I hardly notice any, but watching Star Trek:TNG I just noticed 2 today.

In the first 30sec of "Relics", Cmdr Riker and Picard stand by a seated Data at his usual console, then all 3 walk to the back of the bridge, only for the camera to cut to Cmd Riker and Picard walking back down to a seated Data, in his original chair (operations console iirc the name)



In the episode "Schisims", Riker sits down at the operations console, ~17m30s, and there's a close in shot of the console, and you see 2 philips screw heads. I'm sure that's not meant to be there.

 

So... what's the point? Very few shows or movies don't make tons of mistakes. Most of them are egregious. I just got done enduing an episode of Hawaii Five-O where the main bad guy fires off seven shots from a .38 revolver during a store robbery, runs out the door and immediately fires another thirteen shots.

I was on a plane one time and was seated next to an independent film producer and I asked her why these kinds of stock, well-known, gaffs make it into movies and TV shows all the time and she said that editors have a limited amount of material to work with and dealing with these things is not even on their radar because it is well-known in the industry that audiences just don't care. I have to admit that everything I've seen indicates that she's right. She also said that audiences expect a whole slew of nonsense stuff that they've been inundated with and so that any movie that were to actually portray them accurately would turn off audiences who, by and large, want to see what they expect to see. There's a range of plot elements that they are willing to be "surprised" by, but not the underlying stuff. If someone shoots a propane tank, they expect a huge explosion. If someone shoots a propane tank and it doesn't explode, THAT's when they will howl about how poor and unrealistic the scene was.

As for the Phillips head screws on the console... what's the issue. Was there something in the show that made it unreasonable for them to use screws in whatever century that was set in?

 

List some more mistakes in shows, thats the point

 

List some more mistakes in shows, thats the point

That's gonna me a HUGE, long list even if you just randomly pick a single TV series to focus on.

It would be much more interesting (from my perspective anyway) to try to identify the shows with the fewest mistakes and then see what people can find to try to prune the list and identify the handful of shows that are standouts in this regard. Of course, what's a mistake can be quite subjective, but it would be interesting none-the-less.

One thing that would need to be agreed is that a show is allowed to establish its own reality, within reason for the type of show, and anything that is consistent with that reality is not a countable mistake while things that are inconsistent with it, even if they are perfectly fine in the "real world" would still be a countable mistake.

 

What about the Starbucks cup that appeared in ‘Game of Thrones’?

 

What about the Starbucks cup that appeared in ‘Game of Thrones’?

That would certainly qualify. For the most part, shows like Game of Thrones are hard to pin down on most mistakes because they have their own universe with its own rules and many mistakes can be easily swept under the rug by just inventing a new rule.

You've also got the air tank and plumbing that was revealed in one of the chariots in The Gladiator.

 

Oh, people. Movies are based on suspension of disbelief. Like you bought into it when you bought your ticket so just enjoy it. This whole thing about finding mistakes is just stupid. Do you walk around all day looking for mistakes? Get a life.

 

Oh, people. Movies are based on suspension of disbelief. Like you bought into it when you bought your ticket so just enjoy it. This whole thing about finding mistakes is just stupid. Do you walk around all day looking for mistakes? Get a life.

I have no problem with people that take that position and if they choose to completely suspend all disbelief that's fine. I'm more than willing to suspend disbelief within limits. I do have some problem, though mostly of the sigh and shake your head variety, at the people that suspend disbelief to the point that they then believe the crap they are watching. How many people have gotten themselves are others killed trying to do something they saw in a movie or on TV and believed it? How many people watch a movie about some actual person or event and believes everything in it?

As for nitpicking mistakes, think of it as a game and exercise in observation and critical thinking skills. If it's a game you see no point in playing, then by all means don't participate.

I tend to be the most critical of shows that claim to be accurate portrayals of something and turn out to not even be close. It doesn't matter whether it is about some historical event or some living person or whether the claim is that they put in all this effort to get the science and technology and procedures about something just right and are so far off the mark that what they show is simply not even physically possible, like a pressurized tube being used to suck something out of a vacuum chamber on the basis that as the gas in the tube exits, it has to be replaced with the powder in the chamber.

Another aspect of the nitpicking is, admittedly, wry frustration with all of these super high paid screen writers and directors and editors who can't get the simplest things right.

 

Another aspect of the nitpicking is, admittedly, wry frustration with all of these super high paid screen writers and directors and editors who can't get the simplest things right.

For the most part they just don't care if it makes a buck.

https://people.com/movies/movie-executive-wanted-julia-roberts-to-play-harriet-tubman-reactions/

“I wanted to turn Harriet Tubman’s life, which I’d studied in college, into an action-adventure movie. The climate in Hollywood, however, was very different back then,” Howard told Focus Features. “I was told how one studio head said in a meeting, ‘This script is fantastic. Let’s get Julia Roberts to play Harriet Tubman.’ “

Howard said that while the unnamed executive’s suggestion was met with resistance by the studio, some in the room said, “It was so long ago. No one is going to know the difference.’ “

 

Did you think Moe really stuck his fingers in Curly's eyes?!?!

