Assorted Movie Nits
Last Update: September 1, 1997
Mike Hanks suggested I start a file for movies that didn't garner their own individual file. Sounded like fun so here it is!
NOTE: This file is temporarily frozen due to the four season Brash Reflections for Voyager. You're welcome to send additional nits and I will file them for futue updates!
20,000 Leagues Under the
Sea? (ABC's adaptation)
The Abyss
(new!) Alien
(new!) Aliens
(new!) Alien 3
A Simple Wish
Back To The Future
Back To The Future, Part II
Back To The Future, Part III
Batman
Die Hard with a Vengance
Escape From L.A.
FirstStrike
G.I. Jane
Highlander II: The Quickening
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
(new!) Jurassic Park
Lethal Weapon
Metro
(new!) Money Talks
Murder At 1600
(new!) Planet of the Apes
The Relic
The Saint
The Silence of the Lambs
(new!) Speed
Stargate
(new!) Toy Story
Turbulance
Volcano
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? (ABC's adaptation)
Mike Leinoff: Captain Nemo, after replacing Pierre Aronnax's hand with a synthetic one, he says that it's an alloy of his own design, "non-conductive." So then how come at the end of the movie, Nemo hotwires the torpedoes with his synthetic, NON-CONDUCTIVE hand?
At the very end of the movie, when Aronnax's father goes nuts with a gun, he shoots Nemo and Pierre each in their leg. Pierre stands up pretty easily, then remembers he's supposed to be struggling, and stumbles into the water.
Joshua Rosenfield of Lee's Summit, MO: Some nits on my favorite movie.
The crane which breaks of the Benthic Explorer is rather small compared to the oil rig, Deepcore 2. It makes me wonder if it could really tug the large rig down the canyon wall.
This whole drowning scene with Lindsey is rather unbelievable. She is practically dead for at least 15 minutes, taken it would take about 5 minutes to get her out of the minisub, 2-3 minutes to swim 60-70 yards, and about 7 minutes trying to revive her. When she was revived, she would have serious brain damage and would not be her normal self. I also should point out the she has instantly aquired makeup after her predicament.
This Deepcore thing is pretty tough, for a civilian installation. Not only can it accede the maximum diving depth of the U.S. Navy's Ohio-class nuclear missile submarines, but it can survive and tow along the ocean floor, hitting several obstacles in it's way. I think Benthic Petroleum should sell it's pressure hulls to the Navy.
When Bud makes his descent into "the abyss", also known as the actual Cayman Trench, he breaths with a fluid breathing systems. This is so the pressure won't crush him. However, if you look closely, you can see a big pocket of air just above Bud's head in the helmet.
(Not really a nit.) Man, these minisubs are really tough!
When Bud swims to the "moonpool" to help his friends through the hatch, he swims in freezing cold sea water, and is 2000+ feet below the ocean. Let's get real people, that water is a couple of degrees above freezing. We're talking like ice water. Do this, stick your hand is a cooler of ice water. How long can you hold your hand in there? Not long eh? Well, our hero Bud does this for at least 2 minutes. He would freeze, period. And as for the pressure? 2000 feet? Without his drysuit and helmet, he would be crushed.
Charles Sylvia: We get the impression that the world in which the Alien movies takes place in has an Earth that is much more advanced than our Earth, yet they still have not made contact with any intelligent extraterrestrial beings. (In Aliens the Marines are a bit sarcastic with Ripley when she claims she's seen an "Alien.") However...when they see the dead alien in the mysterious ship, nobody acts like this is some kind of major discovery or anything. I mean...they just found the first sign of some intelligent race, intelligent enough to build spaceships...and all they can say is "this place gives me the creeps, lets get out of here."
We know that Ash, the android, works for the company and is on a mission to bring back the alien life form at all costs - the crew themselves are expendable. He has the perfect oppurtunity! Kain is in a coma and Ash knows the alien is growing inside him. It would be a LOT easiar to get the alien to the company in it's larva stage than when it's in it's big adult form. And besides...the crew wouldn't even know what was going on! So...the question is...WHY didn't Ash just freeze Kain and then deliver him frozen to the company. This way the company get's there very own alien embryo!
For some reason the computer interface on the Nostromo looks like someone sitting on BASIC on an Apple IIe or something...right now my computer, my PRIMITIVE 1990's computer has a really cool looking graphical interface! (I know...the film was made almost twenty years ago...) (Note from Phil: Amazing how fast technology changes isn't it! ;-)
Why is it SO difficult to activate the self-destruct sequence? You have to pull out all those tubes and do all this nonsense...(at least it's not like Star Trek where you need like half the crew to verify the self-destruct sequence)
Okay...I always laugh when I see this. A LOT of Alien is overdramatized! In the last sequence before the Nostromo blows up, when the Alien comes down from the ceiling and kills the last two remaining crew members...for no apparent reason...all these strobe lights and flashing cool special effect lights are going off everywhere. The Alien must have sabotaged the computer to do that to ensure that it's entrance would be more dramatic.
And...while Ripley's running around the decks of the Nostromo...for some reason lights are flashing at her and smoke and vapor is pouring out of the ceiling! What is the purpose of these lights! I'd think someone would fall down in an epilepsy attack or something with all these flashing lights that have no real purpose! Does the main computer sense that something suspenseful is happening, so it turns on all these cool flashing lights and puffs smoke out of every ventilator?
And..finally, in the computer room where crewmembers can interface with the main computer called "mother", what is the purpose of all those cheesy looking blinking lights on the wall?
On the rare occasion that we actually get to SEE the alien, it moves kind of slow...yet somehow...it manages to get all the way to the escape pod from where it was when Ripley last encountered it before getting to the escape pod herself. It gets there before her!
Speaking of not seeing the alien...this movies main plot focuses around this killer Alien, yet...throughout the entire movie, we only see the alien about five times...and only in glimpses. The reason for this actually...is because the director of the movie had wanted to have the alien be as non-human as possible...but eventually, because of costs..they needed to have the alien as someone in a rubber suit. He thought however, that it looked to cheesy, and so he decided "less is more" and therefore, the alien looks a lot better when we see it only in the dark and only glimpses of it. (I agree there!) By the way.. I found this out from watching Alien on the sci-fi channel which featured one of those "behind-the-scenes" looks at the movie.
