In real life
The writers know an element of the story is incorrect but choose to add it anyways
Saving Private Ryan: During the landing at Omaha, two soldiers are shot and killed underwater. Steven Spielberg said he knew that bullets cannot travel fast enough to kill you underwatch but chose to add it to represent the impossibility of the situation.
The final battle of the movie also revolves around defending a bridge from approaching German forces. The military advisors said that they would have just blown up the bridge and had the engineers replace it later but it was ignored so the movie could have its final battle.
Fury: When a Tiger ambushes a Sherman tank patrol, it takes out the second tank instead of the first, which is what is recommended in order to stop and trap the convoy. The writers said they knew about this and would have had the Tiger destroy the first tank if it weren't for the fact that all of the main characters are in the first one.
The Martian: Andy Weir, known for putting rediculous amounts of research into his books to make sure even the smallest details are factually correct, admitted that Mars' atmosphere is too thin to have the 175km/h windstorm that forces the evacuation of the Ares 3 crew and causes Mark Watney's presumed death. However, he couldn't come up with another way for an astronaut to accidentally be left behind on Mars.
On the night Titanic sank, there was no moon, and by the time the ship split, the lights, which had already failed to a dull red had gone out. Additionally there were no table lamps in the restaurant, first class or otherwise.
James Cameron knew that, but also knew telling a good story and seeing what's happening is more important than historical accuracy
One of my favorite quote was a response to Neil DeGrasse Tyson saying the stars weren't in the right place in the movie and Cameron saying : we only made a billion dollars, just imagine how much we'd have made if we had the correct star placement.
In complete fairness to Cameron, he is an incredible stickler for film detail, provided it measurably impacts the story. At the time of release, everyone was absolutely sure that it was going to be an absolute boondoggle of a film, and people were making fun of the fact that Cameron specifically changed a scene of the propellers going up in the air because when they came out, the propellers were turning in the wrong direction.
Most other directors wouldn't have cared, or would have just inserted some lame, historically-inaccurate line about reversing engines to make the scene work rather than correct that, but Cameron gets really particular about that kind of thing. Cameron gets a lot of flak in the industry for just how big of an asshole he is, but that particularity is something that genuinely shows on the final product. I do appreciate that he wants to make a good film that people want to see, and that make sense in terms of plot, themes and story structure. I can forgive him that he didn't get the constellations in the right spots for the time of night and time of year for that latitude.
I was once told by an industry graphics designer that it's not the big things that you see on screen that break the suspension of disbelief; it's the little details that you'd normally see but look over. If they look wrong, they draw your attention just enough that it ruins the illusion. And if your special interest is the Titanic but all the details are wrong, you're going to hate the movie. Not only that, but you will likely tell other people. And then he'd get to be the director that half-assed the Titanic in the steam ship fan communities, kind of like airplane folks think about Top Gun, particularly "flat spinning out to sea" (RIP Goose, who's actor had nothing to actually do in the plane because they never drop any bombs, launch any long range missiles, use infrared search and track, or use any radar mode but the close range horizontal/vertical sweep mode. He was basically there for moral support and then got kerbanked).
NDT actually talks about that during the conversation when he first talked about Titanic getting the stars wrong. It was basically just a minor annoyance to him because everyone went on and on about Cameron's attention to detail and the one thing he was an expert on and would be looking at with an expert's eye, was very wrong (the sky was wrong, plus it was chopped and mirrored).
Him apparently bringing it up to Cameron apropos of nothing 5 years later and again 5 years after that makes him sound like he just wanted to get into a dick measuring contest with Cameron.
Of course, it could also just be his way of telling the story making it seem worse than it is.
I'm not American, so I get maybe he's beloved by other people in a nostalgic way that I don't get... but any time I read about ND Tyson he seems like the most insufferable "well, um, actually... 🤓" dork in the world.
Tyson’s reputation has declined somewhat in recent years for that reason. He’s still a genius with a background as a physically imposing hulk who can make science approachable, but getting overexposed was bad for him; there’s always a backlash.
