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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.
Getting a feature film to be internally consistant with itself is not as easy as it seems, and it only gets harder the more shoots and scenes there are.
But there's always a chance to catch these things in editing... in fact, that scar mistake was most likely introduced when somebody took a mirror image of a shot for some reason or another, and forgot that it'd end up reversing the side of the face the scar appears. Sure, that could be fixed in editing, but if they forgot to do it... well, it ends up on that site.
Seems like the bigger the film, the more of these glitches surface as they rush to the box office.
I noticed a lot of things in the movie, like how he kept running into stuff at school, before they were going with him back to being a nerd. I just thought that maybe it was 'cause his powers weren't working, but I don't know...
plus were is the great spider-man chatter during fights? He's a smart-ass yet he's was quiet.
Like in the train, when the people were helping him. I thought I was watching power rangers for a sec, because he didn't say anything, just kept nodding, and looking at people.
but it was a great movie, regardless...
Be seeing you...
Indeed, but radioactive spiders and super powers are forgivable stuff. Stupid stuff (like the Eigenvalue thing, which particularly bugged me) is what really riles the nerds. As Orson Scott Card said, you can ask your audience to believe the impossible, but not the improbable. Writing your own rules are fine, as long as you're up front about it, but doing silly things without an apparent reason will tick some) people off.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
My only real technical complaint was the tritium stuff. The quantity shown being used was impossible to obtain. No one, including the US or former Soviet government, has ever had that much tritium in one place like that. A few hundred milligrams is probably the most anyone has ever had. Let alone a sphere that probably had a mass of around 1-2kg. And for damn sure, if anyone did have it, the price would be so high as to be somewhere around the collective budget of the US government.
But then, what good is a microscopic amount of tritium going to be as a plot device?
"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." Isn't this obviously because Spider Man is well organized and prioritizes his laundry very highly on his daily to-do list? I mean, I can picture him in need of money and getting a Tide endorsement or something -- he'll sew a little logo on the side of his mask.
Two freaks, no foes. It takes absolutely nothing to make some people angry.
So I'm just going to talk about something I wanted to talk about. Did anyone notice a couple of scenes that seemed to have been very distinct visual references to the Matrix? There was the "jump" scene midway through, and there was the "lying in state" bit in the subway scene. Both of those looked so clear and so visually similar to the corresponding shot in the Matrix that I almost suspect they must have been purposeful for some reason, homages or something.
Am I just reading this in?
Maybe the tritium was inside the sphere. Maybe the little metallic buckyball thing was some kind of shielding, or maybe the tritium was diluted throughout it for some reason.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". This is the way it should be in a comic book movie. You should just be grateful they aren't going to bring in Doc Ock II and her "virtual reality bombs".
If you want to poke closely at this, I'd be much more concerned about this mysterious method of fusion which is a self-sustaining, exponentially increasing reaction that you have to control rather than a self-defeating reaction you have to sustain. The entire advantage of fusion over fission is that if you lose control of the reaction it dies out rather than blowing up New York.
The only thing that really caught my eye was how the character with the mechanical arms moved. He walked as if they weren't there, turning around easily with them spread wide. They didn't seem light enough to just spin like that.
It was just a conflicting feel to them that threw me. On one hand they seem like big strong arms slamming through stone without any sign of slowing down. On the other hand they're being carried around without a care in the odd scene.
But while it did stand out, I was very happy with how they handled the arms overall. I think they went to noticable efforts to obey the laws of physics as much as possible without sacrificing other aspects of the film. Often one arm braces while another pushes out, for example.
I also liked the arcing on some of their heavy high-powered wiring when it was being pulled out. I don't think it'd look like that, arcing outwards but they're still trying to visualise real-world effects.
So they get my full support for putting in much more thought and detail into their physics than I expected going in. I'm willing to look past any physics-related errors at this point.
That was Star Wars episode 4, Han Solo claimed he did the Kessel run in less than 10 parsecs.
I bring this up because in the article he refers to the webpage authors (um, aka Jon Sandys) as "hard-nosed bastards". Dude, don't be so, um, hard on yourself there ... you're just, um, doing your job ...
-- (Score:i , Imaginary)
Those white dots might have been the "Weaving the Web" pop-up factoids that are part of the special features of the first movie.
While watching with the pop-ups turned on through the Special Features menu, it allows you to push enter and go to short featurettes of behind-the-scenes stuff. However, at least in my DVD player (a no-name cheapy), even with it turned off, and trying to watch the movie normally, they would flash up for a split-second.
Could be, they were popping up for you too?
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?
That's not what he said at all... he's not doubting the existence of the technology, only that no-one considered the technology worth anything - i.e: the doc is penniless and living in an abandoned warehouse while apparently in sole possession of technology to create almost perfect artificial limbs.
