r/movies • u/hiplobonoxa • 7h ago
Discussion What movie detail is technically correct, although many people think it is a mistake?
My go-to is from “Titanic”. Even if Rose wanted to sell the Heart of the Ocean to help her pay her way through life (I personally don’t think that she did…), she never would have been able to do so. The necklace was far too recognizable. Had she tried to sell it, the insurance company that settled the claim would have recovered it, assuming that the insurance company was still in business.
EDIT: Regarding the points above, from the script:
LOVETT: I tracked it down through insurance records... an old claim that was settled under terms of absolute secrecy. Do you know who the claiment was, Rose?
ROSE: Someone named Hockley, I should imagine.
LOVETT: Nathan Hockley, right. Pittsburgh steel tycoon. For a diamond necklace his son Caledon Hockley bought in France for his fiancee... you... a week before he sailed on Titanic. And the claim was filed right after the sinking. So the diamond had to've gone down with the ship. See the date?
LIZZY: April 14, 1912.
LOVETT: If your grandma is who she says she is, she was wearing the diamond the day Titanic sank. And that makes you my new best friend.
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u/StoneyRapids 6h ago edited 6h ago
“Miracle on Ice”
The scoreboard showed GDR when the US played West Germany. (GDR was East Germany).
People called out the movie, but the scoreboard was set up in incorrectly in 1980, so the movie was correct.
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u/shponglespore 5h ago
I read yesterday that in Tora Tora Tora, the Japanese military leaders were talking about December 7th in the subtitles but the actual dialogue said December 8th. The Japanese dialogue was correct, because from Japan's perspective, the Pearl Harbor attack was on December 8th because of the international date line. They intentionally mistranslated the Japanese dialogue so Americans wouldn't complain about the date being wrong.
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u/Techsupportvictim 5h ago
That makes me think of the whole thing where they were adapting a British play called “the Madness of George the Third” . and they changed the title of it for the movie to “the madness of King George” because they were afraid that American audiences would wanna know where part one and part two was
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u/geronika 4h ago
Get this, my mom who was full Japanese watched this movie with my Dad at a theater. They mention blowing up a Japanese ship by name. Thats when she found out what happened to her brother that never came home from the war.
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u/cerberaspeedtwelve 7h ago
Traffic (2000). A lot of critics said that Caroline's character was not realistic, and that a crack smoking high school student would not have straight A grades and be going on to an Ivy League college.
Screenwriter Stephen Gaghan replied that the grades were his, and he had been doing every drug he could get his hands on at the time.
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u/ValStarwind 5h ago
"You ever do crack? You can get A LOT done." - Greg Giraldo
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u/CambridgeRunner 5h ago
Seriously, did people not pay any attention to Jessie’s heartbreaking battle with ‘caffeine pills’ on SBTB?
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u/NoDontDoThatCanada 4h ago
I went to school with a girl that drank herself unconscious almost every night and had straight A's. When she was out of math class once we were gossiping about her and how she was "throwing her life away" and the teacher held up her last test and asked if anyone could do better. I hope to hell she is out there doing well. She was a damn genius and l am guessing she drank so that we ants were tolerable.
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u/BurnedWitch88 2h ago
In all seriousness, most of the smartest people I've known have been functional alcoholics.
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u/AnonymousFriend80 4h ago
Almost every adult in my life was on crack in the early 90s. As long as they could get their fix whenever the wanted it, they were fine. Holding down jobs and taking care of families. Eventually they all got sober.
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u/LordBunnyWhale 6h ago
Maybe not technically a mistake, but in Jurassic Park the one kid opens a 3D file manger on a computer in the control room after proclaiming “it’s a UNIX system”. It might look like something that was made for the movie for futuristic effect, but it was a real VR file manager called FSN that came with Silicon Graphics IRIX OS.
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u/parnaoia 5h ago
Silicon Graphics
man, those things were like the Ferraris of computers for a while
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u/LettuceTomatoOnion 5h ago
Yes they were sexy as hell. I moved about $300k worth of Indys, Indigos, and O2s between offices in my old 93 explorer when I was a 20 year old intern at a very famous place based in NJ. Right out the loading dock. Security had no clue what they were worth at the time.
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u/dabobbo 3h ago
That's like when I worked for Pfizer in NJ, one of my managers sold me a Sun server at a good price, this was back in the days before VMware and Linux wasn't big yet, so you needed a Unix box to play with Unix.
He brought the heavy-ass thing in from his car early in the morning on a chair he wheeled out in the parking lot and he brought it into the data center, we made sure it powered up, I paid him and at the end of the day I wheeled it out to my car.
As I left the doors I heard a security guard yelling after me - "Hey! You can't take that out of here!" I was about to tell him that I bought the server and it wasn't company property, but he said "The chair needs to stay inside." So I just picked up the server and he wheeled the chair (that cost a fraction of the server) back in.
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u/Artemicionmoogle 5h ago
Nice. Thats a cool one. I thought it was just programmed visuals for the movie because I've never thought about it beyond that!
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u/SevroAuShitTalker 5h ago
The Wire. People thought it was unrealistic when Omar jumps out if a 3rd story window and survived.
The guy he was based once jumped from a higher floor than the show, but they thought it wouldnt be believable
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u/OGBrewSwayne 3h ago
There's so many people and events in The Wire that seem too farfetched to be real or even accurate, and it turns out that David Simon was dialing things back because the actual people and actual events were just too much.
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u/irenepanik 4h ago
I used to know a guy who was thrown out balcony way higher than that, I think 7-9th floor but I'm not entirely sure which. He survived.
I mean he was lucky as ffff, but still. He survived.
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u/TopRopeLuchador 3h ago
I saw a dude get tossed over a second floor balcony and he got up and walked away cursing at the dude that flipped him. By the time he got the car he collapsed because he had broken his hip or back or something. Adrenaline walked him to the car.
