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Spider-Man 2 Has Over 30 Mistakes 750

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.
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Spider-Man 2 Has Over 30 Mistakes

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  • 32 already (Score:5, Funny)

    by mcgroarty ( 633843 ) <brian.mcgroarty@nOSpAm.gmail.com> on Monday July 05, 2004 @09:40PM (#9617768) Homepage
    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.

  • "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.
    • by noewun ( 591275 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @09:46PM (#9617802) Journal
      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.

      • Well, there was no sound in space on Firefly...and it got canned.

        (Yeah, it's OT, but not VERY OT)
    • by Xeth ( 614132 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @09:46PM (#9617803) Journal
      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.
    • by Engineer Andy ( 761400 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @09:49PM (#9617829) Journal
      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.
      • by dvdeug ( 5033 ) <dvdeug@emailMENCKEN.ro minus author> on Monday July 05, 2004 @11:01PM (#9618269)
        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.
    • by Blastercorps ( 762119 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @09:54PM (#9617866)
      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!"
    • You mean genetically altered spider. Radiation was cool/hip in the 50's and 60's when the comics were written, and passe when SP1 came out. In the movie, genetics was the new hotness mutation.
      • by ConceptJunkie ( 24823 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @11:52PM (#9618455) Homepage Journal

        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?)

    • Go watch the 80's cartoon "SilverHawks". Between people "falling" through space (and needing saving!), hair being "whipped" in the wind, the SilverHawks "flying" around, and that damn theme song "Partly metal, partly real", you'll be screaming for just a LITTLE bit of realism.

    • That Peter Parker wasn't bit by a radioactive dung-beetle. Just imagine what his super powers would be then..
    • by GarfBond ( 565331 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:37PM (#9618142)
      I got bit by a radioactive spider once. Didn't get any special powers, but I did lose a lot of hair.

      (note to mods: this is a haha-funny attempt)
    • People like movies for different reasons. While to you, all of this nitpicking is annoying, I think that for some people it is part of the fun. In any case, I had fun watching the movie tonight just straight up for the themes it addressed, and the story, but I am not annoyed that people do this nit picking. To each his own, you know?
    • by rorymoon ( 200947 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @11:11PM (#9618314)
      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 ...
      • by Mister Skippy ( 789403 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @12:29AM (#9618685)
        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.

  • by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Monday July 05, 2004 @09:43PM (#9617786)
    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.
    • by $$$$$exyGal ( 638164 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @09:50PM (#9617836) Homepage Journal
      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.

      • by Ralph Wiggam ( 22354 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:18PM (#9618024) Homepage
        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
        • by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:34PM (#9618124)
          An important concept that comes into play from the bean counters is "time value of money"... that is, the investors in the film want their millions back ASAP because even if the film gives them more money back, that has to be compared to how much their capital would have made had it been invested in something else or just sitting in a bank.

          In short, giving up that director's fee had to equate to the interest the investor's money would have made over the six-month delay, or the bean counters woulda vetoed it.
        • by lawpoop ( 604919 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:50PM (#9618209) Homepage Journal
          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.
    • So true, there is a scene in Gladiator (from the DVD) toward the beginning where the Romans clash with the barbarians (?) and you can clearly see extras laughing and walking back to their lines after they collide. Obvious enough to easily see while watching on an airplane...
  • Randall. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by EvilJohn ( 17821 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @09:45PM (#9617800) Homepage
    What was it he said?

    "There's nothing more exhilarating than pointing out the shortcomings of others."
  • 3.141 (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 05, 2004 @09:45PM (#9617801)
    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.
  • by Gary Destruction ( 683101 ) * on Monday July 05, 2004 @09:46PM (#9617808) Journal
    Alot of the errors they mentioned are typical for Friday the 13th films, where blood and guts reign and only the hardcore fans devote time to find the bloopers. One would expect better from a major action film.
  • My only gripe (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Grave ( 8234 ) <awalbert88.hotmail@com> on Monday July 05, 2004 @09:46PM (#9617809)
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Twirlip of the Mists ( 615030 ) <twirlipofthemists@yahoo.com> on Monday July 05, 2004 @09:55PM (#9617873)
      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 (Score:5, Insightful)

        by tgibbs ( 83782 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @11:03PM (#9618277)
        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 (Score:5, Interesting)

          by DunbarTheInept ( 764 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @01:20AM (#9618962) Homepage
          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.