Out of all the ways to kill someone, Ash...the "Company Android" chooses to try and kill Ripley by stuffing a rolled up magazine down her throat. Why not just choke her or something?
The most pathetic showing in the movie comes when the alien comes down from the ceiling to kill the remaining to crewmembers. (Forgot their names!) First....why does no one ever just shoot the alien with their flamethrowers? When the alien comes down, this guy actually attacks the alien by hitting it with the end of his gun! What is he doing!? And when Ripley meets the alien in the hallway she just runs away...why didn't she fire at it?
Charles Sylvia: Although this alien species is supposed to be the ultimate survivor, it seems that it would be pretty hard for it to propagate. We find out here that an alien can not reproduce by itself. Only a queen alien can reproduce. But the only way for a queen alien to come about would be if one of the colonists went into the cave of eggs and got one of the face-hugging thingies attached to him, and was impregnated with a queen. Now...this would have to have happened the first time the colonists ever discovered the alien eggs. Otherwise these colonists are pretty stupid. Didn't they realize after the first colonist fell victim to a face hugger that these things were..."bad." Therefore, why would they continously go back, and get themselves impregnated by face huggers. And it's not like this is a quick process, the face hugger has to sit on you for hours before you are properly impregnated by aliens. Didn't the colonists realize after the first guy was impregnated by an alien that these salivating black monsters are bad, and therefore they should do whatever necesary to avoid being impregnated by these face huggers? (The only way I understand how the aliens completely conquered this colony is if the first person to come in contact with an alien face hugger was impregnated with a Queen alien. Then the queen alien could have gone off an reproduced on its own. But what are the chances of the first one being a queen?)
Why would there only be one queen alien? Maybe the original queen just kills any new queens that are born. (Note from Phil: I'm sure there are parallel to the insect world but without doing some research . . . ;-)
At the ending scene Ripley, by herself, with only one gun, goes into the den of the aliens to rescue Newt. Now...this is the same place where almost the entire squad of marines will killed in less than a minute, and they all had the "bigger" guns. Yet Ripley, of course, somehow manages to survive.
I think, probably the biggest nit in this movie, is that the Marines did not leave anyone aboard the Sulaco. Are people in the future so reliant on technology that they don't see the need to leave a human onboard the mothership just in case anything goes wrong? Of course, if they had left someone on board, the movie would have been cut short by about an hour since they could have easily been rescued and then nuked the planet from above.
Charles Sylvia: In this movie the alien emerges from the dog it was implanted in very differently from the previous movies. In the previous movies it burst out of it's host in the form of a small, pre-adult worm like thing. Now, it emerges out of the dog fully grown. I wonder how it even fit inside the dog at this size without tearing the dog apart earliar.
This alien must be some kind of new mutation or something, because we saw a LOT of these aliens in the previous movie, but none of them were able to dart accross the ceiling at super fast speeds or walk sideways along the walls.
I wonder, exactly HOW Ripley got impregnated in the first place. She says it happened while she was in cryo-stasis. But in order for the face-hugger to get to her it would need to burn through the glass casing of the cryo-chamber. How did it come into contact with her without leaving any marks or anything on the cryo-chamber.
E. Anne Cattell: Best line: "Nothing's cast in stone....except maybe your father.."
Nitpicks: This wasn't too bad of a movie if you're a Martin Short fan.
The casting of the painter from Murphy Brown as Anabel's dad was an odd choice at most. The fact that this guy's day job was driving a horse drawn carriage was silly but ironic.
Does Short have to hit his head once in each movie he does? Is it in his contract or something?
I'm not going to nit on the male fairy godmother thing, because I see nothing wrong with it. Though it does appear odd that the way to become a fairy godmother is to take a test. Apparently, you aren't born, you're taught.
Apparently Murray was patterned after The Mad Hatter. I'm referring of course to the carrot red hair, the buck teeth and the fact that his eyes never blink, unless you count when he knocks himself out in the whirly twirl scene.
I forgot to mention one thing, the frogs in the movie were blue and very obviously computer animated.
Bob Canada: Note: These nits were gathered from the widescreen edition, so some observations may not be evident on the pan & scan version.
I felt that the opening scene was inspired; making those of us familiar with the comic think we were watching Batman's origin, when in fact, it was a similar family in a similar situation.
Batman certainly has a flair for the dramatic. When the two crooks are on the rooftop dividing up their spoils, Batman floats down in a doorway behind them with his cape outstretched, and slowly lowers his arms, in an attempt to look frightening. They can't see him, so--who's he doing this for?
Bruce Wayne seems awfully slight of build to be holding a full-grown adult at arm's length over a ledge, and not drop them or be pulled over himself. There are several other amazing feats of strength in the movie that would seem to be beyond the capabilities of someone with Wayne's physical stature.
Besides being a "superstitious and cowardly lot," criminals are also all considerate enough to only shoot Batman in his armor-plated chest, instead of his unprotected face.
Hmmm...District Attorney Harvey Dent is a black man...yet two movies down the road he somehow becomes a white man. Maybe Gotham just has a long-standing tradition of only electing men named Harvey Dent as District Attorney.
In the newsroom, a man hands Knox a cartoon of "The Bat Man," and its signed by Bob Kane. Kane was the real-life creator of Batman (that's not him handing Knox the drawing though).
Vicki Vale's copy of Time magazine gives her a photo credit. Since when does Time (or any magazine for that matter) print who took the photos on the cover?
When Jack Napier (who will soon become the Joker) asks Grissom if he can get someone else to handle the chemical plant heist, Grissom grabs him by the shoulders and says "Jack...you...are my number one gar..." Gar? Gar?
I'm no expert on safes, but when Napier and the gang open the one at the chemical plant, they cut around the combination lock, which falls to the floor, then they spin the round handle & open the door--which is perfectly smooth on all sides. No sliding bolts or locking mechanisms that I can see.
Commissioner Gordon makes a poor showing in this movie. When he and his police force first enter the chemical plant, they stand behind a garage-type door that takes forever and a day to trundle upward, exposing their feet, legs, chests, etc., giving whoever's on the other side ample time to gun them all down before could even see them. Wouldn't it have made more sense to stand to the side of the door until it opened?