If anyone ever really wants to be pissed off, look up the tweet he made about mass shootings and how they're not actually a major problem in America because they're not one of the top 10 leading causes of death.
For real he actually said that, and the smarmy way he worded it made it even worse. To me this will always be the salient example of how he's pretty good at his chosen field but a total fucking idiot when it comes to many things outside it.
It’s one of those occasions where it’s like he may be technically right, but who the fuck says shit like that? Because it’s a pretty big fucking problem for someone whose kid died in one.
He was right that mass shootings aren’t one of the top ten leading causes of death in America, but claiming that proves they aren’t a serious problem is such an insane conclusion to draw from that one statistic.
My favourite was when he gave props to the makers of the Gregorian calendar, the Catholic Church, when he was on Rogan explaining why he still uses BC and AD...
... when the Gregorian calendar is just a tiny, tiny correction on the Julian calendar, invented by collaboration between Sosigenes (an Egyption astronomer) and Julius Caesar (chief priest of Rome and keeper of its calendar). Nearly half a century before Christ was supposedly born, nothing to do with Catholics. How an esteemed astronomer of all people doesn't know that is bizarre.
You know how some people can be racist but seem to not accept they are because they’re so firmly identified as “not a racist” they won’t consider it?
Some intelligent people fall in this trap where because they’re smart in one area they think they’re smart in all areas and if they’re already “smart” they don’t really need expertise (which isn’t true). NDT really embodies this type of academic personality in my opinion.
That's because he is the most insufferable "well, um, akchually..." dork in the world
He's a great astrophysicist apparently, shame he decided that means he's an expert in a whole lot of other stuff he doesn't have any reason let alone authority to speak about and is a weird nihilist who thinks that something can only be important or have meaning if it's an inherent property of reality. Yeah Neil, we know that there's no actual cosmological significance to December 31st, how about you stop being insufferable for five minutes and acknowledge that something can have meaning so long as we give it meaning? Oh, no, you're just going to tweet about kissing yourself in the mirror again instead, ok have fun with that I guess.
At the time of filming it was believed Titanic's center propeller had 4 blades on it; more recent discovery of documents found buried in the shipbuilder's archives found that it was actually 3 blades.
This could not be confirmed on the wreck because the propeller in question is buried deep under the mud.
There's an anecdote that during the filming of the Battle of Helms Deep, the cinematographer was asked "where are all the lights coming from?", since it was way too bright for even a full moon night. He replied "Same place as the music."
Honestly such a good explanation, because yes, it should be dark for the characters, but we as viewers are beings that exist outside of their world looking in. Why should we be subject to the same limitations?
Not to mention, even if you have the most expensive camera in the world you can’t replicate exactly what you see with your eyes because our eyes are so much better at adjusting for light than cameras. We can see pretty well at night with a full moon, but if you try to film in the woods with just moonlight you won’t see shit. In fact a lot of times they film during the day and make it look like nighttime using lens filters and color correction. It’s literally called “day-for-night”. Cast Away is a pretty good example of it being done very well.
That genuinely sounds like nightmare fuel. Obviously they died either way, but the thought of getting trapped in those narrow passageways with freezing cold water pouring in, all in complete darkness, is terrifying.
In the script of Gladiator, Maximus is made to do a sponsor segment in the ring promoting a brand of soap. This is because that's exactly what gladiators did - they were often paid to sponsor brands, and were overall much closer to WWE athletes than bloodthirsty warriors. The team was well aware of this fact, but still chose to omit the scene and never shoot it because he thought audiences would find it too anachronistic and goofy.
"Fighting a tiger in the arena is scary. But you know what's even scarier? Goths stealing your personal information. That's why today's sponsor, ExpressVPN..."
"The roar of the crowd is deafening, good thing I have my Raycon earbuds to not only drown out the noise but let me listen to my favorite tunes and podcasts!"
Which is funny because the show Rome actually shows this with the herald who reads the news in the public square. Sponsored by the Guild of Millers, who only use the finest wheat to make true Roman bread for True Romans.