    • Re:My only gripe (Score:5, Insightful)

      by istewart ( 463887 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:00PM (#9617909)
      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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by stienman ( 51024 ) <adavis&ubasics,com> on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:03PM (#9617934) Homepage Journal
      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 (Score:3, Interesting)

      by rjh ( 40933 )
      Tritium is bought and sold on the open market like any other commodity. One major use is for night sights for weapons. Tritium runs for around $1000 per gram, if memory serves--at that rate, it's nowhere near impossible to accumulate a few kilos of it for a wealthy entrepreneur.

      I'm far more irritated at the form the tritium took. Tritium isn't a solid (at least, not under any terrestrial environment). Tritium is a gas.
    • Re:My only gripe (Score:5, Informative)

      by C10H14N2 ( 640033 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:12PM (#9617984)
      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 (Score:5, Informative)

      by geomon ( 78680 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:12PM (#9617985) Homepage Journal
      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 [pnl.gov] 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 (Score:5, Informative)

      by Idarubicin ( 579475 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:48PM (#9618195) Journal
      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 [tocris.com]; 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.

    • by ConceptJunkie ( 24823 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @11:45PM (#9618437) Homepage Journal

      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. ;-)

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @09:46PM (#9617810)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by D+iz+a+n+k+Meister ( 609493 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @09:48PM (#9617825) Journal
      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.
      • by stuffman64 ( 208233 ) <stuffman.gmail@com> on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:54PM (#9618234)
        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... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 05, 2004 @09:47PM (#9617812)
    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.
    • If you pay attention to the angle of the car, it wasn't aimed at him - it was going to fly over his head. The car was going to hit Mary Jane, which makes Peter lunge at her to save her and causing Peter to be put into harms way.

      Yes, I just saw the movie one hour ago, and I enjoyed it regardless of the mistakes.

      Matt Fahrenbacher
      • Still, if I was a super-villian looking at questioning a normal for information, throwing a car in their general direction wouldn't be the first thing I'd do.

        Also-Doc Oc throws Peter into a brick wall hard enough to shatter it. This is after threatening Peter with a 'You'll find Spider-man and have him meet me'. Unless in the Spider-man universe humans are tougher or brick is weaker, this is a bad idea for the Doc to do. Putting your gopher into the hospital or morgue wouldn't generally help their passi
    • Re:Pretty Thin... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Babbster ( 107076 ) <{moc.liamg} {ta} {bbabnoraa}> on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:16PM (#9618008) Homepage
      That one made me laugh, too, though not because it was nitpicky but because it was based on the premise that Otto was in his right mind. It was made very clear that the interface with the arms screwed with his head. Flavin!
  • by rfernand79 ( 643913 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @09:47PM (#9617817)
    Oh yes, and the soundtrack also has mistakes. Two canons are horrendously overlapped, the motif is altered by two notes in several reprisals and if you listen to it backwards it says "Jay and Silent Bob are better than Spidey".
  • Factual Error: When real scientists cybernetically attach themselves to an artificial intelligence, we use two, seperate, completely redundant systems to prevent ourselves from being turned evil.
    • And point two: These systems will be at least as armoured as the AI's are, as well as being set up so that a burn-out will result in a non-functional system, rather than a short bypassing the system.
  • by yoshi1013 ( 674815 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @09:48PM (#9617824) Homepage
    Also, Tobey Maguire isn't Spider-Man in real life, he's just an actor.

  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @09:49PM (#9617831)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by CptChipJew ( 301983 ) * <michaelmiller@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Monday July 05, 2004 @09:50PM (#9617838) Journal
    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.
  • by tomRakewell ( 412572 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @09:50PM (#9617844)
    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!
  • by telstar ( 236404 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @09:52PM (#9617856)
    "Spider-Man 2 Has Over 30 Mistakes"
    • ...somebody's got to give Slashdot some competition.

  • 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...
  • by Mia'cova ( 691309 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @09:55PM (#9617876)
    The only thing that really caught my eye was how the character with the mechanical arms moved. He walked as if they weren't there, turning around easily with them spread wide. They didn't seem light enough to just spin like that.

    It was just a conflicting feel to them that threw me. On one hand they seem like big strong arms slamming through stone without any sign of slowing down. On the other hand they're being carried around without a care in the odd scene.