Obviously whoever designed the control panels that Jack activates in the chemical plant also designed the Enterprise. Every switch he throws produces a shower of sparks and clouds of smoke.
As Batman "glides" down the steps to kick the gun out of Napier's hand, wires supporting him are clearly visible (at least on the laserdisc version). And how exactly is he supposed to be gliding anyway? His cape isn't nearly wide enough to slow his descent that much. Is he using the Force?
Commissioner Gordon strikes again. After confronting Eckhardt (the overweight, unkempt detective) and accusing him of being corrupt, he (and apparently all his men) turns his back on him and allows him to escape, then stands oblivious as Bob the Goon simply walks up to him and places a gun next to his head. By the way, does Eckhardt look familiar? He also was "Porkins," the overweight X-Wing pilot who bought the farm in the Death Star trench in Star Wars. He was also one the FBI agents who confiscated the Ark of the Covenant at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark."
There's some time compression going on after Napier plunges into the chemical vat. Bruce & Vicki have a date the day after the chemical plant robbery. I'm assuming its the next day, based on the newspaper headline we see that reads "Batman Foils Robbery." It has to be the next day, right? It wouldn't be much of a paper if it was covering this story a week after the fact. So that night we then see them on their cutesy date, sitting uncomfortably at each end of the huge long table. Then we cut to Jack in the back-alley surgeon's office, getting his bandages removed. So apparently in less than 24 hours Jack has time to find a plastic surgeon who won't ask questions, get plastic surgery, heal, and get his bandages removed. We then cut to Bruce & Vicki heading upstairs, apparently still on the same date. Then we see Jack's transformation into the Joker become complete as he gets all spiffed up in a new purple suit and kills Grissom. Then we see Bruce & Vicki waking up, apparently the next morning. So either all this happened to the Joker in the same night, or Bruce & Vicki's date lasted for 2 weeks, or however long it takes plastic surgery to heal.
The "Flugelheim" museum (ha ha) contains the Blue Boy, Unfinished Washington, and many other famous paintings that one single museum would be unlikely to have at the same time. By the way, the menu at Vicki's table reads "Fluegelheim," but the sign outside the museum says "Flugelheim."
In the Museum restaurant, the busboy appears to pass out before the Joker's purple gas gets anywhere near his nose.
The Batmobile can cover itself with shields, including its tires. Do the shields go all the way around the tires, or do they stop where the tire meets the street? If they do go completely around the tires, how do the shields squeeze between the bottom of the tire and the street surface?
When Batman cracks the Joker's poison product code, the newspaper lists the following product combinations to avoid:
Deodorant and baby powder Hairspray and odoreaters Lipstick and nail polish Aftershave and talcum powder
The deodorant/baby powder and aftershave/talcum combos I can see--you might use both those products in the same place on your body. But how could hairspray and odoreaters, and lipstick and nail polish do any harm? Those products are used on widely separated body parts. I suppose you could argue that the chemicals could be absorbed into your body & combine, but...
The TV announcer then reads the following combos to avoid--"deodorant with baby powder, hairspray and lipstick." Huh? Totally different from what the newspaper said. He left out a few combos and mixed one up. How many Gothamites were killed by listening to this man's faulty report?
Given that the view from Vicki's apartment looks to be pretty high off the ground, shouldn't her apartment number be a little higher than "9?" Also, the sign on the wall across the hall points to "Apartments 4387."
When the Joker and his men enter Vicki's apartment, Bruce finds a tray which he uses as a bulletproof shield. The tray has raised edges, about an inch high. After Bruce is shot and Vicki finds the tray, it has a dent which protrudes from the flat back of the tray. So apparently instead of placing the tray under his clothes with the raised edges touching his chest (which would give him an inch or so clearance when the bullet dented it), Bruce must have placed the flat back of the tray against his chest, which means that the bullet dented the back of the tray inward and about half an inch into his chest. Ouch.
There's a strange scene which starts in a TV control room, where we see a bank of 4 TV monitors. The Mayor and Harvey Dent and the rest of his entourage come down the steps of City Hall to cancel the Anniversary celebration, and they're visible on all 4 monitors. The Joker then appears on the monitors on the right side of the screen. When he speaks, the Mayor and everyone, who are still visible on the left-side monitors, turn to look at the right-side monitors, as if they can see him. What exactly are they looking at here? Are there monitors on the steps of City Hall? Its almost as if the Mayor and other people on the screen can look around at other TV screens and see what's happening on them.
During the Joker's statement, he says he's taken off his makeup (which is a lie, since at the time he's actually wearing flesh-colored makeup), and challenges Batman to take off his. I think he means take off his mask.
Bruce Wayne watches the Joker's challenge, and pauses the tape. When the tape pauses, the Joker's eyes are closed. After Bruce has his flashback and realizes who the Joker really is, he looks up at the monitor, and the Joker's eyes are open.
There are some continuity problems during the Joker's parade. In the longshots, the giant clown balloon is very high above and in front of the Joker's float. In close-ups, however, the clown balloon is behind him and so close that its almost rubbing against his head.
Bob the Goon reacts to being shot before the Joker even pulls the trigger.
Batman swoops down in the Batplane, grabs all the giant poison gas-filled parade balloons, and swoops up above Gotham to release them. Batplane or not, I would think that 5 or 6 huge balloons like that would create some serious drag...could a plane even pull something like that?
It's hard to see for sure, but one of the buttons Batman pushes to arm the Batplane's weapons looks like its labeled "volume."
I won't even comment on the silliness of downing the Batplane with one bullet.
More time compression--Vicki & the Joker walk up the cathedral steps for two minutes at the very most, yet when the Joker drops Vicki's shoe over the railing and we see it fall, it appears they're up 30 or 40 flights. They've obviously both been spending some serious time on the Stairmaster...
During the fight in the belfry, one of the Joker's henchmen throws Batman down a shaft. Batman is facing the henchman as he falls backwards. A few seconds later, Batman swings up, wraps his legs around the henchman's neck, and flings him into the abyss, but now, of course, he's facing AWAY from the henchman. I guess there was time for Batman to turn around while he was hanging from the edge, but...it just looks wrong.