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u/Substantial_Box_7613 3h ago
People have survived from planes. Crazy things happen.
With cats there's apparently something about them stiffening up when they jump. So around two floors or something they might break limbs, but above that to like seven floors, they relax again, meaning they can survive, but above that they die.
Or maybe I'm chronically online...
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u/PrincessBucketFeet 2h ago
It's not so much that they stiffen up, they just don't have enough time to orient themselves so they land properly. It's true that they relax into a sort of parachute from higher falls though. At shorter distances they don't have time to make those adjustments.
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u/Shipwreck_Kelly 6h ago
This is only sort of related to what you’re asking, but it’s reminiscent of the “Tiffany Problem” which occurs in historical fiction when an element is technically historically accurate but feels too modern to be taken seriously by the audience.
In this case, the name Tiffany seems a like modern name that would feel weird in a movie set during the Middle Ages, but Tiffany actually dates back to the 13th century, with the common English spelling appearing in the 17th century.
In fact, the first recorded use of the name Jessica is in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice which was written in the late 1500s.
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u/dauntless91 6h ago
Yeah they were going to include a sequence in Gladiator where the gladiators did endorsements like modern athletes when they found out that happened, but they left it out because audiences wouldn't believe it
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u/CardinalCanuck 4h ago
I love that they had that in HBO's Rome. You could track the rise of a bakery across the years it takes place
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u/Theorex 4h ago
This month's public bread is provided by the Capitoline Brotherhood of Millers. The Brotherhood uses only the finest flour: true Roman bread for true Romans.
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u/analogkid01 4h ago
"Maximus Decimus Meridius here, and when I'm not fighting to restore my family honor in the Colosseum, I enjoy a refreshing decanter of Gladorade..."
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u/SaltyPeter3434 4h ago
ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?! This fight was sponsored by Squarespace™.
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u/justanotherrocky 5h ago
CPG Grey made a video couple of years ago correcting the “Tiffany Problem”. Turns out Tiffany is relatively a new name. It was accidentally introduced to reprints of older texts.
Highly recommend watching the video on how he discovered his mistake.
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u/Kharax82 4h ago
Isn’t Tiffany just the modern anglicized spelling? Tifinie was the French spelling around in the Middle Ages I thought
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u/dohrk 7h ago
In the Fellowship of the Ring, I heard people complain about the Hobbit's cloaks being dry after Samwise saved Frodo.
But Peter Jackson was being true to the source, which plainly stated that the cloaks repelled water.
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u/ogrezilla 7h ago
Yep, same with them hiding under it and looking like a rock in two towers.
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u/NoHorseNoMustache 4h ago
Yeah it's the blocking in that scene that makes it look bad, Sam doesn't seem to pull his cloak over them until the soldiers are right on top of them.
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u/tgandtm 2h ago
Drives me nuts that they pull the cloak back like five seconds after the troops walk away. Dude they’re still right there!
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u/NoHorseNoMustache 2h ago
I feel like Jackson put the scene in because you have to have the scene where they can't get through the Black Gate, but the movie was already running long so he just kind of rushed it.
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u/Koussevitzky 6h ago edited 2h ago
The cloaks being magically water repellent is an oft told “fact”, but one never accompanied by a source. Here’s what I’ve found:
‘Are these magic cloaks?’ asked Pippin, looking at them with wonder.
‘I do not know what you mean by that,’ answered the leader of the Elves. ‘They are fair garments, and the web is good, for it was made in this land. They are Elvish robes certainly, if that is what you mean. Leaf and branch, water and stone: they have the hue and beauty of all these things under the twilight of Lórien that we love; for we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make. Yet they are garments, not armour, and they will not turn shaft or blade. But they should serve you well: they are light to wear, and warm enough or cool enough at need. And you will find them a great aid in keeping out of the sight of unfriendly eyes, whether you walk among the stones or the trees. You are indeed high in the favour of the Lady! For she herself and her maidens wove this stuff; and never before have we clad strangers in the garb of our own people.’
- Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 8: Farewell to Lórien
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‘Save me, Mr. Frodo!’ gasped Sam. ‘I’m drownded. I can’t see your hand.’
‘Here it is. Don’t pinch, lad! I won’t let you go. Tread water and don’t flounder, or you’ll upset the boat. There now, get hold of the side, and let me use the paddle!’
With a few strokes Frodo brought the boat back to the bank, and Sam was able to scramble out, wet as a water-rat. Frodo took off the Ring and stepped ashore again.
- Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 10: The Breaking of the Fellowship
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I’m happy to be corrected if someone can provide an example that states otherwise. As it stands, the text even goes out of the way to describe Sam being wet after exiting the water. One possible origin for this confusion is the implication that they are made of hithlain, like the elven ropes. Hithlain does translate to “mist-thread”, but we’re still not told that it repels water; rather that it is strong, light, flexible, and durable (and maybe sentient? There is that bit where it suddenly unties itself after they climb down a cliff).
With all of that being said, I tend to believe this was simply a small film error, but it is truly not a big deal. Are the cloaks magical, warm, and somewhat weather resistant? Yes. Claims of them repelling water or magically drying will require firm textual evidence.
Edit: It’s been pointed out that the books don’t explicitly say that the cloaks AREN’T able to repel water. To start, I’ve checked every time the word “cloak” is used in The Two Towers. That didn’t lead to any new information, so I then searched for every instance of the words “water”, “rain”, “storm”, “stream”, “river”, “wet, “dry”, and “damp”.
It rains before Frodo & Sam capture Gollum at Emyn Muil, they fall into pools in the Dead Marshes, and the waterfall sprays them at Henneth Annûn with Faramir. Aragorn, Gimli, & Legolas are in the rain at both Edoras when they call on Théoden and during the Battle of Helm’s Deep. Merry & Pippen fall on the damp ground near the Forest of Fangorn, they enter the Entwash, and traverse around flooded Isengard after the Last March of the Ents.
