Glaring Movie Mistakes People Should Have Caught Sooner
Movies are an expensive, difficult process where anything can essentially go wrong at any time. They often go over-budget and take longer to make than anticipated, they can involve harsh or even dangerous shooting conditions, and nobody involved knows whether people will even like the movie when it’s completed.
That said, some mistakes are still baffling even with this context in mind. When a random person off the street can tell you what’s wrong with a scene, that’s a bad sign. Nonetheless, some of the biggest movies in film history have let some whoppers into the final cut.
Mission Impossible (1996)
Although it’s true that so many movies about secret agents get this wrong, Mission Impossible catches the blame in this case, as it’s one of the most popular movies to feature the trope. When Ethan Hunt and another agent crawl through the vents at CIA Headquarters, viewers noted that the vents were standard galvanized steel box vents.
This means that sneaking through such vents would be effectively impossible, because steel box vents make a thunderous racket whenever somebody walks on them or crawls inside of them. If Hunt tried to sneak into the CIA Headquarters that way, he would have been discovered within minutes.
Sonic The Hedgehog (2020)
During one of the moments like this where things get tense in the first Sonic The Hedgehog movie, Tom and Sonic pull over as a mini drone is exploding. This knocks Sonic unconscious but doesn’t attract any outside attention, as Tom and Sonic are isolated when this happens.
However, it seems that as the camera pans away from this moment, it also shows that they’re not as alone as they appear. On the right side of the shot during this pan, a group of emergency vehicles can be seen blocking the road. Since nobody else mentions the drone at this point, those vehicles are clearly there to block off the film set. Oops.
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Although Luke Skywalker was certainly established as being Force-sensitive by The Empire Strikes Back, one mistake accidentally had the movie giving him more powers than he had learned at the time. Thanks to one sloppily-dubbed line, he appeared telepathic when he had no reason to be.
Shortly before Skywalker meets Yoda on Dagobah, he tells R2-D2, “Now all we’ve got to do is find this Yoda, if he even exists.” However, Mark Hamill’s mouth passively hangs open as he moves his head during this line, making it blatantly obvious that he didn’t actually say it during filming.
Shrek (2001)
One might expect an animated movie set in a fantasy world to be immune from any criticisms that it’s unrealistic but Shrek still finds a way to make a glaring mistake that defies physics. How is that possible? Well, the mistake doesn’t concern anything magical but something mundane.
Specifically, the door on Shrek’s hut doesn’t make any sense. It opens outwardly in this photo but it also opens inwardly at other parts of the movie. It also can’t be a door that swings both ways, as Shrek tends to slam it shut against its frame when he’s annoyed. Amazing how the most unbelievable thing in Duloc turns out to be a simple door in the swamp.
Commando (1985)
After chasing down one of the movie’s most significant villains, John Matrix and Cindy can be seen standing by this yellow Porsche, which has some clear damage to its left side. However, it seems that damage isn’t quite as clear throughout the scene.
Although the damage appears consistent when Matrix and Cindy arrive at a hotel in the next scene, the car is suddenly in pristine order when Matrix first drives it away after this shot. If only real cars could forget they were damaged like that.
Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
Sometimes, a movie’s crew will acknowledge a mistake but still want to keep it in for aesthetic or narrative reasons. Although some have noted that the surface-to-air missile platforms in Top Gun: Maverick shouldn’t have had a fighter squadron attacking them at all, there was also a different military inaccuracy at play when the fighting began.
The pilots used flares to protect their jets from guided missiles but the unfortunate truth is that they only work against heart-seeking missiles. Instead, fighter pilots unleash chaff (clouds of aluminum strips) to jam the radars of other guided missiles. Flares are easier to identify to a moviegoing audience, so those are used instead.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
For a scrappy, independent movie like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, mistakes are inevitable. At the same time, some mistakes are a lot more effective at taking people out of the movie once they notice them than others.
Although it’s brief, such a moment occurs at the end of “Hot Patootie Bless My Soul,” when Eddie takes his motorcycle up onto the ledge behind him in this photo. Once he comes back down and the party guests run away, it’s revealed that more of them were invited than it seemed. In other words, some film equipment and members of the camera crew can be seen on the right as the guests run from Eddie.
Die Hard 2 (1990)
In the climactic scene in Die Hard 2, John McClane and Colonel Stuart fistfight on the wing of a plane, only for McClane to get knocked off the wing. However, he took off the plane’s fuel cap on the way down and lights a trail of jet fuel that runs through the snow to catch up with Stuart’s plane, exploding it.
