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

32 already

[mcgroarty]

I'm surprised that nobody noticed this biggie:

In one scene, Spiderman is leaping and twirling like he's a male gymnast. Then in the next, he has a heterosexual love interest.

Re:32 already

[mcgroarty]

Edit: Of course. (Flash required)

Re:32 already

[Anonymous Coward]

In one scene, Spiderman is leaping and twirling like he's a male gymnast. Then in the next, he has a heterosexual love interest.

As someone who got First Post in a Slashdot Spider-Man article, I highly doubt you are qualified to make such a differential assertion.

Re:32 already

[mcgroarty]

Brilliant :)

So... what are you doing this evening?

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

[black88]

"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.

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

[noewun]

But this would remove the ability of those who wish to make movies but never to feel superior by pointing out the mistakes of others.

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.

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.

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

[Engineer Andy]

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.

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

[Blastercorps]

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!"

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

[dvdeug]

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.

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

[rorymoon]

Since the first movie I've been wondering why the webs come of out his wrists. What aspect of the mutation brought about this particularly useful super power? If he was really taking on the properties/abilities of a spider, would they not shoot out of his arse? Or somewhere thereabouts ...

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

[ConceptJunkie]

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?)

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.

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

[OldManAndTheC]

(p.s. IANAP... tachyons are still considered only theoretical, right?)

Certainly not! How else could I be writing to you ... FROM THE YEAR 3004 AD!!!!!

Oh and btw, don't take the bus on Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2012. Seriously. You don't affect history, but your son was captain of the first Earth-Saturn probe.

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

[noewun]

Maybe this is silly, but isn't it possible that sometimes the mistakes add to the replay value?

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.

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?

[Ralph Wiggam]

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

Re:Rushed through post-production?

[Soulslayer]

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.

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.

Randall.

[EvilJohn]

What was it he said?

"There's nothing more exhilarating than pointing out the shortcomings of others."

3.141

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:3.141

[fiftyfly]

Or perhaps that was after I licked that toad...

Dude - you do toad? That's like soooooooo gross!. If You Lick A Toad... You're Licking Every Toad That Toad Has Ever Been With

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

[Twirlip of the Mists]

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?

Re:My only gripe

[istewart]

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.

Re:My only gripe

[stienman]

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

Re:My only gripe

[C10H14N2]

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.

http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=831&sequenc e= 0

Re:My only gripe

[geomon]

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.

Re:My only gripe

[Idarubicin]

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.

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.

Re:My only gripe

[tgibbs]

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)

Re:My only gripe

[ConceptJunkie]

But then, what good is a microscopic amount of tritium going to be as a plot device?


About the same amount of good as having your main character get a small welt and mild itching after being bitten by a genetically-engineered spider. ;-)

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.

Re:My Favorite Mistake

[D iz a n k Meister]

Deliberate "mistake": When Mary Jane is being pulled toward the tritium when Doc Ock has her, the shot is taken from her feet up to her head. If you look where her dress ends, you can just barely see that instead of having the regular open dress, it is switched with shorts of the same type so you can't see under her dress. Submitted by Guy Strad

I hate it when I can't see up an open dress. . .especially if it's Kirsten's dress.

Re:My Favorite Mistake

[stuffman64]

Was it just me, or was there a continuity error involving MJ's nipples? In the scene near the end where spidey holds up the wall to prevent it from falling on her, I thought I saw MJ nippin' pretty bad just before the wall fell. Then, as spidey is standing over her holding the wall, her nipples are no longer showing through.

Of course, I may have just have been wishing her hardcore nippage from earlier in the movie was still there. Anyone else notice this?

Pretty Thin...

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of these are pretty thin:

"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 ... leave it to the screenwriters.

More mistakes and trivia

[rfernand79]

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".

Hurting people, with science

[sam_handelman]

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.

One more mistake

[yoshi1013]

Also, Tobey Maguire isn't Spider-Man in real life, he's just an actor.

Lone Taxidriver

[CptChipJew]

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.

Lots of No-Prizes will be awarded...

[tomRakewell]

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!

Spider-Man 2 Has Over 30 Mistakes

[telstar]

"Spider-Man 2 Has Over 30 Mistakes"

• ...somebody's got to give Slashdot some competition.

The biggest problem with spiderman

[earthforce_1]

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...

I haven't seen the movie ... but

[BelugaParty]

Peter Parkers physiology is more man than spider. Therefore, he should be called: Man-Spider.

Re:Thank God Raimi makes all these mistakes!

[general_re]

Would you want Stanley Kubrick to make a Spider Man movie?

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...

Already being hit hard - copy of the site

[DiveX]

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

Mirror image isn't always a mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I prefer the IMDB's trivia

[jfengel]

Continuity errors bore me, and I try to ignore the plot holes, but The IMDB's trivia page is often fascinating.

i didn't like the demonization of fusion

[circletimessquare]

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!

Re:i didn't like the demonization of fusion

[mpaque]

More than 2,000 observed supernovae disagree with you.

Good point. We should pass a law prohibiting the construction of fusion reactors containing more than two solar masses of fuel (just to leave a good safety margin) on the Earth.

Errors, you say?

[dema]

I have found a few errors on their website (:

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Re:Three things that got me...

[jCaT]

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.

Re:Evil Dead - Army of Darkness

[MrPoopyPants]

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.

They've forgotten to list all the location mishaps

[sinergy]

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

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.

newsflash

[blue_adept]

Also, people bitten by spiders don't generally become ultra-powerful

of course not! the spider has to be radioactive, silly.

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).

In Related News

[suwain_2]

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.

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:Just be glad!!!!

[The Meeper]

Nothing but a wicked urge to enter politics.

Re:Funny to see that here...

[rarity]

I guess you get to keep on secretly dreaming about Spidey coming out of the closet to declare his interest in you

Hmmm...