Top Ten Movie Mistakes I Can’t
Un-See
Sometimes, instead of being
engrossed in a movie, the trance is broken by some sort of mistake or error or
faux pas that the filmmakers didn’t intend for you to see. It might be a tiny
little detail, or a more substantial one that hurts your brain the more you
think about it. You might be able to get over it, or it might stick with you
and ruin the rest of the movie-going experience.
These ten movie mistakes are
things I personally noticed, and there are a lot on here that have become “infamous”,
but that’s not the point. Maybe you caught a mistake in a movie that others
missed, or you missed one and saw it on a repeat viewing. There are too many to
count, but these ten didn’t get past me (which really says something because I
don’t pay that much attention most of the time)
10. Scary Movie 2: underwear change
Honestly, I was stretching to find ten that I genuinely noticed at one
point and have noticed ever since, but this is one of the first times I recall
actually noticing an error in a movie. My friends and I marathoned all four (at
that time) movies in the Scary Movie
franchise, and in the second entry, Kathleen Robertson’s character is, very
clearly, wearing a blue thong (trust me, you can’t miss it) but then in a scene
meant to parody Charlie’s Angels
(which came out a year earlier) she runs down some stairs and pulls her clothes
off, along with two other women, obviously meant to indicate a costume change,
but they end up in just their bras and panties at the bottom. The fail?
Robertson’s character is wearing a completely different type and colour of undies.
It’s evidently just meant as a gag and has no bearing on anything within the
context of the movie, but it’s still the first error I recall noticing in a
movie. For whatever reason.
9. The Shining: helicopter shadow
Stanley Kubrick was well known for being a perfectionist and doing
endless numbers of takes to get his movies just the way he wanted them, and
really who could blame him? Okay, maybe there are more than a few actors who
could, but I’d say all that extra work and attention to detail helped, since he’s
considered one of the greatest directors ever. But imagine his disappointment when
people pointed out a tiny moment in his adaptation of Stephen King’s novel The Shining where his perfectionism faltered.
In the opening shots of the mountainous landscape—the footage for which clearly
having been captured via helicopter—you can see the shadow of the helicopter on
the ground. Is it a big deal? Not really, but it does shatter the illusion for
just a quick second. In a film with so many tiny details (many of which are
pointed out as being extremely purposeful, according to the documentary Room 237), it’s surprising this faux pas
made it to final cut, but it’s probably because Kubrick couldn’t afford to have
the chopper do another fly-by for more footage, or he just didn’t have the time
to worry about it.
8. Teen Wolf: Why is that extra’s fly open?
This one’s pretty famous, thanks in no small part to the second Family Guy Star Wars spoof. As described in that episode, there’s an extra in
the background of the final basketball game in Teen Wolf who stands up and appears to have his genitals exposed.
Confused? So was I when I watched the movie and noticed this detail, but I didn’t
know what I was looking at exactly until I saw the Family Guy episode. But now new information seems to indicate it
isn’t a guy, but rather a girl, and it isn’t a dick hanging out, but her fly is
still open. I’m not sure which one to believe, but either way, it’s very
obviously someone with their fly open. So, what’s going on there? Why did he or
she have his or her fly open while watching this basketball game? We may never
know, but this isn’t the only Michael J. Fox movie on this list.
7. Predator: Schwarzenegger on a sled. Bonus: dog tag turned around.
This one’s very minor, and I only notice it because 1) I’ve seen this
movie a million times, and 2) I’ve seen the outtakes, which reveal how the shot
was done. After Schwarzenegger’s team has been killed by the intergalactic hunter
and he’s trying to escape, he falls/slides down a hill toward a cliff where he
falls off into a river below. As he slides down the hill, he says “Oh shit!” (A
line he apparently ad-libbed, as it’s absent from all other takes of this shot)
and you can see he’s sitting on some kind of sled, which in turn is sitting on
a track. Honestly, it’s such a quick moment it’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it
kind of mistake, and it’s not the only one. When Billy throws the dog tag to
Arnold, he catches it, then when it cuts to a close-up, he’s holding it in a
completely different way than when he caught it. But tiny errors like this
definitely don’t detract from the overall movie, they’re more like fun Easter
eggs for hard-core fans.
6. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope: Stormtrooper bangs head on
doorway
Speaking of Easter eggs, here’s a famous one that not only fans have
embraced, but so has the creator, George Lucas. Star Wars is far from a perfect movie, and with all the production
troubles Lucas experienced, it’s amazing it turned out as great as it did, but
one little blooper that made it into the movie caught the attention of more
than a few fans. Apparently Stormtrooper helmets are hard to see out of, as
evidenced by one who hits his head on a low doorway. I actually half-noticed
this when I re-watched Star Wars as a
kid, before I had internet. I said, “Did that guy just hit his head on
something?” But never bothered to back it up and check. Of course nowadays it’s
made even more obvious by a clunking sound effect added in after the many special
editions and re-releases, but that could be why I noticed it, because that was
and still is the only version available to watch.
5. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: sunglasses on, sunglasses off
The only foreign movie to make this list, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a dark mystery film with
multiple brutal scenes and gritty realism throughout, except for one scene at
the end, where a simple continuity mistake completely took me out of the movie.
The main character, Mikael, arrives in Australia to talk with someone, and it
switches between over the shoulder shots of their conversation, a pretty
conventional method we’ve seen a million times. One tiny problem: in the shot
looking at him, he has his sunglasses on. In the shot looking over his
shoulder, he very clearly has his sunglasses up on his head. I’m not sure why I
caught on to this little error, but it drives me nuts because, as this list is
titled, I can’t un-see it, and the worst part is it’s not even one of the
biggest mistakes in the movie, but for whatever reason, it’s the one I caught.