However, lighting that fuel would accomplish far less in real life. He likely wouldn’t be able to light the fuel before the plane was already gone and even if he did, the fuel would already be too dispersed to make such a clear path to the plane. Even if all of this could miraculously happen as it does in Die Hard 2, the fuel simply wouldn’t burn fast enough.
The Usual Suspects (1995)
Although The Usual Suspects is a tight, believable crime drama in many ways, the filmmakers were also banking on the audience not noticing that a plane completely transformed in mid-air. To their credit, it seems as though most people didn’t.
Before the movie’s main characters rob a police car shuttling a crime boss, the boss’s plane can be seen landing. When it’s shot from the front, this plane is a Boeing 747. When shot from the back, however, it suddenly has two fewer engines and far less landing gear. That’s because the plane in these rear shots is a 767.
Red Dragon (2002)
When making a prequel, one of the trickiest pitfalls often concerns remembering the time period the earlier story takes place in. That was the exact pitfall that the makes of The Silence Of The Lambs prequel Red Dragon fell into, albeit in a subtle way.
Although the movie doesn’t set itself more precisely than “several years after 1980,” it could only take place before 1991 to make sense as a prequel to The Silence Of The Lambs. When Will Graham is investigating a house in Leeds, however, one of the VHS tapes shown is a copy of Mrs. Doubtfire. Unfortunately, this is impossible because the Robin Williams movie came out in 1993.
Limitless (2011)
Naturally, it’s hard to think of a narrative conflict for a character who can do practically anything, but Limitless tried to make things perilous for Edward Morra after he borrowed $100,000 from a loan shark named Gennady. However, the problem is that there wasn’t any reason for him to do this.
According to the movie, Morra was able to quintuple his money in the stock market every day. Furthermore, his poker winnings suggest that this would be a plausible way for a man of his abilities to amass a lot of money in fairly short order. In other words, Morra put his life at risk for an amount of money it sounds like he could have made within a week.
Con Air (1997)
One can’t typically expect much realism from a silly blockbuster like Con Air but it’s also not often that a mistake comes along that invalidates the entire movie’s premise. However, that’s exactly what happened in the case of Cameron Poe’s trial.
The only reason he was on the flight packed with infamous criminals was because the judge overseeing his case arbitrarily decided to give him a harsher sentence in light of his military service. Not even judges are allowed to play that fast and loose with the law, which means any appeals court would strike the ruling down before Poe served his sentence, thus keeping him off the plane.
Charlie’s Angels (2000)
It’s fair to say that Charlie’s Angels isn’t a terribly realistic movie to begin with, as there’s no way the titular Angels would be able to jump away from explosions as suddenly as they do without any harm. However, any argument that they’re somehow just that amazing doesn’t account for one movie mistake.
After all, even if the Angels could somehow hitch a ride on Eric Knox’s helicopter (which is a Huey like the U.S. used in Vietnam) by dangling on a line shot with a speargun, they wouldn’t be able to do so without Knox noticing. The sudden added weight of three adult women would cause trim and airspeed issues that Knox wouldn’t be able to ignore.
Bruce Almighty (2003)
Although it seems hard to find logical inconsistencies in a movie where a man has the powers of a literal god, Bruce Almighty‘s ending makes a lot less sense once Bruce Nolan becomes an average person again. In the final scene, he reports on a blood drive and is about to give blood himself.
As nice as that sounds, however, his use of a cane in that scene shows he has yet to fully recover after being hit by a car and left clinically dead. In other words, not nearly enough time has passed before the Red Cross or any similar organization would consider it safe for him to give blood.
Battlefield Earth (2000)
Although Battlefield Earth had far more than one glaring issue, one inaccuracy proved significant enough to invalidate the movie’s entire ending. When the humans rise up against the ridiculous-looking alien Psychlos pictured here, they destroy the invaders’ home world with a nuclear weapon. However, that nuke presumably hasn’t been used for centuries.
Most people haven’t worked with nuclear weapons but those who have would know that the detonators and especially the essential tritium need to be replaced on such weapons every decade or so. This is particularly true in the case of tritium, which has a half-life of 12-and-a-half years. Without this regular maintenance, the nuclear weapon doesn’t function at all, as it assuredly wouldn’t if Battlefield Earth really happened.
