Tailkinker

18th Feb 2013

Star Trek (2009)

Corrected entry: Spock Prime charges out of the wormhole/timewarp and Nero sets about capturing him, which apparently takes some time to accomplish. Spock Prime knows the destructive power of the Red Matter and he would in no way ever allow this substance to fall into the hands of a madman, even though it would cost his life. This was the only logical conclusion Spock Prime could have made.

alfredodedarc

Correction: Pure assumption. Spock cannot be aware that Nero would intend to wipe out every planet in the Federation; given his experience in diplomacy, he would have every reason to believe that he could reason with Nero. Choosing to attempt that rather than taking the suicide option does not make for a plot hole.

Tailkinker

Corrected entry: In the scene where Will Scarlet is presented to the Sheriff of Nottingham after being discovered in the crowd at the execution, the sheriff calls Will a "turncoat". The term "turncoat" did not originate until the American Revolutionary War.

Correction: The entire film is presented in modern-day English, despite the fact that this would bear only a limited resemblance to what would actually have been spoken at the time. As such, present day terminology has been used to allow audiences to understand what's going on. This is a dramatic convention and is not considered a mistake.

Tailkinker

18th Feb 2013

The Avengers (2012)

Corrected entry: The nuclear missile that is fired at Manhattan, the Air to Ground (AGM)-154 Joint Standoff Weapon (JSOW) does not actually have nuclear capability. The F-35 Lightning II, which fired the missile, however, can actually carry the JSOW and will eventually be able to carry the B61 nuclear bomb.

Correction: Given the large amount of entirely fictional technology depicted in the film, it's not unreasonable that SHIELD, the possessor of much of that technology, could have been able to retrofit the missile to carry a nuclear payload for those occasions where it might prove necessary.

Tailkinker

Corrected entry: If terrorists took over the stock market, wouldn't trading be suspended for the day? Why would they need to physically breach the trading floor to plug in to a secure network? If you could breach a secure network, wouldn't you want to keep that fact secret?

Correction: They need access to the trading floor because they need to input Bruce's fingerprints into the system to authorise the trades.

Tailkinker

Corrected entry: There's no way Daggett's plan to make Bruce lose his fortune and get kicked out of his company would have worked, Bruce wasn't on the trading room floor, the fact that terrorists seized the Stock Exchange would have cancelled and voided any trading that day, plus the fact that the trade happened whilst under terrorism control would have made it more that obvious that Bruce did not make the trade. To make matters even worse almost every single character and the news media acts like Bruce intentionally committed a kamikaze trade whilst the floor was seized.

Correction: As Fox specifically states in the movie, given time, they'd probably be able to prove the fraud, but that would need to be proven to the satisfaction of the courts, which would not be quick. You have to bear in mind that copies of Bruce's fingerprints were used to authorise the trades, copies that were made during a break-in that the police were never informed of and thus any subsequent claim of theft would be treated with considerable scepticism. Thus, for the time being at least, Bruce is broke and has to relinquish control of the company. Daggett believes that may be enough to gain him control of Wayne Enterprises in order to force a merger with his own company; he may well be wrong but you're overlooking the rather major point that this is not Daggett's plan. The real aim of the plan is to get Bruce to temporarily surrender control to Miranda Tate so that she can gain access to the reactor in order to weaponise it. That's all she and Bane need; after that, it doesn't matter in the slightest if the trades are proved to be fraudulent, because they have what they were after and their plan for the fall of Gotham can be set in motion. Long-term, you're right, the plan probably wouldn't work. But it never needed to.

Tailkinker

While you are correct about them not needing the fraudulent trade to be permanent, the original mistake is still, for the most part, valid. If we assumed there is security footage of the exchange, it would prove that Bruce was never there. If we disregard security footage or assume Bane's crew destroyed it, they would have cancelled all trades made that day anyway because, for all they know, Bane may have kidnapped Bruce and forced him to make the trades under duress during the siege.

AD

It would still take some time to determine this as trading was under way so it would take some time to decipher the legit trades from the fraudulent ones.

19th Feb 2013

Skyfall (2012)

Corrected entry: When the explosion in MI6 occurs, they say that there are 6 deaths. When M is walking near the tombs with England flags, there are 7 or 8 tombs, not 6.

Correction: Pay attention to the exact wording of the news report: "Early reports from the scene indicate at least six dead." This clearly lends itself to the final total being higher, as additional bodies are found or the critically injured succumb to their wounds.

