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.
What was it he said?
"There's nothing more exhilarating than pointing out the shortcomings of others."
Less Talk, More Beer.
A harsh opinion? Perhaps. But sometimes it is the only way I can explain this middle school "neener neener neener" stuff. I would like to see these people work on a major motion picture and see how they feel afterwards.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
Some of these are pretty thin:
... leave it to the screenwriters.
"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."
I can just see some pimply faced teenager sitting in his mom's basement thinking.... "It'd only make sense that he'd act this way. if i were Doc ock, thats what I'd do. Then re-enacting the whole thing with his spiderman action figures to prove himself right." Give it a rest. It's a fictional movie about fictional characters that's incredibly entertaining. Make your lists about the gaffer screwing up, but when it comes to how a character that's got some metalic arms fused to his back would respond after throwing a car through a window at a cafe
I'm sure these were the same people who objected to the ents in LOTR as trees seldom pick up roots and walk, or pointed out the time travel anomalies in Harry Potter and the prisoner of Azkaban (sp?) with respect to special relativity.
It's called suspending disbelief, and some people, it would appear, are incapable of doing it.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World" 1 John 4:14
You act as though you think the people on that site do nothing but critique and criticise the movies they see. Is it so hard to believe that some people can watch a movie, enjoy it, and then at a later date enjoy poking fun at the obvious mistakes the movie makers let slip? You act as if these people NOT having orgasms in their seats over every movie ever made is the worst thing to ever happen. As you said: "It's a movie, for christ's sake!"
In real life, tritium's a gas. It's not a metal at anything anywhere close to room temperature and one atmosphere.
Which brings me to my point. Would you be more satisfied if the substance had just been referred to as bolognium, or less satisfied? In other words, are you giving them points for putting the ideas "tritium" and "fusion" in proximity to one another, or taking off points for getting the amount of tritium wrong?
I write in my journal
I get the impression that both Spider-Man movies take place in the near (but not immediate) future. For instance, in the first one, they're celebrating a "World Unity Day" (some kind of PC World's Fair) and the military is testing advanced exosuits. (Not to mention that weird neutron grenade that the Goblin uses to disintegrate the Oscorp board.) In the second one, Jameson's son is an astronaut who has already been to the moon. Little background details like that make it easier to assume, for the purposes of the story, that somebody (maybe even Octavius) has perfected a more efficient means of harvesting tritium.
Actually the technicality here is that they never mentioned how pure the tritium was.
In this case they only needed 0.001% pure tritium, so the size of the ball was entirely plausable.
-Adam
i liked the movie, but i did not like the demonization of fusion in spider man ii
in a world of smog and wars fought over oil prices (pro-iraq war people: read why iraq invaded kuwait, anti-iraq war people: read why us invaded iraq) we do not need an ultra-pop movie demonizing one of the few technologies which could save us from the petroleum age
in spider man ii, fusion can go "chernobyl", this is a fallacy
if something goes wrong with a fusion reaction, it just fizzles out, it can NEVER start a chain reaction
in spiderman ii, fusion is the megalomaniacal goal of the evil mastermind, and his obsession threatens to blow up half of manhattan... but much like that old '90s film "chain reaction", with keanu reeves, you can't blow up half of wisconsin or manhattan with a fusion reaction, noways, nohow, never
so we don't need hollywood spreading flat out wrong and fearmongering ideas about a promising technology
there is no runaway chain reaction component to fusion, please get it right hollywood... or do you like the global warming, choking on diesel exhaust, war-for-oil world we live in?
ps: fusion reactions are not super-magnets either: in the movie, anything metal got sucked towards them
pps: it WAS funny and harmless how the fusion reaction is portrayed as a miniature sun in the movie, complete with coronal mass ejections threatening doc ock's control of the reaction...
perhaps that is vaguely educational too, fusion's connection with the sun shown as a visual parable, to portray it that way
but hollywood, PLEASE: fusion is not fission, do not let forth the hounds of ignorance and fearmongering onto a promising technology, please!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
One thing is bugging me about your comment....
Did you ever read the comic books? Really. You're wondering how robotic arms could attach to someone's spine, but you're OK with the fact that there's a guy that can shoot webs out of his wrists?
I think some people actually go out of their way to NOT enjoy a movie at times. Just sit back, relax, and ignore the stupid shit. It's a fantasy movie, for chrissakes.
An important concept that comes into play from the bean counters is "time value of money"... that is, the investors in the film want their millions back ASAP because even if the film gives them more money back, that has to be compared to how much their capital would have made had it been invested in something else or just sitting in a bank.
In short, giving up that director's fee had to equate to the interest the investor's money would have made over the six-month delay, or the bean counters woulda vetoed it.