    But while it did stand out, I was very happy with how they handled the arms overall. I think they went to noticable efforts to obey the laws of physics as much as possible without sacrificing other aspects of the film. Often one arm braces while another pushes out, for example.

    I also liked the arcing on some of their heavy high-powered wiring when it was being pulled out. I don't think it'd look like that, arcing outwards but they're still trying to visualise real-world effects.

    So they get my full support for putting in much more thought and detail into their physics than I expected going in. I'm willing to look past any physics-related errors at this point.
  • by BelugaParty ( 684507 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @09:55PM (#9617877)
    Peter Parkers physiology is more man than spider. Therefore, he should be called: Man-Spider.
    • In English, the ajective typically preceeds the noun. Thus, Clinton was an American President, not a President American, even though he was president for only 8 years and an American his whole life.

      I have a red car, even though only the paint is red and the entire thing is a car.

      Parker is a man. Spider is a modifier like 'typical', 'super', or 'bat.'

      Perhaps in South America they would be interested in your suggestion.
  • 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
  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:01PM (#9617918)
    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.
  • by TheAntiCrust ( 620345 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:02PM (#9617925)
    OK, a lot of stuff bugged me in Spiderman2, but a few things stand in in my mind, none of which were adressed in this list.

    1. How are you going to tell me a fusion reaction, what was supposedly a small sun, was drowned by water???

    2. OK, so the fusion thing didn't work out, you're telling me that the technology going into those robotic arms that could instantly send wires capable of interacting with the human brain and be powered by no easily identifiable power source werent worth anything? As well as the biggest break-through in fusion energy ever? Yeah right.

    3. OK, this one is a bit more nit picky... helicopters do not just go flying in between the buildings of New York like that, especially not so close to one another.

    The movie was good as a whole, but a lot of the plot just didnt make sense. It doesnt seem like it would take that much thinking power to get rid of those few anomolies. Oh, and the one woman reporter asks about the super intellegent AI and Doc Ock had never even mentioned anything about the arms being intellegent!!! Why did the arms have to be intellegent at all??? Gah! Oh, and Doc Ock didn't tell whats his face how much of that gold junk he needed. He just said he wanted some. There were soooooo many technical errors in that movie and I wasnt even looking for them!
    • by jCaT ( 1320 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:15PM (#9618007)
      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.
  • by jfengel ( 409917 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:02PM (#9617926) Homepage Journal
    Continuity errors bore me, and I try to ignore the plot holes, but The IMDB's trivia page [imdb.com] is often fascinating.
  • i liked the movie, but i did not like the demonization of fusion in spider man ii

    in a world of smog and wars fought over oil prices (pro-iraq war people: read why iraq invaded kuwait, anti-iraq war people: read why us invaded iraq) we do not need an ultra-pop movie demonizing one of the few technologies which could save us from the petroleum age

    in spider man ii, fusion can go "chernobyl", this is a fallacy

    if something goes wrong with a fusion reaction, it just fizzles out, it can NEVER start a chain reaction

    in spiderman ii, fusion is the megalomaniacal goal of the evil mastermind, and his obsession threatens to blow up half of manhattan... but much like that old '90s film "chain reaction", with keanu reeves, you can't blow up half of wisconsin or manhattan with a fusion reaction, noways, nohow, never

    so we don't need hollywood spreading flat out wrong and fearmongering ideas about a promising technology

    there is no runaway chain reaction component to fusion, please get it right hollywood... or do you like the global warming, choking on diesel exhaust, war-for-oil world we live in?

    ps: fusion reactions are not super-magnets either: in the movie, anything metal got sucked towards them

    pps: it WAS funny and harmless how the fusion reaction is portrayed as a miniature sun in the movie, complete with coronal mass ejections threatening doc ock's control of the reaction...
    perhaps that is vaguely educational too, fusion's connection with the sun shown as a visual parable, to portray it that way

    but hollywood, PLEASE: fusion is not fission, do not let forth the hounds of ignorance and fearmongering onto a promising technology, please!
  • by dema ( 103780 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:09PM (#9617965) Homepage
    I have found a few errors on their website (:

    Warning: mysql_connect(): Too many connections in /usr/www/users/jsandys/includes/phpconfig1.php on line 2 Warning: mysql_connect(): Too many connections in /usr/www/users/jsandys/includes/phpconfig1.php on line 3 Warning: mysql_select_db(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in /usr/www/users/jsandys/includes/randomtitle.php4 on line 4 Warning: mysql_query(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in /usr/www/users/jsandys/includes/randomtitle.php4 on line 16 Warning: mysql_fetch_row(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /usr/www/users/jsandys/includes/randomtitle.php4 on line 20
  • by Eric(b0mb)Dennis ( 629047 ) * on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:12PM (#9617986)
    While we bicker over a movie, what about the mistakes in real life?