What's wrong with Vicki during this whole catherdral sequence? As the Joker dances around with her, she hangs limply in his arms like a rag doll, as if she's passing in and out of consciousness. Is she drugged? Does she have the Vapors? Or is she just overcome by all this excitment and commotion? Isn't it a little late in the 20th century for this type of helpless damsel-in-distress portrayal?
So Batman throws the Joker over the edge of the cathedral, then he & Vicki peer over the ledge and apparently don't see the Joker standing a mere 3 feet below them on a second ledge, until he reaches up and grabs them and throws them both over...
The Joker's fall from the cathedral is VERY fake looking.
I think at least one of the laws of physics, possibly more, are violated when Batman & Vicki fall from the top of the cathedral and Batman shoots his grappling hook back up to the top of the tower, before they both hit the ground.
David Letterman always used to ask this question, but it bears repeating. At the end of the movie, Knox asks Commissioner Gordon how they're supposed to contact Batman. The Commissioner says, "He gave us this," and turns on the Bat Signal. Cut to Batman standing atop a building, staring at the signal. The question is...did Batman think that they want him right THEN, or did he understand that they were just demonstrating it?
Todd Felton: When in the museum and painting over the artwork, there's one painting in particular that one of the goons puts big paint handprints on. This picture, which is a portrait of someone (William Shakespeare maybe, I can't recall) is then shown throughout the entire sequence (while Prince's "Partyman" song plays on). However the graffiti on the painting changes! It's clear, then there's handprints, then there's none, then there's handprints again.
On the cover of Time magazine, it states that the photos were done by "Vicky Vale". 'Vicky' is spelled wrong, it should be 'Vicki'.
M. Nelson: While I hate to be the producer's advocate, I did notice one nit that seems worth contesting. Bob Canada mentions that in a couple of scenes, you can see the wire Batman is "gliding" down. I think this is meant to be intentional, since several times during the movie we see him openly use wires to swing, glide, whatever, from place to place.
Brian Straight, Shawnee, KS: Setting aside all of the problems with the creators' theories in time travel. I'm doing these "on the fly" so I didn't get to far in the movie (I'll leave the rest up to the guild).
Again when Doc demostrates the DeLorean he says "if you wanted to witness the birth of Christ" and then punches December 25, 0000 into the keypad. A. We don't know "for sure" Christ was born on Dec 25, and second there was no year 0.
During Marty's chase sceen with the Lybians, keep an eye on the milage on the odometer.
Not a Nit just a Note: When Marty runs back to the mall at the end, notice that it is now the "Lone Pine Mall." because he killed a pine in 1955.
Brian Straight, Shawnee, KS: Hmmmm, Marty, Biff, and Doc, all seem to have aged 5 years since we last saw them, and Jennifer now seems to be an entirely different person altogether!
Aside from that the creators did an excelent job of acurately recreating the final moments of the first movie.
I let it go in the first movie, but I had to mention it in this one. Marty travels to the future and buys a sports statistics book, Doc throws it away, and Biff gets the book, steals the DeLorean, and gives the book to "himself" in 1955, as a result Biff becomes a mega-illionare and owns Hill Valley, turning it into a apoclytic nightmare, Doc and Marty try and thwart Old Biff's efforts by traveling back to 1955, and destroy the sports book before Biff can use it. Once Marty destroys the book everything is fine and dandy (almost). The only problem is once the book was destroyed, Biff would never have owned Hill Valley in 1985, Marty and Doc would never travel back to destroy it, and thus Marty couldn't be there watching the book being DESTROYED!!!. Secondly if Biff owned the 1980's then Marty and Doc would never of been able (since Doc was commited, and Marty in boarding school) to travel to the future to get the sports book. Nor would Doc be able to build a time machine, so they could never travel to the future. Nor would Marty ever be able to change his parents in the past.., etc.....
Funny, I never heard Lorraine say "I'm gonna let my kids have anything they want..." in the first movie.
When the DeLorean is tailing Biff's Ford, hovering over the ground, watch as Marty clings to fender, look under the DeLorean and you can see little wheels, driving the car!
The DeLorean (if you watch it in slow motion) gets struck by a lot more than two bolts of lightning. And, I guess its possible the DeLorean puts off a strong magnetic feild, but since it isn't grounded lightning isn't likely to strike it.
And Doc says he needs to make another approach o land. Another approach? Like in an airplane? With wings? Why can't he just hover the DeLorean down, bringing it closer to the ground?
Did Marty leave the Hoverboard behind while he went to talk to Doc? With the Fed Ex guy still there?
So what happened when Doc arrived in 1885? Does the DeLorean have an emergency landing feature? Or did this "tin foil" car not get damaged when it dropped out of the sky? The lightning DID destroy the flying circuts.
(new!) Rene Charbonneau: Brian Straight, Shawnee, KS mentions that he never heard Lorraine say "I'm gonna let my kids have anything they want..." in the first movie. Well, in the first movie, the action cut to the dance in the gym at the point when Lorraine says that.
(new!) Brian Fitzgerald of Acworth GA: This nit involves the final moments of the first movie as shown at the begining of the second one. First off, this comes from the video/theater versions. That is diferent from the one that appeared on network television. The TV ending was shot seperatly and replaced Marty's line about the future "What do we become @$$ holes or something?" with "what do we become weird or something".
Part 1
Marty: What do we become @$$ holes or something.
Doc: No, no, no, no both you and Jennifer turn out fine.
Part 2
Marty: What do we become @$$ holes or something.
(DOC PAUSES AND THINKS FOR SEVERAL SECONDS)
Doc: No, no, no, no both you and Jennifer turn out fine.
If you watch them back to back, the pause becomes very apperant.
Brian Straight, Shawnee, KS: Did Marty ever give Doc back the note, warning him of his death?
Why was Doc tomb dedicated to Clara? She died in the ravine before he could pick her up.
Did anyone (in the 1880's that is) else find Marty's clothes a bit odd?
