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.

Comments

Rushed through post-production?

[LostCluster]

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.

Re:Rushed through post-production?

[$$$$$exyGal]

Seems like the bigger the film, the more of these glitches surface as they rush to the box office.

Nah, the bigger the film, the more nitpicky people get. If a movie sucks, then noone's going to point out that the dead guy's Michigan license plate is post-1998, when the movie was supposedly set in 1997.

Re:Rushed through post-production?

[lawpoop]

That's interesting. I heard an interview on NPR with an astronomer who criticizes night skies in movies. He said that for all the detail that Cameron claims to have gone through (some of which is difficult to verify, such as what plates they were using, the wallpaper in the hallways), there was one large verifiable mistake. The night sky that Winslet looks up into after the ship sank is totally fabricated, with no constellations -- in fact, it's a symmetrical image of stars! (as I remember the interviewee claiming -- never saw it myself.) By contrast, the most realistic night sky was from Lawrence of Arabia, with no recognizable constellations, but still very realistic.

Re:IT"S A MOVIE, FOR CHRIST"S SAKE!

[Xeth]

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.

My only gripe

[Grave]

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?

Re:My only gripe

[DunbarTheInept]

Spidey's swinging isn't plausable, actually. The scenes where he turns corners are done well, and the scenes where he dangles from sticking-out-things are good, but the basic mode of transport doesn't make any sense. The way he's depicted as going down the straight streets, swinging from lines connected to the buildings on the sides, he should be smacking into the side walls at the bottoms of his swings. There is a way to make it with with alternating arcs weaving back and forth, but the way he's depicted as moving, he's not curving side-to-side enough to be doing that. I think this is why the camera often doesn't show what he's attaching his webs to when he goes straight down the street. If it showed what he was attaching to, it would make it obvious that the swing was happening on the wrong arc and it would look fake in that cgi-graphics-with-bad-physics kind of way that the Hulk movie looked fake.

This is something I first noticed as a child watching the old cartoon show, and it's still a problem now. But now I'm more able to accept that it doesn't matter because everything else about the show is so implausable too, just forget about it and go with the flow. As a small child it bothered me more than it does now.

My Favorite Mistake

[Guitar Wizard]

"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.

I noticed alot of those errors

[FS1]

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.

Re:I use a tritium nightlight. really.

[jpu8086]

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).

Re:Well, in principle...

[LauraScudder]

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.

Re:IT"S A MOVIE, FOR CHRIST"S SAKE!

[Mister Skippy]

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.