Movies Littered With The Most Ridiculous Mistakes

Movies run on fantasy. Sometimes its as explicit as that of The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, and sometimes it's subtler. The events of The Godfather really do spring from real life, but that doesn't mean audiences aren't getting lost in its world as readily as they are in Middle-Earth. The silver screen removes its devotees from their lives, subjecting them to the triumphs and tribulations of others. A good movie pulls this off with seeming effortlessness. A bad one ... well, a bad one doesn't.

Perhaps the most egregious examples of a movie's failure of fantasy can be found in their outright mistakes. Historical films featuring props from beyond their time, shots that reveal changes of scenery, facts that are simply, glaringly bungled — all of it removes an audience from the story. Just how mistake-ridden can a movie get? With the help of Movie Mistakes, We're here to find out. From major blockbusters to holiday classics, these movies were all littered with ridiculous mistakes.

The archetypal disaster movie, Twister dazzled audiences with its up-close portrayal of nature's destructive streak and the people who chronicle it. Tornadoes don't just rip apart the landscape in Twister — they suck people into their murky vortices, grow more than a mile wide, and skewer bystanders with flying shards of metal. By the end of the movie, tornadoes seem less like acts of god and more like gods themselves. They're life-changingly powerful and impossible to understand, let alone control.

Natural disasters really do upend lives and landscapes, of course. But Twister played fast and loose with the actual science of tornadoes in order to ramp up the spectacle. It begins with the tornado that opens the movie being described as an "F5" according to the Fujita Scale ... which didn't exist in the year the scene is set. Later, when a burgeoning tornado is described by its Fujita ranking, Twister ignores the fact that the rating can't be determined until the tornado is gone. 

But the climax of the film takes the cake. Our heroes send a car hurtling into a tornado and book it through a cornfield like it's a meadow and not full of sturdy stalks that should've slowed them massively. The belts they use to lash themselves to pipes manage to keep them safe (and relatively unscathed) while the tornado passes directly over them. The storm, it seems, has a sense of drama. It sends some cows hurtling through the air, but it leaves the leads alone.

Nothing is subtle in the world of The Phantom of the Opera. Beds are shaped like enormous swans. Candles number in the hundreds. Velvet is the fabric of choice. This isn't a movie interested in doing anything by halves.

Unfortunately, that happens to be the case with the film's missteps as well. Some are accidentally hilarious, as when Raoul is trapped in a chamber of water with a slowly lowering grating, and then bubbles suddenly float downwards — a dead giveaway that the film was reversed. Some are simply confusing, like Meg Giry's pants. When she enters the Phantom's lair, she wades through water, yet one shot later, she's completely bone-dry. But the most noticeable mistake of all has to do with the Phantom's deformity. 

No, we're not talking about the fact that the movie downgraded the horrifying malformation of the book and stage musical to something like a bad sunburn. We're talking about the fact that it changes over the course of its reveal. When Christine first rips the mask off, the disfigurement doesn't extend much beyond his jawline, only for CG to be added moments later, taking it to his ear, neck, and beyond. Moreover, while the Phantom's deformity is luridly pink when first seen, it's almost sallow when glimpsed later in his lair. For being the thing that doomed him to a life in the Parisian sewers, the Phantom's terrible face sure is subject to change.

Directed by Martin Scorsese, the 2002 epic Gangs of New York chronicled the world of 19th-century Five Points, a New York City neighborhood as vibrant as it was deadly. Gangs vied for power, people fought and died, and the winds of change never stopped blowing, bringing immigrants, freed slaves, pickpockets, and all other manner of misfits and dreamers into the mix. Led by Leonardo DiCaprio and the ever-electrifying Daniel Day-Lewis, the film garnered positive reviews and ten Oscar nominations. Another Scorsese classic, another American fable.

Like any historical drama, however, Gangs of New York managed to foul up quite a lot of its details. Bill the Butcher might growl about who will do dirty deeds for a nickel, but he's missing the fact that he was living at least three years before the coining of the first nickel. A man is sent sprawling across a market floor, bringing the bananas that weren't yet traded in the US down with him. Flags featuring 50 stars drape a stage, roughly a century before the US would, in fact, have 50 states. This might have been a story about an era long past, but its mistakes were utterly modern.

Is there any movie that says "Hollywood" more than Titanic? From its legendary profits to the fact that, 20 years later, people are still making jokes about being "drawn like one of your French girls," it was as big, bold, and glitzy as the movie industry itself. It's impossible to imagine the world without Titanic, so huge was its impact. It wasn't just an icon of the 1990s, love stories, or any featured actor's career — it's just an icon, period.

Yet Titanic is as riddled with mistakes as any movie. Rose comments on Sigmund Freud's theories on "the male preoccupation with size," despite the fact that Freud wouldn't publish material on that subject until 1920. Jack runs to catch the ship while sporting a modern Swedish Army rucksack, commonly available in Army surplus stores today and very much unavailable in his own time. The "unsinkable" Margaret Brown, played to perfection by Kathy Bates, refers to herself as Molly, a nickname the actual woman never used until after the sinking of the Titanic. So it goes in the world of blockbuster films, where sweeping audiences away requires the work of thousands. As a result, sometimes you make a hit the likes of which the world has seldom seem, but you still probably get a few things wrong.

Two other Spider-Men have inhabited the legendary blue and red suit since Tobey Maguire brought the webslinger to cinematic life, but Spider-Man 2 still stands as a joyous monument of superhero cinema. The action! The romance! The tragedy! And what a cast, bringing it all to life, styled to embody their comic counterparts with almost surreal perfection. Mad science drives a man insane, altruism brings a young man with astonishing powers to the brink of death, and a moral emerges from the chaos, as shining as the city Spider-Man protects: Doing good is the duty of all who are capable.

Something less shining, however, is what the movie gets wrong. Remember the scene when Otto Octavius' fusion experiment goes horribly awry? Octavius warns the onlookers that what they're about to see is dangerous and then arms himself with special goggles. Yet mere feet away, the onlookers are apparently totally okay without them. And how about tritium, the substance that's so rare that Octavius claims there are only 25 pounds of it on Earth? He's not entirely wrong, as tritium is, in fact, quite rarely found in nature. But it can be produced through man-made nuclear reactions of the sort a world-famous scientist like Octavius would doubtlessly have access to. So goes the ways of Hollywood super-science — ever-changing, always fantastic, and extraordinarily easy to screw up.