(new!) Brian Fitzgerald of Acworth GA: Brian Straight wanted to know why was Doc's tomb dedicated by Clara because she "died in the ravine before he could pick her up".The reason is that Doc was supposed to meet her at the train station. She arrived in town by train. She died in the ravine because after arriving at the station she had to rent a wagon to get her bags to her house, by her self. If the doc would have met her at the station they would have ridden out to her place with his horses, they might taken a slightly diferent path at a slightly diferent time. For what ever reason there horses would not get spooked by the snake, and not run off the cliff. Even though Doc would not save her life that way, she still falls in love with him.
Mike Hanks: The plot revolves around a mad bomber who uses a "binary explosive" to do his dirty work. As is explained to the audience by an on-screen character, a "binary explosive" consists of two separate chemicals. When these chemicals are combined, they make a super-powerful explosive. But as long as these chemicals remain separate, they're each harmless on their own.
So... At one point in the movie the bad guy reveals that he's placed a huge binary explosive bomb in an elementary school somewhere in New York City. After a lengthy search, the cops find it. It is indeed huge, with a few dozen gallons of each chemical resting in a separate container. (The chemicals are different colors, by the way, which allows you to see that they are, at this point, unmixed.) The head guy of the bomb squad comes in to deal with this monstrosity. A very tense scene follows in which the bomb expert does his best to defuse the bomb. Time ticks away. The bomb expert sweats a great deal. We're given the feeling that if he blows it, there won't be enough of him left to vacuum up with a dustbuster.
Why not just make it so the chemicals can't mix?
I mean, we're told quite plainly that each chemical is totally harmless on its own. And in this huge bomb, the chemicals are clearly unmixed. As long as the bomb expert can keep them from mixing, there's no problem! Cutting the connecting tubes would have solved this problem, as would simply breaking one (not both, obviously) of the containers. (But then we wouldn't have been treated to the tense, sweaty bomb deactivation scene.)
Murray Leeder: Using caller ID, they should have been able to find out Simon's location in a second. That whole scene of "Keep him talking so we can locate him" is an antiquated notion now.
Corey Hines, Hamilton, ON: This isn't really a list of nits but they are a comparason of how much John Carpender couldn't really think of anything new from "Escape From New York" and re-used the plot devices from it.
EFNY = Escape From New York
EFLA = Escape From L.A.
Crime is rampant in the U.S.A. and a city is tured in to a prison
EFNY - Manhattan
EFLA - Los Angeles
A problem arises that involves the President
EFNY - The President in trapped in NY
EFLA - The President's daughter goes to LA with a massive weapon
Snake Plisken is is arrested and headed for the prison
Both
Plisken is sent in to retrieve
Both
He is injected with a weapon to make sure he completes the mission
EFNY - Capsels that will expand and kill him in a day
EFLA - Infected with a virus that will kill him in 8 hours
Goes in covertly
EFNY - In a glider
EFLA - In a sub
Uses a traking device and comes up short, an excuse to see the city
EFNY - Looks for a tracking device on the President but he's not wearing
it
EFLA - Looks for a tracking device of a swat team member but he's dead
One head bad guy
EFNY - The Duke
EFLA - Quarvo Jones
Meets up with a woman who later dies
Both
Is captured and has to compete for his freedom and wins
EFNY - Must fight a huge wresler
EFLA - Must play basketball
Gets injured in the leg
Both
The vehicle that gets him there is gone
EFNY - Punks throw the glider off the World Trade Center
EFLA - His sub sinks
Meets up with a person he used to know
EFNY - Brain
EFLA - Hershey
His allys that tries to leave with him all die except one
EFNY - The President
EFLA - The President's daughter
He does a switch at the end of the film
EFNY - He switches a tape with important peace making information with a
music tape
EFLA - He switches a disk that controls a massive weapon with a useless
information disk
Tony Forbes of Albuquerque, NM: Great flick! Well, great fight scenes!! Picture this, bad guys are on the second level of a parking garage, Jackie is on ground level, and he takes 'em out! How? He's wearing stilts! But one thing. Later in the stilt fight scene, the action is inside a mall. Jackie gets his girl out of harm's way by placing her on top of an elevator. The elevator promptly goes up. Our hero ditches the stilts, and races to save her. Some helpful security guards rescue the girl, and then they radio to base "We're on the top floor." Jackie shows up and pushes the guards into the elevator, faking that he's got a gun. The doors close and the elevator goes up. Are there shops on the roof?
Bob Cascella of Falls Church, VA: Brash Reflections: I found it interesting that the Demi Moore character was named Jordan O'Neil. The movie is about the struggle for equality between men and women. I couldn't help but think that her name was a reference to Michael Jordan and Shaquille O'Neal, the two superstars on opposite sides of the sneaker wars: MJ for Nike and Shaq for Reebok.
One nit that I saw:
When the Master Chief is being chased by the Libyans, he rests his gun on the handle of a grenade, pulls the pin, and leaves it there for someone to pick up the gun and set off the grenade. Nice trick, and it kills one or two bad guys. The problem is, the grenade exploded immediately when the guy picked up the gun. A grenade would have to have a delayed explosion, otherwise it would blow up in your hand any time you tried to use one. I'm not an expert on weapons, but it makes sense to me.
(new!) James E. Puntch: I only had one or two nits for the movie that hasn't been mentioned. When the Cobra gunship is heading in to provide reinforcements, it faces the camera very briefly. You can see right through the two rocket pods, the tubes were empty. Second, when the helicopter begins to fire its rockets at the Libyans, it gets really, really close, closer than is probably safe. Third, about the last time it fires its rockets, we hear them being fired, but there is no explosion, and a couple of soldiers fall over as if they had been shot. Not very good realism there.
Todd Felton: In a scene near the beginning of the movie, there is a closeup of Connor McLeod. A fire escape is seen raising up in the background. Then cut to a long shot, and the fire escape raises up again.
Mike Hanks: Rick Moranis's character describes his shrinking method approximately thus: "There's a lot of empty space in between each individual atom. My shrinking ray simply reduces the distance between each individual atom, which has the effect of shrinking whatever it hits."
So let's think about this: The space between the atoms is just reduced. The atoms are closer together, making you smaller. But you still have the same number of atoms. And a billion atoms close together exactly the same mass as a billion atoms farther apart.
