Factual error: When Sandra Bullock and George Clooney manage to get to the ISS, she gets entangled with some ropes and manages to grab Clooney's safety rope. Clooney's speed should be very close to Bullocks' and the ISS', hence. The parachute ropes should be able to withhold the forces of deceleration (the mass of two people is very small, compared to Soyus or ISS), so no more pulling or having to sacrifice himself... This is due to the fact that there's no drag in space to constantly change Clooney's velocity (revert to Newton's First Law).
t-6
28th Aug 2014
Gravity (2013)
Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.
Suggested correction: The parachute ropes are of course strong enough to hold the relatively low kinetic energy of the drifting astronauts, but that is not the reason why Clooney detaches. The rope is not attached firmly to Bullocks' leg. There are some loops loosely wrapped around her leg, and while both astronauts are still drifting away from the ISS (seen in a shot a few seconds earlier), those loops slip away from the foot one by one. Before the last loop slips away from the foot, untethering and condemning both astronauts, Clooney detaches himself to lessen the kinetec energy that pulls on the rope by reducing the total mass of the "system of two astronauts", so that there is a better chance that the last loop will remain attached to Bullock.
Once Clooney had stop moving all that would have been need was a slight pull from Bullock to pull him towards her. The momentum was lost when he stopped moving. So no need to cut himself loose.
It all happens in free fall. As soon as the cord withstood inertia resulting from George's body mass pulling on it, George would bounce back towards Sandra. The entire scene was completely unrealistic.
Clooney stopped moving in relation to Bullock. But both were still moving in relation to the ISS (look at the scene again; there is a wide shot that establishes this), with both their masses pulling on the parachute cords, straining the tenuous connection of the cords looped around Bullock's foot. To lessen the strain, Clooney detaches itself from the two-astronaut-system, reducing the mass and kinetic energy pulling on the cords.
Clooney and Bullock - when they were connected to each other - never actually stopped moving in relation to the ISS.
Actually parachute cords can withstand hundreds of pounds of force, making them very difficult to snap.
The danger wasn't the ropes snapping, the danger was that they would slip off her foot, and they would both be lost to space.
17th Feb 2013
The Prestige (2006)
Corrected entry: Olivia brings Angier the notebook of Borden and Angier realizes, that it is encoded. "Even with the keyword it would take months to decode it." Furthermore, he admits to Allie in the Colorado Springs restaurant that the cypher changes with each day and is "time consuming to translate". However, after Angier received the keyword ("TESLA"), he can be seen several times reading the notebook casually as if he already decoded the whole book. Nevertheless he reacts surprised as if he has never seen the entries when he should have, namely WHILE DECODING the book. Particularly, in the last entry, Borden directly addresses Angier, telling him directly that he lured him to America on a wild goose chase. The moment Angier would have deciphered this, he would have the reaction he shows and not only after setting all the entries in a context whatsoever. The book he reads is actually the original notebook from Borden, not the one he uses to transcribe the translation, which is smaller. (00:33:05 - 01:22:45)
Correction: One was a notebook and one was a diary. Two separate "books"? Or at least different sections entirely. One wouldn't read all the the diary entries if they were desperately obsessed with reading the trick formula first. That would usually to an average man be the second place to look for information. Indeed there was probably two diaries or books. One that was "stolen" by Olivia and then a new one with current entries in it.
There is no evidence to support that Angier received two notebooks from Borden. We can only see the one book that Olivia brought him. Enrypting all the sections about magic tricks, but leaving at least the section in clear text where Angier is directly taunted, would have immediately crashed Borden's plan to send Angier half around the world, if Angier would have only once flipped through the pages for other clues that might help him decipher the book (like he did the moment he got the book from Olivia). Borden's whole plan was to send Angier to Colorado, but Angier only embarked on that journey after Borden told him the secret "Tesla" after Angier exhausted all his available options. It would also be uncharacteriscally arrogant for the Borden's who meticulously planned literally their whole life and not taking risks.
2nd Dec 2014
Interstellar (2014)
Corrected entry: In the docking scene where Coop is trying to dock the service module to the partly damaged Endurance, the Endurance is spinning around its center axis. As the ship was damaged around the perimeter it would spin around its new center of mass, that would be off axis. The docking bay itself would revolve around this new axis, making alignment much harder.
Correction: It's not explained in the movie itself, but any kind of craft that has to take distribution of weight into account (e.g. Larger ships, airplanes), has some form of (semi-) automatic mechanism to rebalance itself, for example by pumping fuel into another section. A spacecraft that is designed to revolve around itself and features detachable cargo modules etc., sure as hell will have some form of automatic weight redistribution as well, so as not to off-center the whole craft when someone goes to the toilet 90° away.
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