FleetCommand

7th Feb 2023

Lightyear (2022)

Factual error: The film gets basic physics wrong while trying to depict relativity. Buzz Lightyear leaves T'Kani Prime for a trip around its sun, travels with near-light speed, and returns four years later. This could only have happened if T'Kani Prime's sun were at least two lightyears away! It gets more ridiculous. Buzz's last trip takes 26 years, even though he has traveled at faster-than-light speed. Overall, T'Kani Prime is experiencing either a mysterious time slow-down or a rapid orbit expansion.

FleetCommand

21st Apr 2022

Belle (2021)

Factual error: All Arabic texts in the film suffer from wrong directional rendering. Arabic is a right-to-left language. Its letters have different joined and disjoined forms. The film, however, has rendered Arabic texts from left to right in disjoined letters. These texts aren't semantically wrong, though. For example, deciphering the Arabic message at 0:40:45 point gives "أليس "التنين فنان؟ Translation: "Isn't the Dragon an artist?" The film has even adopted a good font for them.

FleetCommand

Factual error: The film consistently mistakes Absinthe ban with Thujone ban. The United States Food and Drug Administration (US FDA) lifted the ban on Absinthe in 2007, 13 years before the events of this film. Thujone is still banned, and Absinthe products must contain less than 10 mg/kg Thujone content.

FleetCommand

26th Oct 2020

Enola Holmes (2020)

Factual error: Linthorn meets his end when Enola knocks him off his feet. He hits his temple against a heavy and sharp furniture protrusion. Death must have been instantaneous, but instead, he lives to speak a few words. (01:39:18 - 01:39:55)

FleetCommand

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

Suggested correction: He suffered a serious injury, but didn't die right away. There's no indication death was instantaneous.

Bishop73

Every word of what you said is correct. And that's the mistake! Death must have been instantaneous... that is if there was any. A "head trauma", as medical doctors call it, does not have slow-timed effect. The effects range from dizziness to more severe ones, e.g. loss of consciousness, loss of memory, or death. All of them are instantaneous.

FleetCommand

26th Oct 2020

Enola Holmes (2020)

Factual error: Mrs. Harrison travels to a random, remote country mansion (kilometers away from any civilization), meets a woman who is not her pupil, forcibly takes her measurements, insults her, and slaps her! Nobody in the right mind would do that because they know they would be murdered, harmed, or handed over to the police for trespassing, assault, and battery. (Such outcomes are recurrently portrayed in Sherlock Holmes stories.) Schoolmistresses did use corporal punishment but only on their pupils and within the bounds of school, where they have relative safety. To make matter worse, Mycroft warns Mrs. Harrison in advance. He describes Enola as "unbroken", "a wild and dangerous woman", "a wild child." (Indeed she is; she beats people during the rest of the film. How did Mrs. Harrison escape unscathed?). (00:11:43 - 00:13:46)

FleetCommand

12th Aug 2019

Missing Link (2019)

Factual error: A blunderbuss is fired at a safe. The shot not only bores a hole into the safe but also blasts it out of the window behind it. First, a gun can do no such thing; a cannon can. (The film already establishes that the safe is incredibly heavy.) Second, the hole on the safe is wrong. It is gouged outward as if by an explosion from within. (00:38:10)

FleetCommand

Factual error: Grewishka consistently survives falling several stories down. He is twice the size of a normal human. Assuming that he maintains the same density (weight to volume ratio), the fall must still be 8 times (2×2×2 times) harder. A scientific breakthrough that reduces density is perhaps not far-fetched in a work of sci-fi. But here, Grewishka's demonstration of brute force suggests that he actually has higher density, not lower.

FleetCommand

Factual error: Hugo detonates an incendiary device on Zapan's torso. Zapan's cloak catches fire, which he discards. The fire should burn (or at least blacken) his organic face and mohawk, but none of these happens. Zapan emerges completely unscathed. Most of his body is metallic - an excellent heat conductor. Zapan's organic parts should suffer serious damage. (01:27:25)

FleetCommand

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

Suggested correction: Zapan is a total replacement cyborg, similar to Alita. That means that nothing on his body is organic, besides the brain inside. His skin, hair, eyes and everything else of his face is artifical. We see that when Alita cuts a part of his face off. So, we don't know how fire resistant those artificial materials are.

Even concrete walls (completely fireproof) get blackened by fire. Zapan didn't. Also, fire-resistant mohawk?

FleetCommand

Factual error: When Zapan speaks while his face is chopped off, the producers have failed to take into account the importance of mouth and tongue in producing speech. As a cyborg, Zapan could use speakers to produce a voice, but he isn't.

FleetCommand

10th May 2019

Star Trek (2009)

Factual error: USS Enterprise's onboard computer initially refuses to acknowledge Chekov's authorization code. The reason, it seems, is Chekov's Russian accent, which pronounces the letter "V" (pronounced labiodentally) like a British "W" (pronounced bilabially). Problem: Chekov pronounces his ensign authorization code in the NATO phonetic alphabet. ("Nine, Five, Victor, Victor, Two", which resolves to 95VV2) This alphabet is specifically designed to alleviate this exact same situation. The 26 code words in the NATO phonetic alphabet are assigned to the 26 letters of the English alphabet: Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, and Zulu. The slightly mispronounced "Wictor" should not be a problem. (00:42:05)

FleetCommand

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

Suggested correction: You're applying today's standards to a fictional future. We've seen in every iteration of Star Trek that security includes both a passkey/password and voice authentication. The actual mistake here is that regardless of how Chekov speaks, the computer should recognize it as his voice because he always speaks that way.