So you have these four quarter-inch kids who have the same number of atoms in their bodies that they had when they were fully grown. This means that they weigh EXACTLY the same as they did when they were full-sized. This would eliminate a lot of the activity we see in the movie (riding a bee, riding an ant, climbing a blade of grass).
David L. Tayman III: When the Explorers arrive at the Tyrannosaur paddock (for the second time) in the rain, the now-free T-Rex tosses a bloody goat leg onto the top of the vehicle. In all subsequent shots, the leg is no longer there!
When Grant tries to rescue Tim out the of the Explorer, which is stuck in a tree, he accidentally knocks the steering wheel, causing the wheels to turn, shifting the vehicles position in the tree. Question: Why would an automated ride through a path with many dangerous electrified fences have a working non-locked steering wheel? Someone could drive off the track right into an electrified fence (or worse)!
When Lex sits down at the Computer console to put JP back online, she stares at the /Graphical/ Map Interface on the monitor, and gasps, "It's a UNIX system...I know this!" Since when is UNIX graphical with pretty nifty graphics? Last time I checked it was all text based, (though I may be wrong on this...) (Note from Phil: As far as I know UNIX is a text based system. However, I believe there are graphical interfaces that can be mapped on top of it. NextStep, for instance, is UNIX based.)
Euan Bowen: Lethal Weapon (I believe it's 3 or 2): Martin Riggs [Mel Gibson] fires his Berretta 92 until the action locks open (indicating it's empty) and then proceeds to fire two more rounds, complete with recoil and SFX.
Jeffrey M. Muscato: Just off the top of my head: When Eddie Murphy mouths to take out the car to his lip-reading partner (who's watching him through a rifle scope), the sniper says to himself "car? what car?" Sharpshooting requires that the shooter remain perfectly still -- at the moment the shot is fired, you hold your breath and don't move *at all* except to pull the trigger. To talk when you're hunched over a rifle's scope would require movement that is unacceptable when he's watching for his target.
Richie Laskaris of Toronto, Ontario: A few days ago I saw the movie "Money Talks", starring Chris Tucker. Personally, I thought it was extremely funny. I saw it again yesterday to verify a nit my sister caught the first time around. There were maybe a dozen people in the theatre the first time around, and even fewer the second, which baffles me (it really was a pretty good movie, though there was a lot of shooting and a LOT of swearing). Anyway, here's the nit:
There is a scene consisting of Franklin Hatchett (Tucker) shaving after taking a shower at James Russell's (Charlie Sheen) place. While shaving, he is watching the television mounted in the bathroom. It features an infomercial offering a collection of Vic Damone's greatest hits or something, with Hatchett making comments like, "I never heard of him...[derisively] 'Vic Damone'--psh!" When the phone number is displayed on the screen, it (and all the other text) can be read normally, from left to right, even though we are seeing the television's reflection in the mirror.
A minor second nit: after the good-cop guy ("Bobby" something) shoots the bad-cop guy at the stadium, Hatchett shouts, "You shot him!", to which Bobby replies, "No, no--YOU shot him. It's your gun." Not only is the gun not Hatchett's--it's his friend Aaron's--but Bobby's fingerprints are all over it. He isn't wearing gloves or anything, and if he were to try to wipe his prints off, he would wipe off Hatchett's, as well.
Jeff Muscato of Columbia, MO: When Regis (Wesley Snipes) walks through the White House metal detector and it goes off, a Secret Service agent asks him for his weapon and says he'll get it back when he leaves. Strangely enough, he doesn't make him walk through it again! I've set of an airport metal detector several times with keys or whatever, and they never just make you show them your keys and then go on -- you have to take off your metal *and then successfully go through!* Regis could have had a second gun (as many cops do) and brought it in to the White House after giving the agent his primary weapon.
When Regis suspects there is someone in his apartment, he pulls out his Glock and checks out all the rooms and hallways. Several shots show him carrying his weapon with his finger on the trigger -- a bad move with any gun, but especially with a Glock, because this defeats the only manual safety that the weapon has -- the switch in the center of the trigger that must be pressed into the trigger before the weapon will fire. More on this later.
When Regis is enlarging the photograph, the computer seems to "sharpen" the blurry, enlarged grid section very quickly and very accurately! It *almost* (catch my sarcasim) looks like they took a picture, blurred it, and then had the program "undo" the blur when the actor did whatever he did on the program! I've got Corel Draw, and it's "sharpen" function doesn't work very well at all. It just touches up lines between color differences and such -- it can't make a wa-out-of-focus photo in perfect focus! The problem here also is that, no matter how good the program or the computer is, the data *simply isn't there.* Anything that the computer does to sharpen a picture is all approximations and estimations! If the picture's blurry to start with, the computer doesn't have any more information than the user does on what the person really looks like.
Also, the color printer (probably laser or thermal wax transfer) printed really fast -- it's probably 12-18 papes per minute, although I've never seen a home/small office color printer that can go that fast (although some of the higher-end black and white small office laser printers go that fast.)
As Agent Chance jumped from the lowest part of the fire escape to the ground, her hair was suddenly down. I suppose it could have come loose, but I didn't see anything that could have been a hair clip fall off her head.
When she goes into the coffee shop to meet Regis, she has a tight shirt -- tucked in -- and pretty tight pants. It doesn't look like she has a gun, which I would think is unusual for Secret Servive agent.
The guys in the van have a coherent-beam radar system to listen in on people very far away -- pretty much a radar that uses laser to point at one specific place. The problem is, it shouldn't be visable light! That would give them away because a red dot would show up on the target! Plus, when looking straight back a laser, the emission point is *very* bright -- many times that of a flashlight or whatever. Also, in the first shot of the laser we see, not only can we see the emitter itself showing visable light, but we can see a red line coming out of it -- a no-no unless the van is *very* humid, which it wasn't.
Right after Detective Regis and Agent Chance shoot the car's gas tank and it explodes, they show the two of them taking cover behind a concrete block. The slide of Regis' Glock is locked back. Normally the only time you see that in movies is right after a gun's been fired, but only in the same photo shot. After that there's time to let it forward for the next shot. They do that because they only put the number of blanks to be fired in the gun (the problem could be corrected by always putting one extra blank in a gun to be fired). But the problem here is that it was in a *different* shot -- probably taken hours later, when the gun hadn't just been fired. So I don't know why the slide was locked back anyway.