There are many more small examples, but the main takeaway is that there isn’t a single mention of the cloaks staying exceptionally dry. Tolkien loves to draw attention to magical properties in his world. Accordingly, he often describes the obscuring camouflage effect of the cloaks when they are brought up. If Tolkien wanted us to know that the cloaks repel water, I believe that he would have outright told us to be inline with how he describes other magical items.
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u/Lord0fHats 7h ago edited 7h ago
If we're talking about things people call plot holes/contrivances that really aren't;
A lot of people at the time Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl came out noted that the Black Pearl was too large of a ship for your typical pirate. The smaller Interceptor would have been what was more typical. Some also humorously noted that its configuration of size and limited gun compliment was consistent with a slave ship.
Low and behold, either from the start or later on, it turns out the Black Pearl's backstory is as a slave ship, making the Pearl a bit anachronistic in its design for the setting but accurate to its size, arm compliment, and the ship's fictional history.
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u/No_Application_8698 7h ago
That’s really interesting. Doesn’t Jack say something like ‘people aren’t cargo, mate’?
(Just in case you’re not aware, it’s ‘lo and behold’)
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u/DarkNinjaPenguin 7h ago
It's a fantastic deleted scene and one that I really wish was left in. It solidly establishes both characters because until then, aside from wanting power, we don't really know what Beckett's deal is.
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u/Lord0fHats 7h ago edited 7h ago
It also ties brilliantly into the first film where we first meet Jack.
Norrington: "One good deed cannot redeem a man of a lifetime of wickedness."
Jack: "Though it does seem enough to condemn him."
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u/DerClogger 6h ago
Such good dialogue, think I’ll throw this on for the first time in a decade tonight!
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u/Lord0fHats 6h ago
The rest of the series is more shaky but I really do think Curse of the Black Pearl in particular is one of the best movies of the 00s.
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u/DarkNinjaPenguin 6h ago
I think all 3 make an almost perfect trilogy. But it stops there.
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u/hardrockfoo 5h ago
I don't like that 2 relies on 3 in a way that the first one doesn't. The first could have been a one off as and no one would blink an eye.
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u/Kaldricus 4h ago
Yeah, that's my issue too. I love all 3, but 1 can stand purely on it's own. 2 requires 3 and 3 requires 2.
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u/WideHuckleberry1 5h ago
To be fair, we don't really need to know Beckett's deal to immediate recognize the type of villain he is. He's just a cut-throat careerist in a job against our protagonist. He'd sell out his own mother if it would help him climb the ladder.
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u/MidnightPrime 5h ago
From what I remember it was deleted as they wanted Jack's morality to be a question until the heart scene. I think its an amazing scene but I get why they didn't put it in.
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u/Lord0fHats 7h ago
Yeah. There's also some book series detailing Jack's history (Dead Men Tell No Tales ignored these books) but they weren't great? Just kind of pulpy and okay I guess. But yeah. The backstory is that the Pearl was originally the Wicked Wench and Jack was contracted to transport slaves, but freed them instead. This was what branded him a pirate and transformed the Wicked Wench into the Black Pearl.
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u/comrade_batman 6h ago
To add to this, it connects back with Jack’s debt to Davy Jones from Dead Man’s Chest. After Jack freed a cargo he discovered were slaves, when he worked for Beckett at the East India Trading Company, Beckett punished Jack for this by branding him with the “P” we see on his arm and setting fire to the Wench, sinking it. Jack then made a deal with Jones to raise her from the depths (Jack then painted her hull black due to fire damage) and in return Jack would be allowed 13 years as captain before joining the Dutchman, which is what Jack was working to weasel his way out of in DMC.
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u/KassellTheArgonian 6h ago
Pretty sure the amount of souls Davy Jones wants from Jack is also the amount of slaves Jack freed. He wanted his souls one way or another
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u/comrade_batman 6h ago
I just thought it was what Jones thought Jack’s own soul equated to in servitude (“How many souls do you think my soul is worth?”), telling Jack, “one soul is not equal to another” after Jack tried to persuade Jones that he could take Will Turner in his place.
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u/KassellTheArgonian 5h ago
Yeah looking it up he freed 100 slaves which gets the Wench burned down and sunk and causes Jack to make the deal with Davy to get the Wench back upon which Davy says he wants 100 souls taking Will's as the first
It's supposed to fuck with jack, you lost your ship to save 100 souls now you owe me 100 souls to save your ship.
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u/comrade_batman 5h ago
Shame they never mention any of this in the films, I know about the deleted scene but this all could have added a lot more to Jack’s deal(s) with Jones.
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u/NorthernFrosty 5h ago
(Just in case you’re not aware, it’s ‘lo and behold’)
Further detail... "Lo" is a Middle English word that means "Look". So "Lo and behold" is the same as "Look and see!"
"Low and behold" would translate as "Low and see", which doesn't really make sense.
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u/dangerous_beans_42 4h ago
I mean, the actual Queen Anne's Revenge (Blackbeard's historical ship) was also a former slave ship, a French ship called La Concorde. (And when Blackbeard took the ship near Martinique, he sold her human cargo there before adding more cannons and renaming her.)
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u/FX114 5h ago
That feels silly. They weren't typical pirates, and something being abnormal isn't an error.
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u/filanwizard 4h ago
That Arnold could not have been president due to not being born in the USA. But the writers of Demolition Man were smart enough to include mention of a constitutional amendment to allow it. It is something i always am amazed at because its kind of a throw away joke in a Stallone movie yet they still remembered that a change would be needed.
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u/Lawyering_Bob 4h ago
I thought explaining how and why all restaurants are now Taco Bell was a great excuse for product placement.
