightly hits the pick when pushing him up. Also, you can see that the pick's metal end is carved perfectly to cut the ice, when supporting Jack's weight.
Correction: It's an ice axe. It's designed for climbing ice. I've been ice climbing for years on these things, they can hold your weight. Even rotten, shattered ice can be climbed if you know what you're doing.
Corrected entry: In the scene where helicopters approach LA, (when the city is hit by the tornadoes) one can see a string of pearls of rear lights of cars on their way into the city, whereas just a few cars leave the city.
Correction: In the movie it states that the tornadoes developed very suddenly in the city. The normal, horrendous, L.A. rush hour traffic is stuck on the road into town.
Corrected entry: In the scene at the end of the movie, after the storm has passed, and we are viewing the world from space you can see the coastline of America, surely if the coastline had been consumed by the rising oceans and then frozen it would not be visible.
Correction: Not very much of the coastline would have been consumed, seeing as how the ocean only rose by about 50 feet at the most.
Corrected entry: How could the wolves survive after the tidal wave? They appear in the snow as if they were in a high place in that moment.
Correction: There is no way of telling where the wolves were during the flood. They were shown to have escaped from the zoo but we are not told where this is. They may have been scavenging on the top of the Empire State building for all we know.
Corrected entry: The International Space Station is shown orbiting form east to west. It actually goes in the other direction.
Correction: The way the camera pans in, it gives the impression that it is travelling from east to west even though when all the scenes show them looking from inside the station the motion indicates it is correctly travelling west to east.
Corrected entry: In the scene where the tornadoes are hitting Los Angeles, the helicopters could not have possibly flown by the tornadoes because the wind from the tornadoes would have either vacuumed the helicopters in or pushed them away.
Correction: Not necessarily. Several times I have seen video taken from helicopters shooting tornadoes from the air, go to weather.com to see this. From what the movie shows the helicopters have adequate distance to not get knocked down.
Corrected entry: Throughout the movie, there is constant emphasis on how much snow had fallen (15 feet in Europe, the library is nearly buried, etc.). Yet, at the end of the movie, the military rescue helicopter (which must weigh tons) is able to land on top of NY Harbor without any difficulty.
Correction: Due to the cold temperatures the snow would be hard and tightly packed, not the loose powder that things sink in. The snow was stable enough to handle a soft balanced landing.
Corrected entry: Isn't it unusual that radio stations were still up and running even after the disasters?
Correction: No, radio stations can have their own power generators and may be on high ground to increase transmission range but this would also protect them from the flooding. Where I live we had a massive flood and the radio station moved it's broadcasts from downtown to the mountain where the transmitter is located.
Corrected entry: The whole of New York was covered in several feet of snow but in the scene where they walked over the building with the glass roof and it cracked, only about two inches of snow had fallen on the roof.
Correction: This is entirely possible, considering that there was a blizzard - meaning high winds as well as snow. Likely, as it was an exposed surface, much of the snow would have blown right off of it, resulting in there being only a couple of inches covering it.
Corrected entry: When New York City is in the eye of the storm, we see the Empire State Building freezing from the top down. However, when the characters are running back to the fire place in the library, the frost is following them lengthways through the corridors.
Correction: It's all down to airflow - the cold is coming from the upper atmosphere, so the Empire State Building would freeze from the top down. The interior of the library, however, would freeze in the manner depicted as the cold air flowed (horizontally) down the corridors, away from the windows and doors.
Correction: The fact that we see snow fall out when he opens the fireplace suggests the chimney is clear. Thus smoke will easily escape up and out of the chimney.
XIII