When Regis is at Spikings' house and the guys shoot it up and then one climbs through the window, the slide of his gun is locked back when he climbs through and suddenly forward in the next shot, even though we didn't hear him release it (and if he did -- that is, if the movie was portraying that it locked back because he was out of ammo -- he would have had to reload as well).
Finally a good neck-breaking scene -- most movies make it look too easy. I was talking to my biology teacher's husband (who was subbing for her for the last month of school while she was on maternity leave), who's got a Ph.D. in biology and was in the Air Force, and he said that it's not as easy as it looks in the movies to break someone's neck (but he wouldn't show us how. Grin).
I'm sure that when Regis said "2118 -- that's 9:18," that was just for the pesky salesman to overhear, since it's almost guarenteed that Agent Chance is familier with military time.
If those grates are such a vulnarability to the White House, why didn't they lock them from the *inside* (from the bottom)!?
In the tunnels the guy jumps on Regis and Regis' gun goes off because the instinct is the tighten your grip when you're faced with an aggressive situation or when you're startled. Perfect example of why you should carry a gun with your finger securely anchored on the trigger guard or on the frame just above the trigger area.
In the same scene, Regis and Chance converse normally although their ears would be ringing terribly and it would be hard to hear each other.
The lasers on the motion sensors (which is the wrong term for that, but more on that in a minute) shouldn't have been visable. Light is only visable when it bounces off something and hits your eye. Unless the room was extremly humid or full of "dirt'n'grime," the lasers shouldn't have been visable -- and even then only slightly; they wouldn't have been as bright as they were. A side note -- there was a lot of space between the lasers; Regis should have at least *tried* to get through without setting off any alarms! They were in a bad position -- instead of being criss-crossed, they were all horizontal, leaving space between them.
Now about the lasers/motion detectors. Motion detectors (you can get a cheap one at Radio Shack for $40 to see what I mean) have a piece of plastic, usually a sqare about 1.5 inches on a side. Behind this is an emitter than does *not* emit a coherent beam -- it emits a cone-shaped light beam to cover most of the room. The lasers in the tunnel are not "motion" detectors but rather they just detect when someone actually walks through them.
Just a note -- the president punches the guy at the end with his right hand (you'll understand when you see the movie).
Murray Leeder: A nit on one of the best sci-fi pictures of all time. And though I realize that it was kinda the point that Taylor was unwilling to see for himself the fact that "the planet" was actually Earth, but I'm still forced to wonder why he didn't notice that the constellations were suspiciously similar.
Tony Forbes: It's only a horror flick. I won't, for example, mention how a guy dies IMMEDIATELY after being chomped off at the waist, even though tests done during the French Revolution showed that a person remained conscious for at least thirty seconds after being beheaded.
Jeff Muscato: Val Kilmer had a cellular phone that had a phone interface on the front, and flipped open to be something like a Psion or HP 100LX -type thing. Whenever he sent e-mail, it showed up on a black screen (backlit, probably active-matrix, color LCD) with a teal grid. Each character filled one spot in the grid. True, it looked cool, but I've never seen that interface anywhere else (I can believe that he has that gadget -- it'd be expensive but they probably exist). It makes it hard to read and makes it not be able to have as many characters per line. My dad's plain-old-civilian Psion with an electroluminecent screen (like Indigo watches) and I think it has 2 MB or memory, and two non-standard PCMCIA-type card slots (they don't work with real PCMCIA cards but they're silimar in function and a little smaller than the regular ones). Although my dad's doesn't have a phone built in (that probably would cost several thousands more, plus it has to *look* like a regular phone from the outside) it seems a lot more functional than this thing Kilmer had.
When we first see Val Kilmer he has this watch that tells him the temperature of his wet(dry/insulating)-suit and the room temp. When they match he walks through the rigged room. But his goggles (special gadget that shows the lasers, which you shouldn't see from the side anyway because they're coherent beams) show teal-colored lasers -- I guess they're UV, instead of IR like most -- but then that stops people from seeing them with regular night-vision goggles that use IR to see in the dark. My question is, how do these lasers detect heat? It looks like they each shoot to a sensor (or maybe to mirrors that only all end up in one sensor) and when you step through it and break the beam it would set off an alarm. Also when the Russian guy walks into the room and and disarms the system with a remote, he walks in the doorway. He doesn't have an insulating suit on. If these things worked by heat, his body heat would probbaly have warmed up the air enough to set them off.
Phil Farrand: This is not a movie I'd recommend but Cliff Cerce did bring up a very interesting point. As I understand it the premise of the title is that the female character--played by Jodie Foster--is subconsciously trying to silence the screams that she remembers from sheep being killed during her childhood. Except . . . sheep don't normally scream when they are being killed! We have several shepherds in our church and one of them confirmed that the illustration used to describe the Messiah in Isaiah 53:7 is correct: " . . . he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is [silent,] so he openeth not his mouth."
Euan Bowen: I'm sure you've already heard this, but Keanu shoots Woody in the right leg, and his cast is on the left. Or is it vice-versa?
Katrina Pipinis: I just caught this movie last night on TV... uggh. Makes me wish I'd gone to bed at 8.30. A little long, and just a bit too slow in getting moving. An hour into the movie (including ads), and we still hadn't seen Ra!
Anyway, onto the nits:
If reading & writing have been outlawed by Ra, who wrote all that stuff for Jackson to be able to read it and be able to tell us the story? And how come the girl was able to read it? Was I just not paying enough attention, and there was some sort of secret society that kept reading and writing? But then, she says later that Daniel told her everything that was on the wall. But, she also sits there telling Jackson how to read the markings, and she only figures it all out after Daniel tells her? Oh, forget it, I'm confusing myself here.
How come we haven't found anything written in Egypt that would support everything that gets written on the other planet? The dismantling and burying of the Stargate would have been a huge event and this hasn't been written down by the Egyptions?
(Note from Phil: My buddy Darrin Hull brought up an interesting point. If Buzz Lightyear really thinks that he's a real person and not a toy, why does he freeze when Andy comes in the room?)