I am afraid the computer's error message leaves no doubt that there was no voice matching at work this time; only pure speech-to-text.

FleetCommand

6th May 2019

Common mistakes

Factual error: In many films and TV series that feature passwords being cracked by a "brute-force" attack, individual characters of a password are found independently of each other. (See Ocean's Eight, Under Siege 2, various episodes of Alarm für Cobra 11 - Die Autobahnpolizei, or Person of Interest.) In reality, this is impossible; most of the times the password itself is not stored anywhere. Rather, an irreversible cryptographic hash of the password is stored, and the typed password's hash is compared with that. Either the whole thing is right or no access is granted.

FleetCommand

3rd May 2019

Cashback (2006)

Cashback mistake picture

Factual error: At one point, a screencast of a computer screen shows a video of Barry Brickman on the desktop environment of Windows XP (operating system, developed by Microsoft, released in 2001). However, the app that plays the video is QuickTime for Mac (which runs on Mac OS only), not QuickTime for Windows (which runs on Windows XP). These two versions of QuickTime are almost identical in every respect, except for their title bar (the narrow horizontal area above the video). (00:19:15)

FleetCommand

29th Aug 2018

Ocean's Eight (2018)

Factual error: A shot of Paul Damanian's computer's screen shows mostly a large wallpaper. At the bottom, there is a taskbar that resembles that of Windows 10. Judging from the task view icon, it is Windows 10 version 1709 or earlier. The taskbar is retouched: The Start button is missing, and the Microsoft Store icon is edited to have the Windows logo cropped out. The taskbar is missing the clock, and the Action Center icon appears before that of the Touch Keyboard icon. There are four icons on the desktop, but none have a label. The icons correspond to "This PC", "Contacts", "Documents" and "Pictures" but none are genuine Windows 10 icons. The "This PC" icon is from Windows 7, while the other three icons are edited versions of what's seen in Windows 10. There is a battery icon but this item appears on laptop computers only; this one is a Dell desktop computer. After clicking on the Search icon (Cortana seems to have been disabled) a task manager appears instead. Moreover, the task manager belongs macOS rather than Windows. No wonder the tasks shown in it moments later are running in the context of the "root" user account. Then an app is executed on that computer called "McCallister Security Visual Matrix Controller 3.1.1.5" but the window chrome indicates that it is a Linux app. (00:48:25 - 00:48:55)

FleetCommand

29th Aug 2018

Ocean's Eight (2018)

Factual error: This film repeats on of the classic mistakes that countless films have repeated since the invention of personal computers: It shows that letters in a password are discovered independent of each other. In reality, this is not possible. The computers themselves don't know the password; they only know a "hash digest" with which they can only determine if the password is 100% correct, or not. (If you need technical details, look up "Cryptographic hash function" on Wikipedia).

FleetCommand

13th May 2016

Under Siege 2 (1995)

Factual error: The film's plot violates the third of the Ten Immutable Laws of Security by Scott Culp. The premise of the law is: When one has physical access to a computer system, given enough time, he can take over the system. In the film, the reverse happens: Dane takes over an ATAC site remotely while people inside (who have complete physical access) cannot do anything to wrest the control back. In the real world, it is usually possible to simply cut the connection cable or antenna and take control back. (Even Windows XP and later have such simple lockdown provisions as part of Windows Firewall.) After the lockdown, the passcodes can be changed and other measures taken.

FleetCommand

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

Suggested correction: They don't have physical access to the satellite. It is in orbit, it is impossible to have physical access unless they had someone on the satellite.

That would be a plausible explanation, had it been in the film. But in the film, Dane hacked into ATAC system, not the satellite. That's how he implemented bogus satellites.

FleetCommand

You also have to remember Dane designed and wrote the software that ATAC is using. He may have written in access stuff that can't be disabled. So they couldn't have disconnected the building and gotten back control of their systems. There is no way that they could have gotten back control of their satellite.

An yet, the exact opposite happened at the end of the film: Ryback shot Dane's laptop, severing his persistent remote connection. Immediately, ATAC personnel regained control of the satellite. It appears you're smarter than the filmmakers and would make a better film if you tried. But it also appears that they've made not one but several mistakes here.

FleetCommand

13th May 2016

Under Siege 2 (1995)

Factual error: The main premise of the film is ATAC's loss of control over their orbital weapon and their attempt to prevent it from doing damage. According to ATAC, they needed to know where the weaponized satellite is, so that they can lock onto it and send it a self-destruct order via radio waves. This isn't how the real world works: Radio waves emit in all directions from its transmitting source. The location of the satellite need not to be known; only it must be within the reach of the ATAC's signal.

FleetCommand

3rd Nov 2014

Transformers (2007)

Factual error: While fighting Scorponok in Qatar, the special ops team requests a gunship to attack with 105 shells. The gunships confirms but no 105mm shot is fired. The gunships fires three rapidly firing cannons within 17 seconds. 105mm shells cause a massive explosion upon impact, and aren't reloaded that rapidly because of their weight. (00:44:05)

FleetCommand

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