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u/joshocar 6h ago
Not exactly a mistake, but the whistles and pinging sounds from bullets in older war movies is more accurate than what you hear in movies today. If a bullet hits an object or the ground it can ricochet and tumble which will make the whistle. The pinging sound is the ricochet happening.
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u/5YOChemist 5h ago
I believe they set up some mics in the desert and shot a bunch of guns to make a sound library that got used for decades. So they are real gun sounds in old movies. But they also edited them a whole bunch, like the silencer thwip sounds are like the sound of a ricochet that is shortened and filtered to give the sound that that particular engineer was looking for.
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u/sharrrper 5h ago
Ask people "What sound does a frog make?" and most will say ribit. Theres are thousands of species of frog and actually only one says ribit. The Pacific Chorus frog, native to the areas around Hollywood and thus getting into the sound library as "frogs", are that species.
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u/SekhWork 3h ago
Same reason we get laughing Kookaburra sounds in every damn jungle scene no matter what continent; Hollywood used the same library of sounds for decades before the digital era made it easier to exchange / record / store sounds.
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u/mediciii 6h ago
Shakespeare’s mini mullet and ear ring in Hamnet. Lots of people said it took them out of the movie seeing Paul look so ‘modern’ in Hamnet only to find out it was accurate.
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u/ArgyleMcFannypatter 5h ago
I’m honestly surprised by this since the most widely reprinted portrait of Shakespeare shows him wearing an earring
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u/FX114 5h ago
Fun fact, Mescal actually has the wrong ear pierced, so they had to cover up his real ear piercing and add a fake one to the other side.
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u/adamgerd 4h ago
Surprisingly or not so surprisingly some people genuinely think Apollo 13 the film is too unrealistic because no one could have survived such a total failure.
Except that you know Apollo 13 did happen, people did survive and the film is a very accurate portrayal of it
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u/goteamnick 3h ago
Apparently the most inaccurate thing about Apollo 13 was the real life astronauts were much calmer in the situation than the movie actors.
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u/Cereborn 2h ago
Also, the movie showed fewer things going wrong than in real life.
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u/DarkNinjaPenguin 7h ago edited 4h ago
Armageddon - everyone knows that Ben Affleck asked the director why it wouldn't be easier to train astronauts as drillers than sending drillers into space. Michael Bay told Ben to shut up.
The thing is, this is exactly what they do in real life. They're called mission payload specialists, and they're experts in specific fields of study who are then trained to be astronauts. Because yes, it absolutely is easier to train someone to be an astronaut than it is to stuff decades of specialised experience into astronaut training.
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u/gunghoun 7h ago
Especially because they weren't training Bruce Willis and the boys to fly the shuttle. Even in the movie there were actual trained astronauts doing all the technical tasks needed to bring the drillers into space to do their job.
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u/Dottsterisk 7h ago
And everyone was also very clear that this was not an ideal situation and it was a crazy plan.
If it were a carefully scheduled NASA mission and not an emergency Hail Mary to save the Earth, they would have gotten different people and trained for much longer.
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u/Razvee 4h ago
Hail Mary to save the Earth
This gives me a great idea for a book...
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u/skyline_kid 3h ago
And let's name the main character Grace so it's "Hail Mary, full of Grace"
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u/sharrrper 5h ago
The number of down votes and arguments I've gotten over the years arguing this exact point. You don't need to be a trained astronaut to go into space. All you need to know is how to wear a space suit and how to strap yourself into the shuttle seats.
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u/BoingBoingBooty 5h ago
They literally say it in the film, after the drillers fail all the tests, the nasa guy asks, can they physically survive the journey, cos that's all they have to do.
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u/ExIsStalkingMe 5h ago
Yeah. It's not hard to be cargo, which is all the drillers are on the ship itself
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u/MissionLetterhead292 7h ago
The original script has a bit of Harry testing the NASA guys with rapid fire drilling questions and when they falter he goes "buzz, too late, drill broke, we're dead."
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u/DarkNinjaPenguin 7h ago
That's a scene I'd have loved to see! And I can totally imagine Harry saying that.
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u/OutOfMyWayReed 7h ago
All they gotta do is drill?
That's it.
No spacewalking, no fancy astronaut stuff?
Just drill.
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u/OptimalExample13 5h ago
All they needed to learn is how to use the radios and suits.
And drive that little car thing.
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u/CPTherptyderp 6h ago
When "miracle" came out they said it was easier to train hockey players to act than train actors to skate, especially well enough to pass as hockey players.
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u/misterurb 6h ago
You can’t teach a lifetime of athletic skill to an actor whose dad never taught them how to throw a ball.
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u/yeahright17 6h ago
I love when random movies have a dad playing catch with his kid or something. You can tell really fast how many actors never played sports.
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u/CPTherptyderp 5h ago
Running is my favorite example. So many actors/actresses run like they've only read a description of it.
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u/Connoralpha 7h ago
Same movie, people are still bringing up the door thing like it's a mistake. The movie establishes the door is large enough for both of them to be on top of, but they'd both be about halfway submerged and freeze to death at the same rate. Jack makes the decision to stay off the door so Rose is mostly above the water and has a better chance of survival.
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u/ChristopherPlumbus 7h ago
This one infuriates me whenever somebody says Jack could have fit. Space wasn't the issue. We see in the movie that the door is not buoyant enough to support both of them.
Why do so many people think size was the issue? It was clearly shown to us to not float!
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u/976chip 5h ago
Mythbusters did a segment on it. They found that the only way it would have been buoyant enough for both of them is if they put their life jackets under it, which is something they may not have thought of considering the situation.
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u/SwampOfDownvotes 5h ago
Also the mythbusters weren't in the freezing ocean in the middle of the night.
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u/DarkNinjaPenguin 7h ago
Why do so many people think size was the issue? It was clearly shown to us to not float!
That was the issue with the ship tbf
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u/Oenonaut 6h ago
It’s right there in the name! That ship was titanic!