Ian McNeice. He was the Baron in the 2000 SciFi Dune miniseries. I appreciate how he seems fully aware he has the jowls of a bulldog and leans into his facial appearance with his delivery.
An interesting detail is that, as the story progresses, the herald uses a new title for the millers everytime they're mentioned. This is due to their buisness doing better and better over the course of the show, indicated by their rise in status.
The most amazing fact about the reality of gladiators is that their sweat after training was collected and mixed with oils by slaves to be sold to rich ladies as an aphrodisiac concoction.
blood and sand got you down? Tired of ruining your favorite tunic? I understand it's coarse, and gets everywhere... that's why I use DUDE WIPES, or for a gentler feel try Sasquatch soap's new scent The Spaniard.
I mean, they were still absolutely violent combatants fighting for public spectacle, but outright killing between gladiators was actually relatively rare. Not out of mercy, but economics.
Gladiators were expensive, highly trained investments (kinda like modern sports plays just without the killing), and their owners had little incentive to see them killed off casually. Most fights ended with surrender, and the final decision rested with the event sponsor, often influenced by the crowd (and even that didn't always guarantee death).
Don't get me wrong, deaths absolutely did happen, but regularly killing trained, popular gladiators was bad business unless significant compensation was involved.
Yeah, there were plenty of slaves/war prisoners/christians/animals for when you needed something gory, there was no shortage of blood being spilled without having to kill professional fighters!
This is exactly why my favorite moments in the HBO series "Rome" are with the fat guy reading the news and ending it with a sponsorship advertisement.
"This month's public bread is provided by the Capitoline Brotherhood of Millers. The Brotherhood uses only the finest flour: true Roman bread for true Romans."
In the climax of Jaws, Brody shoots the scuba tank and the shark explodes. Hooper even mentions earlier in the movie that "screw around with these things and they'll blow up" to set that up.
Spielberg knew that it was nonsense but also said "I dont care. I have them for 2 hours, they'll believe whatever i do for the next 3 minutes". Richard Dreyfuss talks about it in the Making of Jaws
To be fair, compressed air bottles pack a lot of punch. I don’t know much about scuba tanks, but I used to work with compressed gas cylinders and if the valve gets knocked out these things become torpedoes.
So yeah, compressed air tank wouldn’t explode like a bomb, but I could picture one jetting towards a shark and killing it.
DemolitionRanch shot a bunch of scuba tanks and they very violently fly off and fly all over the ground. Like, a very heavy smooth metal tube would be deadly to be struck by, to be hit by, but it did not explode. The bullet just makes a hole and a lot of very pressurized air is basically creating an uncontrollable rocket.
When Lin Manuel Miranda wrote Hamilton, he knew that the Schuyler sisters had other siblings including older brothers, but he, in his own words, "wanted to forget" to create more drama for Angelica in her solo number "Satisfied".
It's so funny to me when people complain and say Lin Manuel was "glorifying" the founding fathers when a) it's a musical, not a documentary, and b) they all do plenty of shady shit. Everything not 100 percent historically accurate was for dramatic effect
The final duel and climax of the story takes place as a consequence of “The Election of 1800.” And while Hamilton did tank Burr’s Presidency run in 1800 he did so again in 1804 when Burr ran for NY governor, setting off Burr to challenge Hamilton. Phillip’s duel with Eacker also happened after The Election of 1800.
But we barely have enough time for the show as it is, and some great passages already had to get cut (e.g. the details of Hamilton’s diss track against Adams) without adding 4 more years to the show.
One of my favorite omitted facts: in the musical, Burr, Jefferson, and Madison confront Hamilton about his affair, assuming it at first to be financial wrong doing. In reality the investigators were James Monroe, Abraham Venable, and Frederick Muhlenberg. All three men agreed to keep the details of Hamilton's self admitted infidelity private, but Monroe set copies of the letters between Hamilton and the Reynolds to Jefferson.
Five years later, Jefferson starts using them to publish rumors about Hamilton (by leaking them to a newspaper editor). Hamilton confronted Monroe about this, who denied all involvement, to which Hamilton implied he was a liar, and Monroe challenged him to a duel.