People like movies for different reasons. While to you, all of this nitpicking is annoying, I think that for some people it is part of the fun. In any case, I had fun watching the movie tonight just straight up for the themes it addressed, and the story, but I am not annoyed that people do this nit picking. To each his own, you know?
Articles posted to Slashdot this month already have over 30 mistakes! Critics claims that some articles posted on the popular technology news site are even duplicates of articles already posted. And those that aren't duplicates, one reader claims, are often riddled with typos.
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suwain_2
It's called suspending disbelief, and some people, it would appear, are incapable of doing it.
I'll happily suspend belief for the ground rules of the universe. Neither Middle Earth or Harry Potter's world work on plain old science. But those worlds, and more so the world of Spider-Man, share something in common with our world. Completely abstract media isn't popular. The only way we can understand what's going on in the movie is if we have some contact with the real world; there may be elves and humans, but you can kill them all with swords or arrows. There may be radioactive spiders giving people superhuman powers, but water should still boil if you toss superheated stuff into it.
In real life, tritium's a gas. It's not a metal at anything anywhere close to room temperature and one atmosphere.
Gee, I must have missed the pressure gauge on the side of the container.
Personally, I like the idea of trying to stabilize a fusion reaction by just poking it back every time it starts to go unstable...
Just to be fair, the physics of Doc Oc's arms seems to have been fairly well thought out. Whenever he's lifting something heavy with two arms, he's always got the other two providing him a reasonable base. This is fairly unusual--I often see "strong" characters in movies lifting things in a physically impossible manner. They also, in this movie and the previous one, manage to make Spidey's swinging look quite plausible, which is quite an accomplishment (although making that much web is another matter, as has been pointed out before)
Fishnet stockings? That would put a whole different spin on why Mr. Parker was a social outcast.
I'm so sick of reading these nitpicker lists where 98% of the so-called errors are trivial continuity errors. Real issues are fun to read and discuss, but I don't really give a crap that George Castanza didn't have the ketchup in his hand when they cut to Jerry, but Jerry's witty rejoinder makes him squirt ketchup across the table when he jump cuts back. Big deal. On the other hand, real plot holes or complete inconsistencies can be fun to talk about. For instance when Michael Moore claims Bush let the Saudis out of the U.S. when all the planes were grounded, pointing out the fact that it was actually Richard Clarke (the _terrorism_ guy) and the flight ban had been lifted, so nothing wrong was done is useful and instructive. That's an error worth pointing out. Unfortunately, these lists are usually just exercises in people's powers of observing insignificant minutia, and the fact that directors often flip the film (or even run it backwards like they did in helicopter shot in The Two Towers) seems to provide the majority of the issues.
Here's one for free: In "This Island Earth" Dr. Meacham and his lady friend duck under the water to escape the explosion of the car driven by Russell Johnson's character. The next scene shows them stepping onto land and they are clearly dry. Woo hoo! I'm a GENIUS!
The reward for such powers of perceptiveness were skillfully and cleverly satirized by the infamous Marvel No-Prize, until the dolt readers became incensed that they never got anything and Marvel actually had to start sending something out.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Radiation was cool/hip in the 50's and 60's when the comics were written, and passe when SP1 came out.
When SP2 comes out, automatic firewalls will be the the new hotness mutation.
Seriously though, in the days of Shelley's "Frankenstein", electricity was the "new hotness mutation". The effects are the same, but we change the causes to take advantage of the latest buzzwords. I'm sure when they remake "Spiderman" in 3D Holovid in 2050, the spider will have been altered with tachyons or (insert your favorite Star Trek-like technobable that becomes reality here).
(p.s. IANAP... tachyons are still considered only theoretical, right?)
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
There may be radioactive spiders giving people superhuman powers, but water should still boil if you toss superheated stuff into it.
I always assumed that the mentality for movies was "this is the same word as you... except..."
And then you filled in the blank, with the one or two "impossible" or "unbelievable" premises required for the movie. Anything that the movie does not attempt to explain, or that I can't understand on my own, I have to assume functions the same way as it does in real life.
I can only answer from my experience: having a friend who's a director, having been on the sets of two, big Hollywood movies and having had a girlfriend who was an editor;
No. Sometimes small mistakes have to be left in because there isn't enough coverage an a particular shot to find another angle which is usable, but most mistakes are just that: mistakes. A movie like Spiderman is an immense undertaking. At a minimum you're talking several years of effort, over a thousand people employed in various roles, coordinating several units shooting simultaneously and cutting down millions of feet of film into a two hour final project. In an undertaking that large, mistakes are inevitable.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
Well, there was no sound in space on Firefly...and it got canned.
(Yeah, it's OT, but not VERY OT)
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."