Tailkinker

Corrected entry: When Bond ditches the Hercules in the Jeep, The plane nose dives into a cliff. The plane explodes into a huge fireball. This should be impossible as the plane doesn't have any fuel on board.

frecklejam

Correction: What is has are fumes in the tank. Which are actually far more explosive than the fuel itself is.

Tailkinker

Corrected entry: When the Ewoks start worshipping C3PO as a deity, Han Solo tells him to use his "divine influence," but C3PO refuses saying that it is against his programming to impersonate a deity. Later, though, Luke instructs C3PO to tell the Ewoks to threaten to his magical powers - impersonating a deity - which C3PO does, apparently no longer against his programming.

deatc

Correction: Deities aren't the only ones to possess magical powers - Jedi quite arguably do, for example. Threepio apparently can't claim to actually be divine, but simply magical appears to be allowable.

Tailkinker

18th Feb 2013

Star Wars (1977)

Corrected entry: As demonstrated, the Death Star can destroy a planet instantly and yet it has to wait for the moon housing the Rebel base to move away from Yavin before it can be destroyed.so why not just destroy Yavin, then its moon?

jbrbbt

Correction: Not all planets are the same. Yavin is a gas giant, orders of magnitude larger than a regular planet - as a real-life comparison, the gas giant Jupiter has a volume equal to more than a thousand Earths. While the Death Star has the power to destroy Alderaan, or the moon housing the Rebel Base, it simply doesn't have the power to blow up a gas giant.

Tailkinker

11th Feb 2013

Alien 3 (1992)

Corrected entry: This mistake is slightly different from how the eggs actually got onto the Sulaco (that mistake was already addressed in another post). In all other movies, the eggs were 'hatched' by some sort of movement or trigger. Since what was left of the crew was in stasis, they were completely motionless and would not have triggered the egg to open up.

12o

Correction: And yet there are also a number of instances throughout the movies where nearby movement doesn't trigger an egg to open. When Kane first finds the crashed ship on LV-426, only one egg responds to his presence. When Ripley encounters the Alien Queen in Aliens, surrounded by a large number of eggs, none of the eggs initially open, with only one opening after some considerable time. In the first AVP movie, at least two facehuggers are shown to be loose in the complex, apparently released from their eggs without the stimulus of nearby movement. Clearly the triggering mechanism on the eggs is rather more complicated than "movement nearby. While obviously you are correct in that there would be no movement in the vicinity, due to the crew being in stasis, it cannot be stated definitively that the eggs could therefore not hatch.

Tailkinker

16th Feb 2013

Prometheus (2012)

Corrected entry: One of the smart-ass crew members says Shaw's theory of alien engineers only makes sense if you ignore three centuries of Darwinism. The movie is set in 2093, so 3 centuries before would be 1793, about 100 years before Darwin's theories of natural selection took hold.

Vader47000

Correction: On the Origin of Species was published in 1859 and the genesis of Darwin's theory dates back into the 1830s. This is still not a full three centuries prior to the events of the film, true, but it's far closer than the hundred years out that you claim. For an off-the-cuff remark, "three centuries" is an acceptable rounded figure.

Tailkinker

11th Feb 2013

Alien (1979)

Corrected entry: In the scene where Ripley is leaving in the escape ship, she's looking out the front window looking back at the ship as she's leaving. When she was prepping the escape ship moments before, the cockpit window is facing outward. If the ship took off nose-forward, she could not see the mother ship moving away through the front window as then she'd be going backwards. There is a small window in the back of the ship through the rear door, but it's far too small to be the same window she was looking out while leaving. Also, the front window has diagonal support struts to hold the windows in place, providing further evidence that the window she is looking through is actually the front of the ship.

12o

Correction: Ripley boards the Narcissus and starts the launch procedure. We see the shuttle being lowered from the belly of the Nostromo, then we see the forward braking thrusters fire [they visibly light up]. This was the effect of slowing the Narcissus relative to the Nostromo, shedding the velocity inherited from the parent vessel. As the Nostromo, which is still under full power, moves on ahead of the Narcissus, Ripley's able to watch it through the shuttle's forward windows. As you say, she could only watch the Nostromo's progress through the forward windows if she was flying backwards. Compared to the Nostromo, that's exactly what she IS doing.

Tailkinker

Corrected entry: When Batman and Bane fights in the sewers Bane takes off Batman's mask, but when the henchmen drag him out you can see the mask still on his head.