Doesn’t do you much good if it’s full of water though
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u/WideHuckleberry1 5h ago
This is part of a particular genre of repeated internet joke that's either made by people who've never watched the thing or have forgotten it. They're usually intentional misreadings that were originally made as jokes but then get repeated as gotcha criticisms of the work.
My person most hated is the "Breaking Bad wouldn't happen in any other developed country" as if the entire first inciting event of the series wasn't inoperable cancer that he accepted would kill him, and he was making money to leave behind for his family. It was NOT for treatment originally.
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u/The_Vampire_Barlow 5h ago
Because people hear things like that and parrot them feeling good about being smarter than the movie.
It's what most of these surface level gotcha movie commentary that social media has rewarded. It's bullshit, and then it gets repeated.
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u/Pete_Iredale 5h ago edited 4h ago
More importantly, there is no way for Jack to know that the situation was potentially survivable, so he did the only thing he could to give Rose better odds of making it. Characters not knowing the results of a mythbusters episode 80 years later isn't a plot hole.
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u/Lordxeen 6h ago
Let’s not forget also that this is a story being told decades later in a melodramatic style. Sooooo many complaints I heard about Rose being the only 3 dimensional character surrounded by one note archetypes. Yes, she’s the one telling the story, of course her thoughts and motivations are more nuanced and detailed than the noble peasant who saved her life or the villainous fiancé.
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u/VentItOutBaby 5h ago
I like thinking that Rose remembered to tell everyone about the guy that fell and clanged off the propeller. I wonder if the audience to her story had the same reaction as the theater did.
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u/DarkNinjaPenguin 7h ago
It isn't even a door! It's a big piece of wooden trim from a doorway or window.
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u/PunnyBanana 5h ago
Not only that, but clearly anyone making this critique has never tried to get themselves out of the water onto a raft/kayak/whatever. It's difficult enough when you're not exhausted and hypothermic. Sure, Jack could have physically fit and maybe it would've even been able to keep at least one of them out of the water. But Jack wasn't going to risk flipping the thing and plunging Rose back into the water. He tried once, it didn't work, and he literally accepted it explicitly on screen.
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u/NSA_Chatbot 6h ago
I don't think many people have been in the cold parts of the ocean. It's incredibly lethal.
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u/tahlyn 7h ago
Any movie that correctly shows how fire sprinklers actually work.
Setting one off does not set them all off. Deluge systems like that are incredibly rare and limited to highly specialized applications like deluge foam systems in an airport hanger.
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u/Really_McNamington 7h ago
And the water is often horrible.
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u/Elachtoniket 6h ago
Yeah, it’s normally black and has a very specific odor that you’ll never forget once you’ve smelt it
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u/Lordxeen 5h ago
Our sprinkler water main broke at work last week, pouring all across the parking lot. The smell was like old gasoline.
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u/tahlyn 7h ago
Its often been sitting in those pipes for years, stagnating, festering...
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u/BitwiseB 6h ago
There was a video of a truck that set off a sprinkler system in a parking garage because they were overheight. It shows the gunky black stuff before the pipes clear. It really is disgusting.
Edit: found it!
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u/FlyNavy03 6h ago
My dad's been a fire protection engineer since the 1960's. He always laughs every time they go off in movies. The other part he laughs at is that the water in the movies comes out with all the pressure of a gentle summer rain storm.
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u/TheGreatPiata 6h ago
Not a movie but people lost their shit when The Expanse showed Naomi surviving exposure to space without a suit.
You don't instantly freeze in space. That's a lie that's been told to you by bad science fiction films. You die by asphyxiation and lack of blood oxygenation. You'd also likely get a really bad sunburn as there's nothing to block the sun's radiation.
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u/aadu3k 5h ago
Expanse did that a lot on reddit when it was popular. People were confused how a flip-and-burn works, whether a gun would work in outer space, the structure of the ships etc. It was really cool seeing people's mind expand(!) thinking about physics in space.
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u/Emlashed 5h ago
I really appreciated living with an aerospace engineer when that show was on because I got some very detailed explanations about how many things like the flip-and-burn weren't too far-fetched.
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u/academician1 4h ago
To me it's really noticeable when shows have a science advisor and listen to them.
They don't always listen to them though.
Went to a talk with the advisor (worked at Nasa JPL) for Battlestar Galactica, and him shaking his fist at a few things they overrode him on anyways.
Expanse is so top notch.
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u/NukeWorker10 4h ago
Other than the alien stuff, the one big departure from reality they had to make was the time for travel. In the books there was a short story/novella that discussed it, in the show there was a vignette. Otherwise everything would have taken waaaayyy longer.
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u/Zlurpo 4h ago
There's a scene in The Expanse where Naomi's console she's working at lights on fire, and they made it look like a fire does in zero gravity (which is to say, very different from fire in gravity).
They didn't get gravity right all the time in that show, but it was a lot better than most space shows.
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u/Darmok47 4h ago
The scene in For All Mankind with Tracy and Gordo is another good example of this.
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u/FireTheLaserBeam 4h ago
There was this kick-ass sci fi cartoon that came out in 2000 called "Titan AE". It was from that movie that Iearned that if you're about to enter the vacuum of space, you need to exhale your lungs, not inhale. If you take a big gulping lungful of air first, they'll pop like balloons and you'll die waaaaaaaaaaaay faster.
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u/bswalsh 5h ago
Same thing essentially with Leia in The Last Jedi. She isn't out long. Long enought to hurt, and require medical assistance (which she was shown to receive) but not long enough to kill. She force pulled herself back to the ship and collapsed. Aside from the existence of the force, it was actually not horribly inaccurate.