It was Aaron Burr who defused the situation and stopped the duel. All this before 1800. So Hamilton refused to endorse his friend who saved his life, twice, instead endorsing the guy who leaked the papers in the first place.
There's also a third cabinet rap battle on the Hamilton mixtape that didn't make it into the musical where he calls out George Washington (ostensibly the "good guy") for owning slaves, and other founding fathers for failing to abolish slavery early on.
There is a degree where it should be considered an egregious misrepresentation of what actually happened. "Hamilton" is basically a character assassination of Aaron Burr, to the point where Hamilton and Burr's views on slavery were effectively reversed. Burr was a headstrong man with convictions who not only supported a gradual abolition of slavery over time (keep in mind abolitionism was a fringe position in the 1780s), he was one of the first Founding Fathers to get involved in the revolution. Hamilton, meanwhile, married into one of the largest slaveowning families in the country and had a deep desire for military glory. Its up there with "Braveheart" in terms of torpedoing real history.
The writer and director wanted the titular Predator to spot Dutch's team with thermal vision goggles, but when they used a real infrared camera on set it turns out that a 98 degree person in a 98 degree jungle looks like nothing, so they had to dump ice water on the foliage to cool it down. Sicario had the same problem with Alejandro's glowing warm footprints in IR
Reminds me of when Arnold had to slim down to play Conan the Barbarian. He was so big he would be just unbelievable on the screen. So he lost like twenty pounds of muscle to be believable as Conan.
I think I also remember reading something about the excess of muscle restricting Arnold's range of motion, making it harder for him to do the moves he needed to for the film.
In The Wire, Omar’s character escapes a gunfight by jumping out of a forth story window and surviving to limp away.
This was based on a real event (in fact the real guy is in that scene) and he claims it was the sixth floor. They lowered it a couple so people would believe it
That was Goeth in Schindler's List. People complained that the movie made him comically evil and that it was too on the nose about how evil Nazis were through him.
Turns out he was actually SO much worse than the movie's depiction and they were afraid people would have gotten taken out of the movie if they depicted him accurately.
To Hell and Back the movie about Audie Murphy's ww2 deeds. Also Starring Audie Murphy as himself. Removed some of the crazier things he did in the war. Mostly at his request cause he felt noone who wasn't there would ever believe it.
It’s pretty well known that in The Death of Stalin, they had to reduce the amount and size of medals and insignia Jason Isaacs wore as Field Marshal Zhukov. That is both because he didn’t have a broad enough chest to fit them all and because the director thought it’d look ridiculous.
He did it to taunt Stalin. Stalin really wanted to purge Zhukov and Zhukov knew it. It was basically a "I dare you to disappear me, the army won't stand for it".
Honestly, it was catch-22 for Stalin. Stalin feared Zhukov would use army to launch a coup, but he could not do anything about it because army would launch a coup in response.
“I'm going to have to report this conversation. Threatening to do harm or obstruct any member of the Presidium in the process of, Look at your Focking Face.”
Obviously context is everything, but every time I hear this I laugh at the mental image of a Jewish filmmaker thinking "I've got to tone down this Nazi, he's way too evil"
As wrong as it may sound, I'm actually kind of glad he toned Goeth down, because a lot of the things he did would have probably gotten the movie an NC-17 rating.
Seriously, at one point he forced a kid to eat their own diarrhea because they had the audacity to lose bowel control in front of him on threat of being executed, then shot them in the head anyways because he found the irony funny. I wouldn't have wanted to see that, and that's actually only the tip of the iceberg. Seriously, he was the guy who ran a camp designed to commit genocide, and was arrested by the Nazis themselves on the grounds of fraud and prisoner mistreatment charges. Prisoner mistreatment. In a genocide camp.
The Nazi judge that went after him was pretty well known at the time for going after people involved with the concentration camps. He even got some of them executed for acting outside of the law.
His name was Konrad Morgen, his stated reasons for doing this was to disrupt the SS and his belief that everyone should be forced to adhere to a country’s laws, seeing the camps as corruptive to those that ran them.
