Bloopers you just can't forgive

[Garlicked]

I'm really good at suspending disbelief and overlooking ridiculous plot holes with a "Well, they've got to keep the story moving". Sometimes, though, the writers/directors make such idiotic mistakes, they poison the whole thing.

I started watching The Silent Sea yesterday. It's a Korean sci-fi thriller starring Bae Doona, and it should be right up my street. In an opening scene, the spacecraft has crashed and Doona slides off the broken ship, which overhangs a crevasse. One of the crew members strains to hold on to her, barely managing to maintain his grip.

The Moon's gravity is one-sixth of Earth's. She can't weigh much over 60kg on this planet - pulling her up on the Moon would be no harder than lifting 10kg of shopping. She could've pulled herself up with one hand!

Now I'm watching for all the bloody stupid low-gravity and wrong-temperature errors, have already spotted several, and don't think I can get into it. What idiot mistakes have ruined the story for you?

Yes, I agree with the pp about all the decorations and furniture in a room being of a particular period. Houses just weren't (and aren't) like that. My pet peeve on similar lines is that there is never any clutter anywhere - everything looks too neat and clean.

One I noticed in the fairly recent Dunkirk - at the end, the lads get onto a train carriage from the 60s - they were so different by then; you'd think the set designers could have got that one right.

There is an episode in the last series of Outnumbered (it's called 'communication') where it obviously takes place in the winter and during a school term where they say there is going to be a bank holiday on the Monday. But there isn't a bank holiday Monday within a winter school term. Possible for it to be cold at Easter but there would be the BH Friday too and they don't mention Easter - just this random bank holiday.

In Bad Sisters they all live in very affluent areas of Dublin where there's no way they could afford the houses they live in..especially the youngest sister who barely works and rents a very nice apartment that would be 2 grand a month easily.

New series on netflix called Bodkin which jumps from Dublin to West Cork yet claiming it's all set in a fictional West Cork village. Really annoying me

They did something very similar in Shetland, @MoonWoman69 - in one scene Jimmy Perez is talking to some other characters in a shop in Lerwick, then leaves and walks down to the harbour - but the shop was filmed near me, in a village called Kilbarchan, near Paisley and Glasgow, so, in a matter of minutes, Perez manages to walk from Kilbarchan to the harbour in Lerwick - over an hour away by plane!

Robin Hood Prince of Thieves when Robin lands in Dover, walks up to Northumberland and back down to Nottingham seemingly in one afternoon, now I totally understand in the film he doesn’t do that walk, he just nips home up the road but because I know the landmarks it really pisses me off 😆

My peeves are mostly medical too - when Daniel Craig has to defibrillate himself in the car in Casino Royale I snort as if you need defibrillating you're unconscious...

Also people doing CPR - I know they can't do proper chest compressions on an alive actor but they just sort of bounce around with bent arms - if it was real CPR they'd be useless.

My DP sits there laughing at me biting my lip and reminds me that just because it's in colour doesn't mean it's real!

Historical films with women with long hair swishing about. It was almost always pinned up and covered, especially in public. Probably even more so if you were poor for safety and convenience as you had to work.

There’s a subtle screen geography issue at the start of Trainspotting, where they rob WHSmith and sprint away down a road under an archway. Which is quite nearby. But not for those characters at that pace. It seems to raise a a doubt about Renton’s lung capacity rather than of dodgy route planning.

It's Calton Road I think, @YoureRockingTheBoat isn't it?

I ran down it myself many years ago in homage and beer. Definitely a good ten-fifteen minutes from Princes St 😁

Yes, it is Calton Road - just a bit far for the absolute pelting pace achieved by both them and the security guards to match the music.

I've only watched two episodes but in The Outlaws when they are driving to do their community service they take a very strange route, including going down Park Street. It was just really weird.

That would so not bother me! But your attention to calendar detail is endearing.

Birling Gap, near Beachy Head

Or showing more skin than would have been acceptable and sometimes ankles or a bit more leg.

Also women from the past being able to wander around alone willy nilly and/or meet and spend time with a man they aren't married or related to - would have caused a massive scandal. Sometimes women 'slip away' from their estates or castles where there would have been servants and guards and would definitely have been flagged and would probably been checked where they were off to.