Correction: Bane takes off the right-hand side of Bruce's mask - in close-up shots it's very obvious that it's not the complete mask. When his henchmen lift Bruce to drag him away, we see the left side of Bruce's head, which still has the mask in place.

Tailkinker

18th Feb 2013

The Avengers (2012)

Corrected entry: After the fight between Thor and Hulk, Thor gets blood from his nose, but the gods don't bleed.

Correction: Of course they do if you hit them hard enough. Odin has a visibly bloody eye socket during the war against the Frost Giants at the beginning of Thor, and the ice shard that impales Fandral during the ill-fated trip to Jotunheim in the same film is visibly smeared with blood.

Tailkinker

13th Feb 2013

John Carter (2012)

Corrected entry: If John Carter is able to jump higher and be stronger due to the weaker gravity of Mars, then why is he able to breathe? Low gravity means less atmosphere.

Correction: This is a fictional Mars, inhabited by at least two highly technological races, the Red Martians and the Therns, and thus it is not unreasonable to assume that the technology exists to maintain the atmosphere in a state breathable by the inhabitants. The Barsoom stories, on which the film is based, include references to atmosphere plants, city-sized mechanisms to do exactly that. While these are not mentioned in the film, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, it can be assumed that the plants are indeed present and functional.

Tailkinker

Corrected entry: In the beginning of the movie, when the cruise missile is fired against the "terrorist marketplace," that missile cannot be ordered to self-destruct because it is out of range. But as a tomahawk cruise missile can only fly 880 km/h it can't at that time be more than 30 km away. That can not possibly be out of range.

Jacob La Cour

Correction: Says you. It's very clear from the film that the missile is in the mountains, and is using a terrain-following flight profile, staying low to avoid detection. Under those circumstances, it's entirely plausible that the signal would be blocked by the mountainous terrain.

Tailkinker

29th Jan 2013

Inception (2010)

Corrected entry: When Eames clings to the back of the snowmobile, he knocks out the driver by smacking his head on the handlebars. But the driver is wearing a helmet, which smashes on the handlebars with a very distinct clunk, this wouldn't harm him in any way.

Friso94

Correction: While the helmet would protect the driver from any significant damage, the impact force is still considerable and could easily stun the driver for long enough for Eames to push him off the snowmobile.

Tailkinker

Corrected entry: In the scene where Galadriel is speaking with Gandalf, her hands are shown up close. However, she is not wearing her Ring. She owns one of the 19 Rings given to Men, Elves, and Dwarves, long before the events of the Hobbit, and wears it in Lord of the Rings. And yet none is shown in this shot.

Correction: Rings can be taken off, even Rings of power; Galadriel is under no obligation to wear Nenya all the time. Travelling outside the secure borders of Lothlórien, it would even make sense not to wear the Ring openly, to avoid potentially drawing unwanted attention. In the books, Nenya is described as not being visible even when worn, whether through some innate property of the Ring itself or Galadriel's magic is unclear; in that version of the story, Frodo is able to see the Ring when Galadriel shows it to him because she wants him to, plus, as a Ringbearer himself, Frodo gets certain privileges when it comes to other Rings. Whether this property of Nenya is intended to carry over into the film version or not is unknown, but, regardless, Galadriel not wearing [or apparently not wearing] her Ring is not a mistake.

Tailkinker

Corrected entry: Sorry to spoil all the fun of the nail-biting finish - but let us remember that the "bomb" was actually a decaying neutron reactor. There is no forecasting, months from the moment, exactly when it will decay enough to explode - that will rely on catalysts such as heat (Gotham's climate) and oscillation (how much it is shaken about when moved around). Also Neutron bombs are big on radiation and low on blast compared to traditional nukes so getting the bomb 6 miles off the beach before it blew (whichever way the wind was blowing) would leave much of the East Coast of America a no-go for decades.

ComicBoy

Correction: The bomb is a decaying fusion reactor, described in the film as being an experimental prototype of a clean energy system. This is not technology that exists in the real world, about which we only have very generalised statements are made. As such, no "factual" claims can be made regarding how it might behave in its weaponised form.

Tailkinker

17th Nov 2012

Skyfall (2012)

Corrected entry: Before an elevator moves, the outer doors close. There is no way Bond could have leaped and caught the bottom of a moving elevator.

Correction: Bond doesn't reach the lift through the doors - he uses the free-standing control column as a step to boost himself completely up and over the door assembly. He then latches onto the bottom of the lift as it rises up into the shaft above, which is not enclosed. At no point does he pass through the space now occupied by the closed outer doors.

Tailkinker

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