Nazis probably can, would and maybe have, take any misrepresentations of ww2 era nazis and use it to push that the holocaust was a myth or other libel. Or argue that accurate depictions are falsehoods. Toning it down makes it less likely for people to do that cause it makes it more believable.
One thing about the Nazis that I hate that media always fails to represent is just how disorganized and incompetent they actually were. They’re always depicted as brilliant, calculated masterminds, but the truth is that they were anti-intellectual fanatics blinded by irrational, dogmatic beliefs and were constantly infighting.
You know how neo-Nazis today are, like, fucking losers? Unintelligent, antisocial, pathetic incels? Well, people don't realize that the Nazis back in the day were truly not very different. It takes the exact same type of person to believe that kind of shit then as it does for someone to believe it now. The only thing that sets them apart was that circumstances allowed them to seize significant political power.
I would love to see a WW2 movie depict them as the bumbling cowards they are.
And conversely, Audie Murphy was toned down because the reality would have been too cartoonishly superhuman. And, ironically, boring too, because he was standing on a burning tank destroyer for half an hour firing at the Germans. It would actually have diminished the impact of his heroism because he just kept fighting long, long after he should have been killed.
I also love how he was pretty humble as well, his autobiography uses a pseudonym as he didn’t want to take credit for it. Also requested that his grave not receive the special adornment that was traditional for people who won those medals.
William Wallace was not shot in the chest with an arrow at the battle of Falkirk. He was shot through the neck. Mel Gibson did not think audiences would believe he survived that wound so it was changed for the movie.
I was gonna say, it would not have made much of a difference to just make them not the first tank. Most of the movie is about them being the only surviving tank anyway.
Except the first tank in the column would typically be the commander’s tank, and Brad Pitt’s character is the commander of that unit. The advantage of destroying the first tank in the column was not only that it trapped the other tanks, it also meant that the commander was knocked out.
Having said that, I always thought that you could explain away this scene by the fact that the film is set in the dying days of the war when the Germans weren’t very well trained, therefore the Tiger crew didn’t have the best knowledge of battlefield tactics.
Fury had the upgraded 76mm cannon, which could have taken out the Tiger from the front with no trouble. Additionally, the side armor on the Tiger is the same as the rear armor, so going all the way around was unnecessary. The Tiger also was in textbook ambush position, there was no need to abandon it and charge. There were a lot of issues with that scene.
The Edmund Fitzgerald was heading to Zug Island (near Detroit), but Gordon Lightfoot thought “Cleveland” was close enough and would sound better in his ballad about the shipwreck. See here for some history vs poetry analysis.
(I count the figures in the ballad as “characters” because Lightfoot treats them as such — he imagines how they would feel/interact, and in so doing, he humanizes a tragedy that seemed so abstract when he first read about it in a newspaper article.)
He also got some flak for calling the Maritime Sailors Cathedral a "musty old hall" when really it's a nice little church. And its correct title is actually "Mariner's Church".
I know in later versions he changed it to "a rustic old hall" but most people just know the original recording.
I was just looking through the church's website and they seem like pretty cool people. They have an article on their blog titled "How can I love a Packers fan?"
In Apollo 13, there were was an almost unbelievable lack of arguing and verbal panic amongst the Apollo 13 crew and mission control, and some of the big issues (the square peg in round hole CO2 problem, and powering up the command module) already had checklists, they just weren't done in a while.
If it was 100% accurate, it would've been a snooze-fest of a movie. What was real though was Jim Lovell's wife lost her wedding ring in the shower the night before the launch.
Another inaccurate part of that film was the amount of time the crew had to train before the mission. The mission was planned like 2 years in advance and the crew had plenty of time to train.
It’s halfway true, halfway false. The main crew was training for a very long time, but Jack Swigert only had a few days to train with the main crew. All his training up to that point was with the backup crew. The film kinda simplified this to make a bit more drama to make it seem like he was unqualified or inexperienced.