Joseph Pintar of New Hartford, NY: I just saw Turbulence on video. This movie makes Air Force One, Executive Decision, and Con Air look probable by comparison.
A 747 flight on Christmas Eve with only 11 passengers? I don't think so.
Why didn't these prisoners simply fly Con Air instead of a passenger plane?
Why is there no navigator on board the plane.
The pilot and co-pilot both leave the flight deck when they should've been on the flight deck.
Repeatedly, Lauren Holly's character does the stupidest thing she possibly could do. She gives the keys to the flight deck to a convicted murderer. Then she leaves the flight deck during a crisis three times. If she had stayed on the flight deck, the plane would've landed sooner and the movie would be over.
Somehow I knew that the confiscated gun would be important later in the film.
The 747 turns upside down in flight?
The flight manages to get from Ohio area to Los Angeles very quickly, doesn't it?
The whole situation with the F-14 was silly. Ray Liotta's character isn't interested in landing the plane, he wants to crash it. The F-14 is simply helping him in that aim.
When the F-14 does fire, why doesn't it knock the plane off balance like in Air Force One?
When Liotta uses the ax to open the flight deck door, did it remind any one of The Shining?
Mark Bowman: I went to see volcano a couple weeks ago and it was an excellent movie (in my opinion it was better than Dantaes (is this spelled right?) Peak). However I have a couple of nits for it.
One of the scariest scenes was when the lava started to come into a house and a dog nearly got trapped but was able to get out through a doggie door just intime which brings up a nit. When the lava is comming into the house the floor boards seemed to be able to support it for quite a while. Now I don't know how long wood can support lava before being totaly vaporized but to me it seemed longer then it would have been in real life.
When the passengers were trapped on the subway when the hydralic fluid leaked howcome they weren't able to break the windows? Also when the lava surrounded the train and started to melt the metal howcome the floor didn't melt away under the guy carrying the driver? Also when the guy jumped into the lava he was able to throw the driver to safety. I find it hard to beleive that even though the guys legs were being burned away by the lava, giving him unimaginable pain , he would able to maintain the concentration and the strengh to be able to throw someone.
Katrina Pipinis: When the volcano first 'erupts' in Wilshire street, Tommy Lee Jones' character decides that they need to block the spread of the lava by the use of a barricade about 6ft high. Okay, fair enough. People then proceed to position barricades around the end of the street. Firepeople (I'm using the politically correct term) then stand behind the barriers with their hoses ready. Now, it might just be me and my bad eyesight, but those barricades don't look six feet tall! Remember, the firepeople are standing behind the barricades -- and the barrier seems to be about waist high, which ain't 6ft!
I have a problem with the whole barricade idea anyway. It looks to me as if the barrier is made up of about 20 highway barriers, bent round the end of the street in order to catch the most amount of lava. Now, the road is bitumen, I assume. Lots of little stones on the ground tightly packed together. This ain't gonna be perfectly smooth! But for this plan to work, the surface of the road has to be perfectly smooth, or lava's gonna get through the tiny little cracks under the barricade--not to mention between the barricades!
I see the makers of Volcano learnt from Independance Day how to make an audience stress. There's a scene very similar to the one in ID4 where a dog makes a last minute escape. The dog just sits in a burning house, while it's master is outside, right up until the lava and the fire is right on top of it, and THEN it comes running out the doggy door!
Okay, one more little problem--more of a production one. There's a couple of these.
Several times during the course of the movie, we see the lava inching it's way down the road, eagerly melting the road away. I suspect we're looking at the same footage several times! Not because of anything specific, but it just seems to move the same way each time.
When the lava bursts out of a water main, we see lava flying into the sky. That bit looked really really REALLY fake. Come to think of it, we see the same shot a few times during the last 15 minutes of the movie!
Murray Leeder: I never saw this one, but the Roger Ebert had a great one! As the lava inches closer, the firemen are spraying water into the middle of it, where it couldn't possibly do any good. They'd do better to spray it at the edge, where it might harden and stop the rest of it. So why are they spraying it at the wrong place? BECAUSE THEY DON'T KNOW IT'S THERE! Special effects sometimes produce the most amusing nits...
Brian Straight of Shawnee Kansas: There are several, many, HUGE plotholes in this movie, that you could drive Mack trucks through! Compairative to Dante's Peak, Dante's was better "realisticly" but not better action-wise.
Several times in the movie the creators where inconsistent with the intense heat lava has to offer. Lava sits at a nice temperature of about 2500 degrees Farenheit (sp?). The fire fighters, the dog in the house, and just about everyone stands right NEXT to the lava, and seem uneffected by the intense heat radiating from it (if you where standing next to lava you would definetly feel it, imagine how hard it is to put your hands up against a camp fire (burning at a cool 5-600 degrees). But later in the movie when Roark opens the person-hole (gotta be PC thse days) cover he puts his hand over the opening and reacts by yelping and jerking his hand away.
Roarke says something like "we need to find a way to stop THIS STUFF" (emphasis mine). At 40-50 years old Roarke dosen't know what lava is?
A lava bomb spurts out on to Roarke's daughter and she only gets second degree burns?
When they put out the lava with the water (which is a nit in itself) the helicopters appear to be flying way to high for the water to make any difference, the water would evaporate LONG before it gets near the lava.
I doubt that little kid would be brave enough to wander so far away, and into dark empty rooms, etc.
Roarke can out run a colapsing building, ok....
When they channel the lava flow at the end, there's some "news fotage" of it being shown in the Emergency Managment office, and it appears to be real footage of lava flowing (and seems to have blackining spots on it) but when the movie cuts back to the computer genrated lava flow it's all red again.
If you would like to add some comments, drop me a note at chief@nitcentral.com. Please put "Movie Nits" in the Subject line and include your real name, city and state (or province and county as the case may be) in the body of the e-mail so I can give you credit if you are the first person to bring up a particular nit. (Remember the legalese: Everything you submit becomes mine and you grant me the right to use your name in any future publication by me. I will do my best to give you credit if you are the first person to submit a particular nit but I make no guarantees. And finally, due to the volume of mail received at Nitpicker Central, your submission may or may not be acknowledged. However, your submission will earn you a membership in the Nitpickers Guild if you are not already a member!)