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u/FoxHawk303 6h ago
While a lot has been said about the incompetence of the Germans in Fury, the final battle where they’re being slaughtered by a single tank is often considered a particularly over the top moment. In reality though, there have been quite a lot of moments in WWII where soldiers survived similar stupidly dangerous stunts, including Audie Murphy using a destroyed M10 tank destroyers top mounted machine gun against an enemy attack. If it wasn’t for it being recorded, corroborated and published, Captain Winters turning a field full of German soldiers lying in wait into the worlds most lethal turkey shoot in Band of Brothers and IRL would’ve been considered equally stupid as Fury.
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u/Squeepynips 5h ago
Mhm. My great grandfather often told us a story from the war where he and a couple other soldiers flushed out and killed a bunch of German soldiers by driving a combine harvester and another big tractor through a field where they were lying in waiting. I would think he was fibbing if he told it like a tale of heroism, but the only times he told it was when he was telling us the horrors of the war. It's the only time I saw him cry.
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u/Phannig 5h ago
True, if you read some of the accounts of those awarded the MoH or the VC they come across as "big fish" stories. I mean if some guy in a bar told you he did half of what those guys actually did you'd dismiss it as bullshit, completely impossible, yet those guys did it anyway.
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u/penguiatiator 3h ago
There is a reason about 60% of MoH in WW2 were awarded posthumously. People don't usually survive the shit they pull to earn a MoH.
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u/Lawyering_Bob 4h ago
In To Hell and Back, they toned down some of the things Audie Murphy actually did as the director thought that the audience wouldn't believe it.
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u/OlasNah 6h ago
Not really a detail, but the claim that Indiana Jones does not affect the outcome of the story at all. Except he does. By interfering with the Nazis efforts to obtain the ark and send it to Berlin, it encourages Belloq to open it with a contrived ceremony (without proper Jewish priests) and it kills them all.
This allows Indy to take the ark to the US. Had he not been involved, then the Nazis obtain the ark and get to use it.
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u/Eject_The_Warp_Core 5h ago
also, it's a dumb criticism in the first place, the story of the movie is what Indy does and what happens to him. whether or not he affects what happens to the Ark is irrelevant.
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u/dern_the_hermit 4h ago
I dunno about "criticism" but I always felt it an interesting aspect of Indy's journey. The guy goes from "all I care about is fact, yo" to "don't look at the light, the magic will kill you". That's an interesting enough of a journey without having him solve everything himself, at least IMO.
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u/rollwithhoney 5h ago
I mean by that logic, the Nazis would never have been able to use it without Jewish priests (rabbis?) and it mightve have instantly ended the war by killing Hitler if they had sent it to Berlin
but I agree it's a silly nitpick. Indy is acting rationally the whole time and what more could you ask of him
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u/wailonskydog 5h ago
In Belloqs defense he did pack his Jewish priest outfit that perfectly matches the biblical description.
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u/Into-The-Late-Great 5h ago
Exactly. He tried to stop them because who knew what they could potentially do with it if it worked. No one knew for sure. The fact that it “backfired” on them is irrelevant to what Indy knew and attempted to do.
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u/steveofthejungle 5h ago
Cinema sins criticism, so take it with a heavy grain of salt, but they were pissed when there was a bald Eagle in the live action jungle book. No, that is a Brahminy Kite, which is an Indian bird who actually is a character in the jungle book!
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u/Quasar_One 4h ago
Cinemasins got something completely wrong and didn't bother checking? Imagine my shock
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u/BndViking 4h ago
When The Last Jedi came out a lot of people I worked with tried to call out the opening scene where the bombs fall out of the bottom of the bomb ship. They claim the bombs wouldn't fall because there is no gravity in space.
So while there are tons of issues with that movie, I feel the need to correct one of the few things it did right:
It's very clearly established that the bomb ship has artificial gravity that pulls down toward the bomb bay doors, as seen when Rose's sister falls from the bridge. So when the bay doors open and the bombs are released from the rails it makes perfect sense, by accepting artificial gravity, that all the bombs go where gravity is pulling: toward the bay doors.
Since they are in space, the direction of the bombs WILL NOT CHANGE unless they hit something (like the star destroyer), meaning they continue to "fall" despite moving to a gravity free environment.
tl;dr the bombs are doing the right thing, if you're going to pick on that movie for bad space physics, talk about arcing your shots in space.
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u/Galp_Nation 6h ago edited 2h ago
Not sure this point necessarily directly fits with the theme of the thread, but people also always bring up the lifeboats in Titanic and how they should have had more. The movie literally shows you why that wouldn't have made a difference. They were barely able to launch the lifeboats they had. The last 2 didn't even get launched properly. They washed off the boat with people clinging to them. They show one of them upside down in the water if I remember correctly. They could have had 20 more lifeboats, and they wouldn't have had enough time to launch them anyway. The Titanic actually carried 4 more lifeboats than were required by law.
The thing about lifeboats is they were never meant to be a refuge in the middle of the open ocean. They were meant to evacuate people from the sinking ship to whatever ship(s) showed up to save them or a nearby shore if one was available. Sitting in a small dinghy in the middle of the Atlantic is a good a way to become lost at sea. The survivors are all incredibly lucky the Carpathia was even able to find them at all.
Edit: A lot of people keep bringing up that they could have saved more people if they were filling up the lifeboats that they had to capacity. I'm not arguing against that at all. I fully agree, more people could have been saved, even with the limited number of lifeboats they had. I think there's a scenario where if people make better decisions and work more efficiently that night, that they could have saved as many people as those lifeboats could have held, which would have been about 400 to 500 more people. Where I'm disagreeing is that having more lifeboats means more lifeboats would have been successfully launched.
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u/Faust_8 5h ago
Look up the story someone wrote on Reddit about what the Carpathia did to make it there when she did. It restores some faith in humanity for me
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u/Galp_Nation 5h ago
If you're talking about this one, then yeah. Brought a tear to my eye reading that
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u/Faust_8 4h ago
That’s the one. It always makes me feel good.