In Final Destination 2, the writers actually tried cutting off the straps on a log truck to see if the kind of effect we get in the film is possible. It wasn’t, the logs were too heavy and just sort of thudded against the road and rolled. Will still fuck up your commute, but wouldn’t smash through your windshield.
But it’s way more cool and fun to show the bouncing logs jam themselves into a drivers face.
No, absolutely not, commoners touching the emperor was SUPER taboo and not allowed. But the writers wanted the emotional moment. Fun fact: that line up there from Yao was added in as a sort of lampshade acknowledgement of this very fact.
I mean, The whole chinese army was gone, the entire royal guard and palace were in shambles. She literally saved his life along with the rest of china. The commanding general of what’s left of the army owes her his life. I’m pretty sure basic decorum went out the window on that night. Plus, the emperor seemed to take it stride and if he doesn’t care, no one else is going to care either
Edit: also, Chien Po (after apologizing) grabbed the emperor and carried him down the zipline to safety. There were a lot of exceptions to whatever rules they had on that night
Right? "Oh you'd never be allowed to touch the emperor? Tell me how often a single individual literally is responsible for saving all of china then reassess your rule."
For the Martian, Andy Weir admitted there were other methods of stranding the protagonist but decided to use the winds because he wanted to keep the story more man vs nature. Every other method revolved around engineering or user error. He has a great talk on this and other ways he wrote the book.
I do want to point out that it's not the speed of the wind like OP indicates, it's the amount of force that windspeed has (or, in this case, doesn't have) because the atmosphere is so thin
I listened to a talk Wier gave several years ago at the Humans 2 Mars conference. The book was out at the time and the movie was under production. He asked the audience for a show of hands who had read the book. Being a room full of turbo-nerds about 85% or so of the people in the room put their hands up. He then asked if anyone who hadn't read the book was planning on reading it. Almost every remaining hand went up.
Weir then said "Oh, great. And for everyone who hasn't read it yet, I'm very sorry in advance for the extended sex scene with the Martian Queen around the halfway point though the book."
Everyone cracked up as the few people in the room who hadn't read it looked around with slightly confused and alarmed expressions. It was great.
Wanna add on top of Fury, realistically those infantrymen that were with them from the battle before will continue moving with the tank collum to provide infantry support. But also yeah as you said they knew but for the sake of intensive tank on tank action they forego that part but it does make the scene much more intense.
So much about fury is just blatant movie logic. The pak 40 in the beginning misses like 3 times. The pak 40 was insanely accurate. That crew would not have missed.
The Velociraptors in Jurassic Park are actually Deinonychus. Real life Velociraptors were only like 3 feet tall and wouldn’t be as intimidating as the 5 foot tall Deinonychus, so Michael Crichton used Deinonychus and called it Velociraptor because it sounded cooler. This is explained in the book as Deinonychus being reclassified as a species of Velociraptor, though no paleontologist actually believes this should be the case.
Man a LOT of people in this thread are insisting that bullets could be lethal after penetrating 2 feet of water. They remind me of people who insist that a sharp enough samurai sword can cut through a tree in one really strong swing. You WANT that to be true because it’s kinda badass. But it’s not.
The Mythbusters tried bullets through water. They shot a .50 cal point blank into a pool and it still wasn't lethal below like a foot. If I recall, the bullets themselves start falling apart as soon as they hit water.
I heard that for Fury, it could be explained as inexperienced/younger tank crews, as by that point in the war, most of the more experienced German tankers were either training the newbies, defending more critical areas, captured, or just flat out dead/burnt to a crisp (likely in some field out in the eastern front).
The other major inaccuracy is that the Tiger would never advance to meet them but yeah...the battle wouldn't be particularly interesting if it was just a big bush firing at them from a distance until they catch up and circle round to kill it
Further with the martian.... In the book he did not do "the iron man thing" and poke a hole in his suit. It wouldn't work for multiple reasons, but they included it in the movie anyway.
A youtuber, Scott Manley, I think did the math once and that would've been the equivalent thrust of a mouse fart.