Me and my friends almost died from laughing at the Evil Dead chainsaw refrence. And the best thing was we were the only people in the theater laughing.
Okay, if you drop a super-hot mass of incandescent gas into the Hudson, you're going to get one big fuck-off jet of super-heated steam gushing out, like a mini-explosion. Spidey and MJ should have had the flesh boiled from their bones in a matter of seconds.
But, otherwise I really enjoyed the movie.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
The main thing that annoyed me about spiderman was the way he webbed in and out of certain scenes. The clock tower had no buildings taller than it surrounding it (as you can see as the scene plays out). Yet Spiderman was able to shoot a web onto a nearby imaginary building taller than the clock tower and swing in.
Also the scene where he saves mary jane has several inconsistencies. When he is thrown out of the building he is launched maybe 100ft from the building, yet when he swings back he is maybe 20ft from where his web is attached to when he enters the window. Then we he leaves and picks up mary jane he jumps straight up, webs then is somehow built up enough momentum to be on the upstroke of a swing, yet again attached to another imaginary building. Also as a correction to a submitted mistake, when Doc Ock is underwater, he is still where he was when he entered the water. The fusion rig is obviously upside down people. Man people need to get their eyes examined.
A Fatal OE Exception has occurred, Sig will now reboot.
Actually tritium has a half life of 12.3 years, so **they** lied. You'll need to get it replaced or refilled in 10 years, just like all other tritium-based devices (like gun sights).
now supporting:
cmdrTaco for president '04
michael for oval office intern summer '05
...is when Doc Oc throws spidey *forward*, then Spidey utilizes his cat-like reflexes (they weren't exactly "spider-like" in this instance) to fit through some weird bridge before slamming into Doc Oc... from *behind* the direction in which he had been thrown in the first place.
Now that you know, you're going to be made at me every time you watch this scene. Ha ha.
If they were in a quantum class and talking about energy eigenvalues, it's possible he meant 0.23 eV. There's a few energy eigenvalues you're supposed to know (like the ground state of Hydrogen, -13.6 eV), and from there you can get to a whole bunch more for that system knowing the general form. The energy eigenvalues, E_n, for Hydrogen-like two-body systems go like m/n^2, where m is the reduced mass of the system and n is the energy level. And since all of them are negative, a lot of people don't bother to say it explicitly.
I'm just saying there are possible reasonable explanations that aren't too far fetched. All of this is stuff I learned in sophomore quantum physics. Now if it was a math class instead of physics, solving for an eigenvalue of 0.23 in your head would usually be rediculous.
I am so glad I am an every day movie goer.
Movies are made for people like me. We laugh in the right places, cry for no apparent reason, and we know that Mary Jane constantly has a bad hair day in this movie because she's no longer a high school student being supported by mom and dad, but a struggling actress moving on up, finally making ends meet and who's also suffering from a bad case of Spidey-love.
I don't notice when Spidey's rips and tears move from shoulder to shoulder. I turn a blind eye when the CGI gets cheesey and pretend I'm watching a live action comic book (uh, I am right?).
I think this movie is a chick flick. We'll explain away everything, even the obvious flaws, and we're the ones who leave with hollow feeling in our bellies in sympathy with the emotional and physical ass-kicking Peter Parker takes in this movie.
I loved it, plain and simple. For the most part, they suspended my disbelief. A few CGI blips and the fact that Spidey's identity is now the worst kept secret in the universe, notwithstanding, I felt I got a pretty good bang for my buck(s).
My advice: save the criticism for movies that really, really suck. This movie rocks.
Did anyone notice a physics problem with the train scene? Spiderman was thrown forward at the elevated sidewalk and after he twisted through the slot he was diving forward at Doc Ock who hadn't moved on the train.
Isn't the weird substance needed for the fusion machine "TriLium" instead of "triTium" ?
I know, I know! Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen and trilium doesn't exist. But that could be an undeserved mistake.
In one scene, there are dead leaves blowing around and bare trees, clearly autumn.
Then raindrops keep fallin' on his head, with cherry trees covered in blossoms, clearly spring.
What the fuck did he do all winter?
The best I could say is that in the short lived Spider-Man 2099 comic book, spinnerettes grew as part of the mutation for that particular Spider-Man.
According to IMDB: James Cameron wrote a treatment for this film, over the years, as the rights to the character jumped between companies, nearly all his ideas were scrapped except for the biological web-shooters.
Also from IMDB: In the comics, Peter Parker designed and made Spider-Man's synthetic spider web and the mechanical wrist guns that fire it. In the movie he shoots the web from his own body. Director Sam Raimi answered the protests of comic book fans saying that it was more credible to have Peter shoot web this way than for a high school boy to be able to produce a wonder adhesive in his spare time that 3M could not make.
----- Oooh, Shiny!
