Slashdot Mirror
Spider-Man 2 Has Over 30 Mistakes
Jon Sandys writes "Spider-Man 2 may have won over the critics, but the hard-nosed bastards at moviemistakes.com are listing 31 mistakes already - and no, not nitpicky stuff that's different from the comics. A scar swaps sides on Peter Parker's face and dummies are visible in hurled cars, not to mention the numerous errors involving tritium which I'm sure Slashdot readers will enjoy refuting. Read the complete listing on the Spider-Man 2 page." Also, people bitten by spiders don't generally become ultra-powerful.
Plot hole: Harry tells Doc Ock that in order to find Spider-Man he must find Peter first. Doc Ock finds Peter with Mary Jane in the cafe and throws a car through the window straight at them. Any normal man would've been killed instantly, and Doc Ock doesn't know that Peter is Spider-Man. Given that Peter is his only lead on Spider-Man, it makes no sense that Doc Ock would effectively try to kill him.
Continuity: When Peter arrives at his aunt's home at the beginning of the movie, it's night. He talks to Harry in the kitchen a few minutes later, and look at the purple balloon by Peter's head, it reflects a window with lots of light coming through it.
Continuity: During the final conversation between Spider-Man and Doc Ock, the rips in Spider-Man's suit keep changing. For instance, there is a tear on his right shoulder; for most of the scene, there is a single piece of black webbing left holding the rip together, but when Doc Ock grabs Spider-Man's arm, the rip now has two pieces of black webbing. Then it goes back to one.
Continuity: When Peter and Mary Jane are together in his apartment at the end of the film, the collar of Peter's t-shirt keeps changing positions underneath his sweater. Sometimes it is fully visible all the way around, sometimes it's higher on the left or right side, and during the closer shots it isn't visible at all.
Factual error: In the scene where Peter is saving the children from the burning building, there is no smoke from the fire. Black smoke would be bellowing out the windows. He wouldn't be able to just stand up and walk through the building.
Visible crew/equipment: On the way to the theater Peter Parker intercepts policeman chasing a couple of bad guys. At the end of that scene one of the police cars has a tremendous wreck that swings the car sideways. There is a clear shot of the driver with a black helmet on.
Continuity: During the train scene, Spider-man's mask had gone partially black. We also see it when Spidey puts his mask back on. Yet when Doc brings him to Harry, we don't even see a patch of darkness on his mask.
Continuity: Doc Ock pulls the giant sun ball and its support down onto himself, so he should be under it as they descend, yet in the final shot of him sinking into the ocean, the ball is below him and he is falling after it.
Audio problem: It's clear that due to the tentacles' heaviness, they have to made some kind of sound when moving. But yet when Doc Ock takes the tritium from Harry in his house, he leaves without making any sound at all.
Factual error: Nobody would dare to cut a metal piece with a saw without eye protection, much less in a surgical room, like the surgeon that wanted to remove Doc Ock's tentacles.
Revealing: In the scene where Doc Ock comes out of the hospital and throws a car onto another one, you can tell the man in there is just a dummy. He has no reaction what so ever. He just sits there as if nothing happened.
Revealing: In the scene at the end where Spider-Man and Mary Jane are in the big web, there is a close-up which shows the webbing behind them. We can blatantly see that it's wire wrapped in plastic of some kind to make it look like web.
Factual error: Dr. Octavius says his fusion relies on tritium and that there is only 25 pounds of the substance in the world. In reality, tritium is merely an isotope of hydrogen and is a good deal more common than that. For example, there is a large region of the North Pacific that contains tritium-rich salt water. Submitted by Phoenix
Continuity: Peter has a small horseshoe-shaped scar on his right cheek. In Dr. Octopus's lab, as Octopus is destroying the fusion reactor, they share a meaningful look and the scar has switched cheeks.
Factual error: Considering the brightness of the fusion process, Dr. Octavius has to wear special goggles to be able to see it. Yet no one else in the room is wearing such goggles or seem hurt by watching the whole process, just as at the en
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
Fact: Movie stills contain timestamp information. If you "accidentally" created a mirror image by reversing the film, the timestamp would be backwards and the timestamp reader would complain. Somebody would notice. Therefore, mirror image shots are not accidental.