    1. You are free.
    2. You read slashdot because you're an 'intellectual'
    3. That +5 Karma you have was hard earned.
    4. You don't like Britney Spears and don't use windows at all.
  • by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:15PM (#9618004)
    So, where you the guy in the front row of Wizard of Oz shouting at the screen "Thats BULLSHIT man, monkeys dont fly!".
  • by sinergy ( 88242 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:23PM (#9618055) Homepage
    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
  • by ITR81 ( 727140 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:34PM (#9618118)
    Don't watch a movie for entertainment but to find mistakes in it and then make note of it on your PDA.

  • by Tony ( 765 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:41PM (#9618161) Journal
    Okay, if you drop a super-hot mass of incandescent gas into the Hudson, you're going to get one big fuck-off jet of super-heated steam gushing out, like a mini-explosion. Spidey and MJ should have had the flesh boiled from their bones in a matter of seconds.

    But, otherwise I really enjoyed the movie.
  • by FS1 ( 636716 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:45PM (#9618180)
    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 (Score:5, Funny)

    by blue_adept ( 40915 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:45PM (#9618181)
    Also, people bitten by spiders don't generally become ultra-powerful

    of course not! the spider has to be radioactive, silly.
  • Movie != Reality (Score:3, Informative)

    by Hello Spaceman ( 739648 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:45PM (#9618186)

    I don't think people should try to hold movies to any kind of "reality standard". Even the most grounded movie story is told by men wearing makeup that techies spent an hour carefully lighting. People stand on boxes to look taller, directors tell actors to step farther apart so that their distance will reflect their relationship, and no one ever has to go to the bathroom.

    No one ever points it out as a "mistake" in movies, but Spider-Man 2 took a step closer to reality by choosing to not have every car that was overturned explode in a huge ball of flames.

    FWIW, Sam Raimi directed the Evil Dead movies, which are cult classics despite having some of the largest movie mistakes to ever slip by audiences. (For ex: in Evil Dead 2 there is no ceiling in the house, and during some of the fast shots you can see techies heads poking over the tops of the walls. People never seem to notice this until someone tells them to look for it!)

  • In Related News (Score:5, Insightful)

    by suwain_2 ( 260792 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:48PM (#9618201) Journal
    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.
  • by crashnbur ( 127738 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @10:49PM (#9618205)
    ...is when Doc Oc throws spidey *forward*, then Spidey utilizes his cat-like reflexes (they weren't exactly "spider-like" in this instance) to fit through some weird bridge before slamming into Doc Oc... from *behind* the direction in which he had been thrown in the first place.

    Now that you know, you're going to be made at me every time you watch this scene. Ha ha.
  • I am so glad I am an every day movie goer.

    Movies are made for people like me. We laugh in the right places, cry for no apparent reason, and we know that Mary Jane constantly has a bad hair day in this movie because she's no longer a high school student being supported by mom and dad, but a struggling actress moving on up, finally making ends meet and who's also suffering from a bad case of Spidey-love.

    I don't notice when Spidey's rips and tears move from shoulder to shoulder. I turn a blind eye when the CGI gets cheesey and pretend I'm watching a live action comic book (uh, I am right?).

    I think this movie is a chick flick. We'll explain away everything, even the obvious flaws, and we're the ones who leave with hollow feeling in our bellies in sympathy with the emotional and physical ass-kicking Peter Parker takes in this movie.

    I loved it, plain and simple. For the most part, they suspended my disbelief. A few CGI blips and the fact that Spidey's identity is now the worst kept secret in the universe, notwithstanding, I felt I got a pretty good bang for my buck(s).