Maybe this is silly, but isn't it possible that sometimes the mistakes add to the replay value?
Just a thought... it makes me want to go back and see it again.
Conveniently located blimps?
No, conveniently located New York City buildings. You know, those tall things that are all over Manhattan?
You'll notice that he generally will traverse the street. In other words, to go forwards, he first shoots a web to the top of a building that's in front of him and to the left. Before he smacks into a building, he shoots a web to the top of a building that's in front of him and to the right. Then left, then right. Some artists are more careless about this than others, but the movies seem to be good about that. (The video game that came out along with the first movie was careful to not let you swing as you neared the height of the tallest buildings, but in the interests of fun wasn't too picky about the precise geometry.)
The trick to this is, you need some variations to keep it up. (The rest of this web-slinging description is my own speculation.) If you start at rest, then you can only go down in the above-described manner; by the time you start an upswing, you've smacked into a building. While it's not as precise of a problem once you have a little forward momentum, it's still something to think about. You can get around this a little bit by starting a web pretty close to you in the forward direction (but still across the street and high). This lets you trade momentum to get back some height. But it's still not an easy game; you need one or two more tricks.
One handy trick is to swing on convenient out-jutting overhangings: gargoyles, horizontal flagpoles, etc. This lets you start an upswing without bleeding off as much momentum as you would if you used the across-the-street web trick.
Now, everybody who got through HS physics learned that an unpowered body can't keep this up indefinately, no matter how many geometry tricks you play. You're constantly exchanging kinetic and potential energy, but also bleeding some of that energy off as friction. You occassionally need a boost of energy. Fortunately, Spidey isn't an unpowered body. A quick yank upwards, timed right, and you can introduce a little energy into the system. If you need to stop and look around, you can also climb a nearby skyscraper to give yourself a nice big potential energy bank. Spidey traditionally can do this in a hurry by shooting a webline high and yanking hard on it (proportional strength of a spider, remember) to propel himself upwards. Or, if he's not in a hurry, good ol' wall-crawling works too.
In the original comic, does the webbing actually come from his body, or is it an invention of Peter Parkers?
Yup. Peter was a science whiz, and developed his own webbing material. It's strong, initially adhesive but quick-setting, and breaks down in a couple of hours. This is how it's been in every Spider-Man medium I've seen (lots of them), except the movies.
In the movies, they use organic web shooters. This is mostly to avoid explaining how a high school kid comes up with an adhesive that DuPont Chemicals would kill for. In the comics, it's addressed only vaguely: Peter suspects that he gained some sort of innate understanding of a spider's web when he was bitten. Even this was only discussed years after the comic began.
Spidey normally kept some extra web fluid cartridges on his belt, and sometimes would come up with specialty fluids for defeating particular foes (conductive fluid, geletainizing fluid, etc). But, being the hard-luck superhero, Spidey would inevitably run out of web fluid at the worst possible times. The "out of fluid" moments are almost a cliche of Spidey stories.
In the comics, most people-- heros, civilians, and villians-- assume that the webbing is an innate ability. I believe that he used that to fool villians once into thinking he had his powers when he didn't, but I could be wrong about that.
Also, it's pretty obvious, at least I think so, that Doc Ock didn't throw that car.
When Peter and MJ get up and look back out the window, he's not even in sight yet, he's still coming up a side street. Given that there was a building between him and the diner, it's unlikely that he threw that car. Also, the angle was fairly shallow, so it wasn't thrown over a building, and it came straight through the window, so it came from right out front, not from either side. Unless Doc Ock threw the car, then retreated up that side street and approached again, he didn't throw it.
I figure it was probably someone trying to get away from the approaching menace, or was a side effect of something else Ock did and not a direct action.
Its called "dumbing it down" Sam, fess up.
Exactly. It's not 'realistic' for Peter to invent web shooters, but it is realistic for one or two guys at Oscorp to invent a battlesuit, personal harrier jet the size of a skateboard, and a super-soldier potion?
Peter went from genius to normal high-school boy.
This is the biggest problem that I have with the movies..
Peter being a genius, and actually inventing the webbing, spider-bugs, etc. are a critical not only to his character, but to the stories themselves.
Most of Spiderman's foes are either scientists, or people modified by scientists for evil purposes.
It's important for Peter Parker to be a scientist, because it balances the perception of science. In the comics, science is a neutral force that can be harnessed for good or evil.
The movies change that, so that science is a tool that is only used for evil purposes - and it's up to the 'pure' non-scientist to defeat it.
I think Raimi tried to address this in the first movie (Peter is 'good' at science, and is offered a job at Oscorp), but this failed miserably, as you still never know if he was offered the job just because he was the best friend of the president's son, and "you like science, here's a science job" just isn't the same as actually inventing and creating the tools.
Raimi's excuse is just that, an excuse. And it's a pretty poor one at that.