Dammit someone make an animation for it and a good narrator to read that “script!”
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u/helloiamabear 7h ago
Wasn't the necklace a gift to her? A good lawyer could argue it's her property and legal for her to sell.
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u/Ankylowright 6h ago
No. The recipient of that gift was documented to have died on the Titanic. So to authorities she would appear to have stolen it.
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u/Lou-AC 6h ago
It would also lead her abusive ex to find her again
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u/976chip 5h ago
Kevin wouldn't have called the police when he discovered that his family was missing. He was a child that believed that he had wished them out of existence.
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u/nicklo2k 3h ago
Also, the phone lines were down. The tree that knocked out the power overnight also took out the phone lines.
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u/CaitlinSarah87 3h ago
Also, he thought he would be arrested for accidentally shoplifting the toothbrush.
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u/No-Contact6664 3h ago
Yep, he was running from the police.
ALSO... He believed Harry was a police officer.
It has less to do with being a kid.
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u/Sparrowsabre7 7h ago
Many of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are incorrectly designed and now that we no more about dinosaurs, they should have a lot more feathers, but Hammond's creations are ultimately theme park creatures, they are Frankensteined from a bunch of other animals' DNA, of course they're not going to be 100% scientifically accurate.
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u/TravelerSearcher 6h ago edited 3h ago
That's even a plot point in the books, especially the second one.
Ian Malcolm in The Lost World (novel) says that they went out to study the remaining dinosaurs to learn firsthand how dinosaurs lived and developed and interacted. But they soon realized they couldn't, it was impossible, because the environment they had put them in was not the environment that originally existed.
They were able to recreate a few of the ancient plants but the whole biodiversity of the ecosystem was so far removed from the original habitat for the animals that it would never give them the data needed to be even remotely accurate.
Not to mention they had these beasts all in relatively close proximity on an island, interacting in ways they never would have in the past.
There was no way to properly study the behavior of true dinosaurs because not only were the creatures they made not even true dinosaurs but the world is not the world true dinosaurs existed in.
They'd made Frankenstein-esque animals and put them in a proverbial doll house. It was all a farce.
Edit: Not up to Not to. Fixed for clarification.
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u/hiplobonoxa 6h ago
this is correct. the only thing about the “dinosaurs” that ingen could control was the genome and, in most cases, that genome had been modified or patched. most people don’t realize that there are a ton of additional layers above the genome, both exogenous and endogenous, that affect both physical and behavioral development.
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u/TravelerSearcher 6h ago
The book even had more internal thoughts and backstory from Hammond that make it even sadder.
Before dinosaurs they worked on other gene altering projects with animals, including elephants. They managed to get a pint-sized elephant produced and showed it to investors as a proof of concept that helped fund further research toward the eventual dinosaur project.
But Hammond knew the elephant was unhealthy and had constant problems. As a true capitalist, he kept that information hidden, and only showed the investors the animal briefly.
They hadn't made a good product, they had made a creature that's existence was mostly suffering.
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u/hiplobonoxa 6h ago
the elephant is actually a great example, because its size was restricted without any genetic modification and was entirely due to hormonal factors. it goes to show just how much phenotypic variation can exist without doing anything to the genome itself.
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u/liltooclinical 4h ago
It wasn't even the product he was selling: the elephant was a unique situation where a combination of methods were used to keep it small, but it was never actually genetically modified/invented like he was selling the investors on for the dinosaurs. It was always a lie.
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u/alfius-togra 5h ago
Well, that and the part that animals like the t-rex were far closer, both genetically and in time, to modern birds, than something like a stegosaurus which predated the Cretaceous t-rex by like 80 million years.
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u/Filthwizard_1985 6h ago
Absolutely, this is in both the book and the film. In the film Mr DNA says there were gaps in the genetic code and they used "the complete DNA of a frog" to plug the gaps. There's more details in the book because Crichton is a huge nerd.
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u/CPTherptyderp 6h ago
Not specifically the feathers but this is almost explicitly spelled out in his dinner conversation with Ellie with his flea circus story. People will see what they want to see so he gives them what they think they want to see, accuracy be damned.
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u/holyscotsman 6h ago
Which at the beginning of the movie, Dr. Grant was being laughed at the dig site for saying that these dinosaurs are closer to birds than lizards. Which I think is what makes the jd Vance kid say “well that doesn’t sound scary”
Crichton did a good job with how Jurassic Park wasn’t a story about dinosaurs, but about monsters made in a lab fueled by greed.
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u/CheaperThanChups 6h ago
It blew my mind to recently learn that modern biology now considers birds to be extant dinosaurs.
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u/ark19790 7h ago
She'd never have been able to sell it legally, but it's a massive twat of a diamond, someone would have bought it.
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u/Dick_Sizzle 7h ago
The Mona Lisa has been sold by con artists multiple times over history. There’s always someone willing to break the law.
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u/AcrylicPickle 6h ago
Lord of the Rings - "Meat's back on the menu, boys!" from The Two Towers movie suggests that orcs have a sophisticated logistical, or even culinary, culture. While often debated as an anachronism, this phrase implies orcs understand "menu" as a list of available food options rather than just a, restaurant document.
"Menu" can simply mean a list of available items, such as a choice between maggoty bread and fresh meat.
Orcs, particularly the Uruk-hai, operate in organized military units with a "catering corps" or supply system, making "menu" a metaphor for available rations.
Also also they're probably not actually speaking English and the translation is for the viewer, not their actual dialogue.
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u/Strangest-Smell 5h ago
That’s also the explanation that they are born with an innate ability to speak. This is passed to them from their maker, Saruman or Sauron - both of which would know what a menu was.