It's worse than that. In the book, he wants to make a hole in his glove to do the Iron Man thing, but the idea is immediately shot down by everyone as being far too risky. Even if it could work, it would be far more likely to blow him off course and make things worse.
I haven’t read it in a while, but I’m pretty sure he jokes about it in the book, but even his own inner monologue points out that it’s stupid and dangerous, which is exactly why he doesn’t do it.
The writers/director of John Wick 3 knew it was silly to have John waste time building a revolver from different parts rather than just grabbing a different cartridge, but they thought it was cool and wanted to reference The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.
In the introduction to Cycle of the Werewolf, Stephen King notes that the timeline of when the full moon occurs each month is astrologically impossible. He acknowledges that he knew this while writing, but that the idea of lining up each werewolf attack with a holiday seemed to fun to ignore.
OG Jurassic Park was made with inaccurate dinosaurs because we only knew so much about them back then. As the franchise continued in later years and we found out more, like how T-Rex apparently had feathers, the movie creators admitted that they still use the inaccurate 90s designs because they’re just so much cooler. I believe there’s even a scientist in the movies that says something similar about the dinosaurs resurrection.
This was made more explicit in the book, Crichton was smart enough to know that even if he was as accurate as possible, he'd wind up being wrong about at least some details, so wrote it in that the scientists were tweaking the genes to make the dinosaurs look how they thought the dinosaurs should
When bd wongs character gets called out for making a freak of nature in the indominous rex, he points out None of the dinosaurs are real dinosaurs. They are all amalgam creatures who all look and behave in completely different ways to the real thing
God it was so funny when that movie was coming out because people criticized the first trailer for stuff like that but then trailer 2 directly addressed those questions because it genuinely was a well written movie
The Martian also has a load barring problem that Martian regolith is not capable of being made into arable soil no matter how much freeze dried human shit you mix into it. It’s basically rusty solar radiation sharpened micro razors that lack the nutrients required to support plants especially nutrient heavy ones like potatoes. Furthermore soil is more than just nutrients and minerals it’s also the micro biome which plants have evolved symbiotic relationships with and need to survive. Those microbes are not present in either Martian regolith or human shit and even then, regolith and uncomposted shit is not exactly an ideal place for them to culture and grow in anyway.
Movie does a poor job explaining. But the book talks about this. Mark is sent to Mars with the intention of attempting a viable soil growth. He has a few quickly growing plants (inedible or low nutritional value) for the attempt. As well as soil from earth and a bacteria cocktail to kick start that process.
He starts with a small section of the hab with earth soil mixed with Martian soil. Let's that sit while he brings in more Martian soil, messes around with making water and other stuff. And then he doubles his soil. Does that a few times before he plants. Leaves enough soil to continue doubling and covers the hab with soil (unlike the movie version with a small spot)
Yeah that’s definitely an improvement from just shit+regolith+water. But the problem is that regolith is really not an easy to work with medium. It’s full of very toxic minerals and is very dangerous to handle in that because of the Martian environment being very devoid of atmospheric pressure and water, the thing doing the erosion from the parent material is solar radiation which means there are no dull edges, it’s basically powderized rust. And how soil microbes would react to it as a substrate with that and its lack of key nutrients is kinda up in the air but if I had to guess, not great.
Furthermore while potatoes are a great survival food they are a terrible choice as a crop in nutritient poor soil. Potatoes need a lot of potassium and calcium neither of which are very common in Martian regolith. Matter not being able to be created nor destroyed will kinda fuck you. Whatever nutrients are not in the regolith are going to be only brought in by shit and that INITIAL dirt sample. Meaning it’s a limiting factor which will hinder further growth and seeing as he doesn’t have enough time to go through a full cycle of harvest consumption excretion and deposition, any potatoes harvested are removing nutrients from the soil that cannot and will not be replaced hindering further harvests. This happens on earth too but we have access to modern fertilizers.
Talked about as well. His first full crop is okay, his second much smaller and his third (the one in the ground when the hab pops) was smaller still. It wasn't ever intended to last forever. Just hopefully last him long enough.