    My advice: save the criticism for movies that really, really suck. This movie rocks.
  • Blah blah blah... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ConceptJunkie ( 24823 ) on Monday July 05, 2004 @11:36PM (#9618407) Homepage Journal
    I'm so sick of reading these nitpicker lists where 98% of the so-called errors are trivial continuity errors. Real issues are fun to read and discuss, but I don't really give a crap that George Castanza didn't have the ketchup in his hand when they cut to Jerry, but Jerry's witty rejoinder makes him squirt ketchup across the table when he jump cuts back. Big deal. On the other hand, real plot holes or complete inconsistencies can be fun to talk about. For instance when Michael Moore claims Bush let the Saudis out of the U.S. when all the planes were grounded, pointing out the fact that it was actually Richard Clarke (the _terrorism_ guy) and the flight ban had been lifted, so nothing wrong was done is useful and instructive. That's an error worth pointing out. Unfortunately, these lists are usually just exercises in people's powers of observing insignificant minutia, and the fact that directors often flip the film (or even run it backwards like they did in helicopter shot in The Two Towers) seems to provide the majority of the issues.

    Here's one for free: In "This Island Earth" Dr. Meacham and his lady friend duck under the water to escape the explosion of the car driven by Russell Johnson's character. The next scene shows them stepping onto land and they are clearly dry. Woo hoo! I'm a GENIUS!

    The reward for such powers of perceptiveness were skillfully and cleverly satirized by the infamous Marvel No-Prize, until the dolt readers became incensed that they never got anything and Marvel actually had to start sending something out.

  • by DunbarTheInept ( 764 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @12:53AM (#9618841) Homepage
    The problem with these kind of cricisms at this site is that once you set up a site to try very hard to find problems, people tend to find problems that aren't problems, just to get their entry on the page: Here's some examples:

    Audio problem: It's clear that due to the tentacles' heaviness, they have to made some kind of sound when moving. But yet when Doc Ock takes the tritium from Harry in his house, he leaves without making any sound at all.

    Doc Ock's normal limbs were also there, in addition to his mechanical ones (He's not called Doc Quad, after all), and therefore he could still walk normally, just holding his mechanical limbs in the air and not doing anything with them (except holding onto the loot, of course). That could still be silent. Thus the implied sneaky getaway he allegedly made while off-camera is possible.

    Continuity: Doc Ock pulls the giant sun ball and its support down onto himself, so he should be under it as they descend, yet in the final shot of him sinking into the ocean, the ball is below him and he is falling after it.

    No. From the shot, we see Ock in the foreground, and the ball behind him, and they are getting smaller. The critic probably interpreted this to mean that they were falling away from the camera. But when I viewed it I interpreted this as the camera's vantage point was underneath them both, and the camera was sinking faster than they were, into the depths. The way the shot looked, either interpretation works. (But I think a much larger problem is that the river is only about 60 feet deep, and that final shot makes it look like it just goes down and down and down at least several hundred feet.)

    Besides, it's entirely possible, even if the critic's interpretation of the camara angles is right, that the two got turned around at some point when they were both off camera. The movie does imply that quite a few seconds have passed between the scene where Ock pulled the thing down and the underwater scene.


    Continuity: After Doc Ock drops Spider-Man off at Harry's house, Spider-Man's legs, wrists and arms are bound. When he sits up after Harry unmasks him, he never breaks his legs free of the ties yet he no longer has anything holding his legs together


    Things are often implied to happen off-camera in a movie. There were shots during which only the top half of spiderman is shown during that 'breaking out' scene, and so breaking out the legs could happen anywhere in there. The problem with finding errors of ommission is that they don't necessarily mean anything when there are moments that are implied to occur off camera. Otherwise everyone in the movie must be horrendously constipated since the movie is implied to take place over a period of several days, and nobody ever goes to the bathroom.


    Continuity: After Peter changes into Spider-Man to deliver the pizzas and throws them onto the ledge to save the two children, the camera goes back to show the pizzas and the man living there finding them. There are only seven pizza boxes, without any damage done to them. When he actually delivers them, there are eight and a couple of them are now flattened or banged-up as they should be.

    The fact that there are 8 instead of 7 - that's a problem, yes. The fact that they are now damaged when they weren't before - no that's not a problem in the slightest. Nowhere does it imply that zero time has passed between the pizza on the ledge scene and the delivering scene. Presumably the damage could have happened after the ledge scene.

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