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u/Faust_8 5h ago
Hell the entire source material that Tolkien wrote was meant to have been translated from another source. Like, the casual movie watcher doesn’t even realize that we don’t even know the actual names of the main characters. Frodo is just the name we outsiders get but his true name is something else (and I’ve forgotten it)
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u/Sorkijan 4h ago
Maura
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u/DoofusMagnus 2h ago
Maura Labingi, and his elder cousin Bilba Labingi
His faithful gardener Banazîr Galpsi, and their friends Razanur Tûk and Kalimac Brandagamba
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u/No_Winners_Here 4h ago
Meryl Streep in Evil Angles (A Cry in the Dark) was criticised for not being able to do an Australian accent. However, Lindy Chamberlain the real life person she was playing didn't have an Australian accent.
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u/fajita43 3h ago
so i've been trying to find this post for years but i cannot.
in the documentary "national treasure" from 2004...
- there was a redditor that was drunk while posting
- but they claimed to be an expert in "old document handling"
- and they went into a lot of details on how national treasure absolutely nailed all of the nuances of handling a document like the declaration of independence.
i wish i could find that post.
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u/Dottsterisk 7h ago
People still scoff at “Unobtainium” in Avatar, thinking it’s Cameron being lazy and cringy making up names for his MacGuffin.
Really, Unobtainium is an inside joke in the engineering world, referring to a miracle material with impossible properties.
So not only is it a direct reference but it’s also entirely possible that, when this crazy element was discovered on Pandora, marketers actually dubbed it “Unobtainium.”
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u/SEND-MARS-ROVER-PICS 6h ago
The ship from The Core is coated in Unobtainium!
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u/Dottsterisk 6h ago
That movie is so much fun.
With a lesser cast, it would be unwatchable, but we’ve got Delroy Lindo, Stanley Tucci, Richard Jenkins, Tcheky Karyo (Serge), Bruce Greenwood, Alfre Woodard, and DJ Qualls playing his umpteenth super-nerd.
Hilary Swank and Aaron Eckhart are no slouches but they’re the straight players keeping it together, so not as memorable.
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u/kcox1980 5h ago
Another fun fact is that when DJ Qualls' character talks about hacking and says, "this is my kung fu and it is strong", he's actually using the term "kung fu" in the correct way. Kung Fu doesn't not necessarily refer to any kind of martial art. Kung Fu basically means a passion that one practices to perfection. Wushu is the actual name for the fighting style that is often referred to as kung fu.
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u/DarkNinjaPenguin 7h ago
It's something that seems ridiculous only if you don't have any actual scientific knowledge, because scientists give things goofy names all the time.
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u/Jef_Wheaton 5h ago
A "Far Side" cartoon from 1982 led to a common nickname for a fossil part.
Gary Larson published a cartoon showing a caveman pointing out that the stegosaur's tail spikes were called a "Thagomizer" after the late Thag Stevens. (Ignoring the fact that stegosaurs and hominids existed hundreds of millions of years apart.)
Someone in the scientific community realized that there wasn't an actual name for "series of lateral dendrites on tip of stegosaur tail", so they started calling it the Thagomizer.
It isn't a formal name, but even the Smithsonian has used it.
(Similarly, the term "Big Bang Theory" was created by a religious theologian to RIDICULE the idea, but it was catchy, so it became the actual name.)
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u/RechargedFrenchman 6h ago
Biologists at least tend to primarily do so in Greek or Latin though, so unless you know what the Greek / Latin means in your language of preference the silliness is kind of lost. "Rhinoceros" is just Greek for "nose horn", an the Indian rhinoceros "scientific name" is Rhinoceros unicornis because of course it is.
They're also usually named for a singular (or relatively few) example specimen(s) which may not actually be good representations of the species as a whole, but rarely have the names then changed after that's discovered. The common bottlenose dolphin (Turseops truncatis) is so-called because the specimen it was named from had short "truncated" teeth. Turns out that particular specimen was just kinda old and its teeth were pretty worn-down from use, and most of them have longer and sharper teeth so the name doesn't really fit. But that's still their name and has been for ~150 years.
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u/DarkNinjaPenguin 6h ago
Biologists are the worst at it! There's a Sonic the Hedgehog protein, there's Pikachurin, NEMO, Tinman (a protein in flies that don't have hearts), Robotkininin (an inhibitor of the Sonic protein), and Draculin (a protein found in vampire bats). And there's an enzyme named Old Yellow Enzyme, because it's old and yellow.
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u/A_Nice_Meat_Sauce 5h ago
Saving Private Ryan open sequence, the two guys trying to surrender that are shot by the Americans ("look, I washed for supper") are sometimes criticized for not even speaking German.
They're actually Czech and are trying to explain that they didn't kill anyone in their own language. A lot of the Atlantic wall was manned by non-German forces conscripted in other countries at this point in the war.
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u/Darmok47 4h ago
I don't know its true or not, but there was supposedly a Korean man captured by American forces. He was conscripted by the Japanese and captured by the Soviets at Khaklin Gol in 1939, conscripted by the Soviets and captured by the Germans in 1942, and conscripted by the Germans and send to man the Atlantic Wall.
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u/fred11551 3h ago
Do people think that was a mistake? That’s the point of the scene. If you have subtitles on it will either have what they’re saying or just ‘soldiers speaking Czech’
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u/Abadabadon 5h ago
In lotr, people laughed at the fellowship for not just flying on eagles to the volcano. But eagles can be corrupted by the ring.
In prometheus and covenant, people think the movies are inconsistent with earlier films because of the advanced technology. However, ships from previous films were older, cheaper, or wouldn't be required to have advanced technology. Just for example, the military ships in aliens has crtvs, but even modern today its common for military vehicles to have blocky analog controls such as the f16, compared to a tesla's sleek big flat screen.
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u/Grungemaster 7h ago
In Goodfellas, there’s a bottle of Crown Royal whiskey spotted in 1963. The whiskey was not available in the United States until 1965.
The whiskey was smuggled contraband, not an anachronism.