 

Did you think Moe really stuck his fingers in Curly's eyes?!?!

On occasion! There was no camera trickery (although there were trick props) in their violence. There were no stunt men. Notice that most of the violence came from Moe, as he was the best trained. In fact, he was in demand to train other stunt men. His specialty was the pie fight and was often hired to choreograph such scenes in other movies.

 

There was lots of camera trickery in their pratfall stunts.

 

For the most part they just don't care if it makes a buck.

Agreed. See my original response above. The real frustration should be with the typical audience member for not caring. Given the talent and money available to them, imagine what the film industry could produce if they knew their audiences would reward well-made and accurate films. That wouldn't preclude sci-fi or fantasy at all, but it would mean that those films had to go out of their way to be self-consistent.

 

A couple of recent errors I have spotted, one is a scene supposedly taking place some decades ago and they were opening a beer bottle with a twist off top.
The other was an American actress playing someone who was born and grew up in Paris, she gave it away when she sat down for a meal and used her knife and fork the American style!
Max.

 

Agreed. See my original response above. The real frustration should be with the typical audience member for not caring. Given the talent and money available to them, imagine what the film industry could produce if they knew their audiences would reward well-made and accurate films. That wouldn't preclude sci-fi or fantasy at all, but it would mean that those films had to go out of their way to be self-consistent.

Good sci-fi should have at least one impossible thing.

 

A couple of recent errors I have spotted, one is a scene supposedly taking place some decades ago and they were opening a beer bottle with a twist off top.
The other was an American actress playing someone who was born and grew up in Paris, she gave it away when she sat down for a meal and used her knife and fork the American style!
Max.

There are different kinds of errors -- I think there's even a name for many of them, such as continuity errors when someone is shown getting up from a chair and the next shot shows them still sitting. I tend to put all of them onto an "error spectrum" that goes from "forgivable sins" on one end to "unforgivable sins" on the other. Each type of error probably has mistakes that span the entire spectrum, but as a whole would be lumped somewhere along the scale. I would image that what I call "place and time" mistakes are among the most common and, in most cases, are essentially unavoidable and fall into the forgivable sins arena. Examples would include the beer bottle twist cap (though that's clearly avoidable) and capturing modern vehicles in the distant background when filming a period piece on location. Also, the general budget of the film can shift mistakes along the spectrum. I would expect a high-budget film to do a better job of making sure that all of the cars used were no newer than the time the film was set in, but I would grant a lot of leeway for a low-budget film that used cars that were of the right era and had the look of cars of the time but that were actually several years newer than the setting.

I find errors that reveal the movie making process to largely be on the unforgivable end of the spectrum just because these are the kinds of things that the editors should be looking specifically for. But allowances have to be made when they decide to use a shot that has such a mistake in it and they knew it did but that they either had no choice because of it's importance to the film or they decided that it added more than the potential subtraction for the few that would be likely to notice.

 

Good sci-fi should have at least one impossible thing.

I don't know that I would agree with that. What I consider to be good sci-fi (in this regard) is work that has a fairly minimal set of rules that violate our current understanding of the possible and then craft there story to not only be consistent with those rules but that also look at the broader impact of those rules on society. But I think you can have good sci-fi without breaking any existing rules at all.

 

I always found it funny all the old cars looked brand new and none were blowing out an oil smokescreen.

 

I don't know that I would agree with that. What I consider to be good sci-fi (in this regard) is work that has a fairly minimal set of rules that violate our current understanding of the possible and then craft there story to not only be consistent with those rules but that also look at the broader impact of those rules on society. But I think you can have good sci-fi without breaking any existing rules at all.

That's why I linked to the levels of impossible. Sometimes things that look mundane in sci-fi movies are really the most 'impossible'. The Transporter“Heisenberg Compensator” is an example.

When the Star Trek creators came up with the idea of Heisenberg Compensators, they were asked how they worked. Their response? "They work very well, thank you."

 

That's why I linked to the levels of impossible. Sometimes things that look mundane in sci-fi movies are really the most 'impossible'. The Transporter“Heisenberg Compensator” is an example.

When the Star Trek creators came up with the idea of Heisenberg Compensators, they were asked how they worked. Their response? "They work very well, thank you."

Again, if a show wants to invent some new laws of physics that's fine with me. My opinion will be based on the degree to which they adhere to their own rules. Shows like Star Trek, in all its variations, were horrible about doing so while at the same time conning a huge fraction of their fans into believing that they did a wonderful job at it. By the same token, if a show just wants to through out technobabble with no attempt to claim it is anything other than that, I can at least respect them for that, even if my opinion of the underlying quality of the plot is commensurate with the technobabble approach.