Niche, but here we go.

In the Mask of Zorro, when the mine engine is about to blow up, and the pressure is rising, there is a close up shot of the pressure gauge.

The units are kg/cm3 (kilo grams per centimeter cubed).

It's meant to be 1821.

Any pressure gauge with the unit on it would be in lb/in2 (pounds per square inch) pound force per square inch, really

It grates my gears.

Artemis was rubbish, but Project Hail Mary is really good. I’m looking forward to the film adaptation with Ryan Gosling.

The TV adaptation of The White Queen where you could see the zip up the back of dresses...and the battle of Bosworth being fought by soldiers who looked suspiciously like Normans from the battle of Hastings- just a few hundred years wrong. At least get that right, there are enough reenactment societies who could have provided extras there.
The Devon coast masquerading as Guernsey in the Guernsey literary and potato peel pie society film. So obvious I'm afraid

The Devon coast masquerading as Guernsey in the Guernsey literary and potato peel pie society film.

Aahh, there was a ton of errors in that but it was so lovely, I can forgive them all!

Zips in historical dresses, though -
Me: Fuxache, couldn't they have covered that up?!
Also me: Well, you don't know how much time they had.
Me again: Mumble ,mumble, grumpy chunter
😂

Would that necessarily be the case in a Hispanic area (not yet part of the USA, I think) at that time? Could have been a French import.

Quite agree. Hail Mary is as good as The Martian IMO.

Well now.

The pressure gauge was invented in France, but not until 1849. So almost 30 years before the film was set!

Also, the style of the mine engine is in that of the Trevithick (from Cornwall) high pressure engines, which were invented in the 1810s.

So, it's wrong, all the ways round! Either it's French, but from the wrong time period, or the wrong units, or the wrong engine.

and breathe

DH can't watch any police procedural dramas. He accepts that the things that take minutes in the film which takes weeks irl are necessary for retaining interest for example, but he always points out that anybody above a sergeant wouldn't be out investigating, interviewing and being so hands on. DCIs aren't bumbling through the countryside looking for clues with a keen but hapless DI sidekick trailing behind. And the interviewing of subjects isn't drama filled and maverick, it's procedural and necessarily dispassionate.

Any American television show or film where the couple live in a massive house. They have an argument so ( usually ) he sleeps on the couch. What about the other five spare bedrooms you presumably have???

I've just watched the Joe Wright/Keira Knightley/Matthew McFadyen Pride and Prejudice film for the first time since it came out, and while there are a few things I like about it (casting a prettier actress than KK as the prettier Jane, the lingering sexual warmth in the Bennet parents' relationship, the fact that they have the characters dancing the livelier kinds of country dance, Tom Hollander as Mr Collins, the scene where the women are all lounging around in a messy room and dash around for thirty seconds as soon as Bingley is announced, so that they are found looking immaculate in a classic 'pretty Austen adaptation' arrangement), it gets so much wrong!

Longbourn is the country seat of small rural gentry, not a farmhouse with a farmyard full of pigs and slurry two feet behind the house. The farm yard would have been separate from the family home! Visitors would have approached the house through the front door, not via a muddy farmyard full of washing lines and animals.

Lizzy would not have been walking around the countryside, far less going to see the nouveau riche new neighbours, in a man's greatcoat and loose hair. Hats were always worn outside the house. Loose hair was for little girls.

Bingley wouldn't have walked into the bedroom where a female guest is lying ill in bed to have a cosy chat with her and her sister.

Lizzy and her aunt and uncle would never have been admitted to view Pemberley were any of the family at home (and in this version Georgiana is).

The Assembly at Meryton, a small town, is both far too big (only gentry families would have been able to afford the yearly dues, and undesirables were kept from the door by the MC), too socially broad and uproarious. And it completely changes the feel of the first meeting between Lizzy and Darcy if Lizzy is sitting out when there are in fact loads of men available as partners.

Similarly, the Bingleys' ball at Netherfield is far too big and crowded. They're new to the area and are socially the top of the local pyramid (despite their wealth being from trade), so simply aren't going to know that many people on their level to invite, yet it's even more crowded than the Assembly.

Have you tried Scott and Bailey? It's supposed to be reasonably realistic. (And is great anyway.)