4. Back to the Future Part III: What is Doc’s kid doing?
This is another one I noticed before internet videos and blogs made movie
mistakes so well known. Not that I’m bragging, just sayin’. At the end of Back to the Future Part III, after the
time machine has been destroyed and all seems calm, Doc Brown arrives in 1985
with a brand-new time machine built out of a locomotive, along with his wife,
Clara, and two new sons, Jules and Verne. While Marty and Doc exchange their
last on-screen dialogue in a short but impactful scene, little Verne is doing
something strange with his hands in the background. I re-watched it, trying to
figure out what was going on there, and it looks like he’s signalling toward
his crotch. Fans have theorized he was indicating to someone off-camera he
needed to use the washroom (By pointing at his dick? Subtle) but I kind of
doubt it. Maybe the child actor was doing some improvisation to indicate he
wanted Marty to come with them on the time machine? But then again, maybe it
was weirder than that? I don’t know, all I know is it’s just a bit distracting
when at the conclusion of one of the best trilogies ever, your attention is
drawn to a kid pointing at his flux capacitor in the background. It’s just
wrong.
3. Terminator 2: Judgement Day: obvious stuntman on bike, clearly not
Schwarzenegger. Bonus: multiple self-repairing windshields
It seems every time I re-watch T2 I
notice some new little quirky thing about it, but hey, that’s usually what
happens when you see the same movie so many times over. T2 has no shortage of bloopers, and in such a complex action movie
as this, it’s no surprise. Multiple windshields are broken or torn away, only
to be fixed or intact in the next shot, but most of these are so quick you don’t
really notice them in the overall flow of action. The one that lingers just a
few milliseconds too long is when Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 picks up young
John Conner off his dirt bike and places him onto the Harley he’s riding. It’s
so very obviously NOT Schwarzenegger, it’s some stuntman. But you know what’s
worse than that? Once you notice this moment, you notice MULTIPLE moments throughout
the scene where it’s obviously not Arnold, or Edward Furlong as John for that
matter! It’s a minor quibble, but it’s things like this that actually make me
miss the lack of clarity with VHS and even DVD, where we couldn’t tell that guy
in the background was a stuntman and not the real actor.
Just kidding, I love me some high def!
2. Jaws: hydraulic arm helping shark jump onto boat? Bonuses: rubber
shark teeth, Schizophrenic Ocean
In all honesty, I saw Jaws
probably twenty times before I noticed this mistake, and that’s not counting
all the times I saw the famous clip in other media. I’m talking about the shot
when the shark leaps out of the water and lands on the Orca (the not big enough
boat), near the end of the film. In fact, it’s the mistake that led me to make
this list, because I’ve discovered I can no longer see that scene and not see
the error, and that is, you can see the mechanical arm lifting the shark out of
the water! Now, I know what you’re thinking, so what? The shark looks fake
anyway, right? Wrong! Well, sort of. Yeah, the shark doesn’t look super
realistic, but when it’s on-screen, you still buy it, because you don’t see the
cables running out of its body or the puppeteers or anything, except this one
moment! But wait, no… After reviewing the footage carefully, I discovered I was
mistaken. It’s actually the rope holding the barrels to the shark that’s
visible, so it’s not an error!
But here are a couple other tiny details that are bound to become apparent
after a number of viewings: when the shark eats Quint, you can see for a brief
second the teeth bent over instead of embedded in Quint’s flesh, because the
teeth were made of foam, and there are multiple moments where the water is
choppy in one shot and calm the next. Does it change the fact that Jaws is one of the best movies ever
made? Hell no.
1. Jurassic Park: where is the T-Rex standing? Bonuses: Dilophosaurus’
frill has strings attached, live video has progress bar, hand holding Raptor up
It should be no mystery that Jurassic
Park is probably my favourite movie of these ten movies (though Jaws, Back to the Future, T2,
and Predator are up there, as well)
and is the movie that I have seen more than any other movie—seriously, we’re
talking 50 plus times, from beginning to end. So it’s no surprise that I’ve
picked up on many errors and bloopers, but actually, there aren’t as many as
you might think. There isn’t even a particular one that stands out to me, and
none of them ruin my enjoyment of the movie, but here are the big ones that I
will never forget about. Perhaps the biggest is the realization that, when the
T-rex steps out of its enclosure for the first time, after you’re done being
blown away by how huge and scary and realistic it looks, you realize it was
just standing in mid-air. As a kid who had no awareness of setting, I thought
the T-rex pushed the car off the edge on the other side of the road, but no, when you see the car go over the
edge after the T-rex breaks out, that’s the same edge the T-rex just came from,
so he was standing in a tree? Or floating? It’s a total break in logic, but it
doesn’t even matter, because it’s still one of the best scenes in cinematic
history.
And then there are a bunch of little things, like the strings that pull
open the Dilophosaurus’ frill being visible, or the “live” video Nedry’s watching
of the docks having a progress bar, or a hand reaching out to steady the
Velociraptor before it enters the kitchen, but if there’s a lesson to be
learned here, it’s this: no movie is without some kind of error, because that’s
the nature of filmmaking. It’s fun to notice some of these anomalies in our
favourite movies, but they shouldn’t detract from the overall enjoyment. If
they do, the movie probably isn’t that great to begin with, anyway.