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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.
In one scene, Spiderman is leaping and twirling like he's a male gymnast. Then in the next, he has a heterosexual love interest.
"Also, people bitten by spiders don't generally become ultra-powerful." Unless those people get bitten by RADIOACTIVE spiders. Why do you people even bother going to the Cinema, if you are that goddamned critical? Why were there explosions in space in Star Wars? Because, they fucking looked cool exploding in space.
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.
What was it he said?
"There's nothing more exhilarating than pointing out the shortcomings of others."
Less Talk, More Beer.
I beg to differ, I did indeed become ultra powerful after being bitten by a spider...
Or perhaps that was after I licked that toad...
Either way, definately ultra powerful.
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.
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
Oh yes, and the soundtrack also has mistakes. Two canons are horrendously overlapped, the motif is altered by two notes in several reprisals and if you listen to it backwards it says "Jay and Silent Bob are better than Spidey".
Factual Error: When real scientists cybernetically attach themselves to an artificial intelligence, we use two, seperate, completely redundant systems to prevent ourselves from being turned evil.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Kick in the Head
At the end of the "I've changed" conversation with Mary Jane, the taxi is right next to her (you can see its roof next to her face), yet in the next shot, she has to cross the street to get to it.
Because as we all know, there is only one working taxi in New York City.
Vonal Declosion
Don't you guys get it? You're not supposed to just point out the mistakes, you're supposed to *explain how they are not really mistakes at all.* Then, you write into the letter page of your favorite Marvel comic book and claim your No Prize!
Spiders don't spin web from their wrists.
But I suppose a bit of realism here would give the movie (and comic book) an "X" rating. Would have been funny to see him net bad guys that way though...
My rights don't need management.
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.
Peter Parkers physiology is more man than spider. Therefore, he should be called: Man-Spider.
Well, now that you mention it, it would be kind of interesting to see Spidey trade in his suit for a bowler hat and codpiece, and belt out "Singin' in the Rain" while stomping on some bad guy. The cinematography would be beautiful, a la "2001" or "Barry Lyndon", which is good, 'cause you'd get about five minutes between each line of dialog to study it...
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
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.
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
I have found a few errors on their website (:
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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.
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?
I thought the chainsaw in the operating room was an obvious homage to the Evil Dead movies. I've never heard of a medical chainsaw... but I'm not a doctor.
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
...
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.
Also, people bitten by spiders don't generally become ultra-powerful
of course not! the spider has to be radioactive, silly.
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
I don't think people should try to hold movies to any kind of "reality standard". Even the most grounded movie story is told by men wearing makeup that techies spent an hour carefully lighting. People stand on boxes to look taller, directors tell actors to step farther apart so that their distance will reflect their relationship, and no one ever has to go to the bathroom.
No one ever points it out as a "mistake" in movies, but Spider-Man 2 took a step closer to reality by choosing to not have every car that was overturned explode in a huge ball of flames.
FWIW, Sam Raimi directed the Evil Dead movies, which are cult classics despite having some of the largest movie mistakes to ever slip by audiences. (For ex: in Evil Dead 2 there is no ceiling in the house, and during some of the fast shots you can see techies heads poking over the tops of the walls. People never seem to notice this until someone tells them to look for it!)
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
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
...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.
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.
Nothing but a wicked urge to enter politics.
-Meeper
The problem with these kind of cricisms at this site is that once you set up a site to try very hard to find problems, people tend to find problems that aren't problems, just to get their entry on the page: Here's some examples:
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.
Doc Ock's normal limbs were also there, in addition to his mechanical ones (He's not called Doc Quad, after all), and therefore he could still walk normally, just holding his mechanical limbs in the air and not doing anything with them (except holding onto the loot, of course). That could still be silent. Thus the implied sneaky getaway he allegedly made while off-camera is possible.
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.
No. From the shot, we see Ock in the foreground, and the ball behind him, and they are getting smaller. The critic probably interpreted this to mean that they were falling away from the camera. But when I viewed it I interpreted this as the camera's vantage point was underneath them both, and the camera was sinking faster than they were, into the depths. The way the shot looked, either interpretation works. (But I think a much larger problem is that the river is only about 60 feet deep, and that final shot makes it look like it just goes down and down and down at least several hundred feet.)
Besides, it's entirely possible, even if the critic's interpretation of the camara angles is right, that the two got turned around at some point when they were both off camera. The movie does imply that quite a few seconds have passed between the scene where Ock pulled the thing down and the underwater scene.
Continuity: After Doc Ock drops Spider-Man off at Harry's house, Spider-Man's legs, wrists and arms are bound. When he sits up after Harry unmasks him, he never breaks his legs free of the ties yet he no longer has anything holding his legs together
Things are often implied to happen off-camera in a movie. There were shots during which only the top half of spiderman is shown during that 'breaking out' scene, and so breaking out the legs could happen anywhere in there. The problem with finding errors of ommission is that they don't necessarily mean anything when there are moments that are implied to occur off camera. Otherwise everyone in the movie must be horrendously constipated since the movie is implied to take place over a period of several days, and nobody ever goes to the bathroom.
Continuity: After Peter changes into Spider-Man to deliver the pizzas and throws them onto the ledge to save the two children, the camera goes back to show the pizzas and the man living there finding them. There are only seven pizza boxes, without any damage done to them. When he actually delivers them, there are eight and a couple of them are now flattened or banged-up as they should be.
The fact that there are 8 instead of 7 - that's a problem, yes. The fact that they are now damaged when they weren't before - no that's not a problem in the slightest. Nowhere does it imply that zero time has passed between the pizza on the ledge scene and the delivering scene. Presumably the damage could have happened after the ledge scene.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
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.
I guess you get to keep on secretly dreaming about Spidey coming out of the closet to declare his interest in you
Hmmm...