Most of the time a director selects a mirror image shot because he was unable to get the real shot he wanted (it happens in nearly every movie, but it's most noticeable when a main character has a lopsided image). In some cases, the director chooses the mirror image shot to cover up an actual mistake (e.g. the main character went left and he was supposed to go right). Sometimes it's more important to the director for a film to maintain spacial consistency than to keep scars/tatoos/whatever on the right side of the screen. However, you won't always know whether it was a coverup or if the shot was reversed on purpose. In either case, you can be assured that director knows and obviously doesn't care which side the scar is on.
Continuity errors bore me, and I try to ignore the plot holes, but The IMDB's trivia page is often fascinating.
Actually, the US requires a constant inventory of about 30 kilos of the stuff, which must be completely recycled roughly every decade, to maintain the nuclear arsenal. Over forty years, the cost is between $1B-6B depending on how it is produced. So say 120kilos for $3B, or about $25M per kilo, which is still pretty freaking expensive, but nothing that couldn't be attributed to a rounding error in the $2 Trillion federal budget.
c e= 0
http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=831&sequen
No one, including the US or former Soviet government, has ever had that much tritium in one place like that.
Bullshit.
The Hanford Reservation has several square MILES contaiminated with tritium.
It was in the last process stream before discharging it to the ground - over the course of 40 years.
Here's a list of figures showing the groundwater contamination at the Hanford Site. Keep in mind that the area in the boundary is 540 SQUARE MILES. Check out map S-7.
That contamination doesn't include what is trapped in the vadose, the waste streams that have been treated in treatment facilities, and the tritium produced at Savannah River, Pocatello, and New York.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
The bigger the film, the more it costs to fix nitpicky mistakes. Maybe the artistic people notice it and want it fixed, but the bean counters won't let them.
James Cameron delayed the release of Titanic from summer to Christmas in order to fix nitpicky things. IIRC, there was a CG shot of the boat sinking where the prop was turning even though the engine room was underwater. In order to get the release delayed, Cameron gave up his entire director's fee. Luckily, he still got a percentage of the box office and ended up just fine.
-B
1. There is no elevated trains in downtown/midtown Manhattan 2. Shots are frequently switching between a background of midtown, brooklyn, queens, and the village. 3. There is no D'Agostinos on St. Marks 4. etc, etc, etc
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Actually, that sort of left to right switch is usually an intentional error created when the editor and/or director decides that the framing works better in a particular shot if the image is reversed. Sometimes the "errors" are corrected digitally, but most often they are left in as the cost of re-touching the footage outweighs what is arguably a minor detail that most people will miss.
What I find annoying is the number of nitpicky "film flubs" that get posted on sites like the one linked to in the news post that have more to do with the lack of imagination/suspension of disbelief on the part of the viewer than anything else. There are generally a few interesting real errors listed in such places, but they get lost amongst all the chaffe.
Once more unto the breach dear friends...
Let's see...
If we assume that the tritium was present as tritium oxide (heavy heavy water)--which is not an unreasonable way to store the stuff, really--then a 2 kg mass of the stuff would contain about 500 g of pure tritium; that's about (I'm going to work in round figures here) 100 moles of tritium.
Tritium has a specific activity of 28.8 curies per millimole; so we're looking at a total activity of 28800 Ci per mole by 100 moles: about 3 million curies total activity.
Market price for bulk tritium seems to be about $2 per curie, so that sphere contains about six million dollars' worth of tritium. Expensive (call it about two thousand times the price of gold, by weight) but not untenable.
On the other hand, the peaceful commercial use of tritium runs to a half kilogram or so per year. The rest of the usage is in weapons programs, and accounts for a few kilograms.
Canada is the world's major commercial supplier, as tritium is generated as a waste product in its heavy-water moderated and cooled nuclear reactors. More than three kilograms are produced each year, and much of that is presumably stockpiled since Canadian law forbids the export of Canadian tritium for use in weapons programs.
To conclude...two kilograms of fully tritiated water would be expensive, dangerously radioactive, and hard to acquire--but it's not outside the realm of the possible. Actually, you can reduce the tritium requirement a bit by assuming that some of the weight of that sphere is shielding. I also haven't done the calculations for heating due to radioactive decay; you might need to use something that boils at a higher temperature than water, or dilute the stuff a bit. Still, I'd say an upper limit of 500 grams of tritium is a reasonable guess.
~Idarubicin