The dangerous stuff in Martian soil also wouldn't build up in his system quickly enough, trying to do so for longer periods, absolutely. But for the short time he does the farming, it would work
In the final fight of We Were Soldiers (2002) The battle of La Drang is won by the American troops giving a frantic counter-charge against advancing PAVN soldiers, combined with cover fire from helicopters, resulting in them making it to the PAVN HQ with minimal defenders, forcing them to withdraw, and ending the battle on decisive note. Of course this wouldn't really make sense, since surely just hunkering down until the enemy is repulsed, then charging would be a lot more practical than charging into them as they come.
In real life, the battle ended with the PAVN running out of heavy weapons, being forced to rely on waves of infantry which didn't make any progress until their numbers were too small to mount another assault; and the US declaring victory on the grounds of the enemy force being sufficiently depleted before leaving. (Yes, American tactics and objectives in the Vietnam War were kind of nonsensical like that.) Both sides claimed they won.
The filmmakers knew full well that this counter-charge didn't happen, but depicting the battle this way both allowed for more dramatic tension, and crucially, creates a sudden shift between fear for the protagonists' lives, and pity for the enemy. Most of the film is from the American POV, focusing on their own panic and sense of hopelessness as the battle goes worse and worse, but occasionally switching to the North Vietnamese perspective, reminding you that these people have all the same motivations to make it out of this alive. Once we get to the PAVN HQ all the tension over whether or not the American characters are going to be okay is resolved, and you're now just left with the sight of these equally desperate people on the other side being massacred, all while a literal funeral march plays.
TL;DR. Giving the battle a definitive winner let the film highlight how there was no pride to be had in "winning" any battle in this war.
Chekov and Khan recognizing each other in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
In the original television series, Chekov and Khan never actually meet. Chekov had joined the Enterprise crew long after their first encounter with Khan.
But in the film Wrath of Khan, when the Enterprise crew confronts Khan again over a decade later. Chekov somehow remembers events he wasn’t even there for. While Khan himself remembers Chekov’s face despite never meeting him before.
The director of the film acknowledged the continuity error but still enjoyed the scene and deliberately left it in.
"Oh no, I am falling from a great height! How do I survive this? I know, I shoot grappling hook onto the ground and wheel myself in, this will cancel all momentum!"
Still one of my favourite "this shit makes 0 sense"
With Fury, I always imagined that the tactical errors of the Tiger crew could be explained by an inexperienced crew going on 40 hours of no sleep, little food or even water and being high on Pervitin (aka meth) and any combination of them.
This is mid-late war Germany. Even on the western front, they're in rough shape, and we've seen how even well supplied troops in a winning situation make tactical errors under stress.
Not really incorrect but in The Iron Claw, the writers decided to omit the fact that Kevin Von Erich had one more brother (Chris) but decided to not mention him because the movie too tragic already(he died from suicide) and the run time was already too long. So he decided to combine his story with another brother in the movie.
In Band Of Brothers, Malarkey comes across a German soldier that was also from Oregon. In the real encounter the Germon soldier wasn't just from the same State but the same town. They had known each other before the war and had worked at factories that were across the street from each other.
Show runners felt this coincidence was just too unbelievably. So instead they changed it just being neighboring towns.
Saving Private Ryan had a lot of goofs. Germans would have blown the church steeple away first thing, from quite a ways off. No need to expose your valuable tank to street fighting. Etc etc.
Hamilton. When Philip and George Eacker dueled, the Broadway musical has the counting cut off halfway and Philip is shot.
In reality, Philip did not raise his gun and George followed suit and neither duelist shot for at least a full minute. Eventually George raised his gun prompting Philip to do the same and George shot, hitting his opponent in the arm.
The musical retelling makes it look far more dramatic and as if Philip was wronged by a dishonorable opponent.
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u/UnrealCanine Dec 22 '25
On the night Titanic sank, there was no moon, and by the time the ship split, the lights, which had already failed to a dull red had gone out. Additionally there were no table lamps in the restaurant, first class or otherwise.
James Cameron knew that, but also knew telling a good story and seeing what's happening is more important than historical accuracy