I admit it: I’m a terrible person to watch films with.

Im sorry but I just can’t unsee things. If you’re going to make a film do it properly…

Watching Independence Day:

Everyone else: F18s vs Aliens is cool!
Me: The warning lights are all lit - did he take off in a broken jet? That display screen doesn’t exist. F18s don’t have drogue parachutes.

Watching behind enemy lines:

Everyone else: Run from the missile!!
Me: Missiles don’t behave like that. They’re faster, don’t fly in formation pairs and burn out of fuel quicker than that scene takes. And the pilot should have dropped tanks and popped flares right at the beginning. And the tanks wouldn’t have exploded like that.

Watch Braveheart:
Everyone else: Freedom!
Me: they’ve painted their faces the colour of a flag that doesn’t exist yet. He was a Lord not a peasant, the Scots had the sophisticated pikemen, armour and weapons too, not just the English. He didn’t capture York, and the French girl is only 9 and living in France at the time. If that French Princess ever met William Wallace it would have been just his head on a big stick many years later.

Pearl Harbour
Everyone else: this isn’t a good film.
Me: <noisily being sick in a corner>

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ArishMell · 70-79, M

Film=makers are dreadful for playing fast-and-loose with facts, not relising that while many people would not notice a technical or historical error in a field not theirs, does spoil it for anyone who does know.

Of your list I have seen only Braveheart, but here's another clanger from it. The Scots did not wear tartan kilts at that time.

I read somewhere that Titanic is so full of deliberate mistakes - around 100 - that film-fans were devoting entire on-line discussions to that film alone.

Here are ones I spotted:

- Rose and Jack cavorting on the ship's bow: inaccessible to anyone except crew-members and then only when necessary.

- Their running straight into a boiler-room - ships' boiler-rooms had air-locks those two passengers would not have known how to operate... then,

- from there into the cargo-hold. I can't imagine any door through that bulkhead, and certainly not one easily opened by a passenger.

- The boiler-room officer, once knowing the order to run at full speed, thought the ship would move faster if his crew threw coal into the boiler furnaces more rapidly, yelling at them to do so.

- The bridge lights fully on while the ship was under way. No. The lights would have been off so the crew could see ahead. (Though the Captain, I think, did make the credible point that the sea was too calm for the iceberg to have been visible at a distance by waves breaking against it.) Modern ships use low-intensity, coloured lamps to illuminate the instruments, and that was probably so in Edwardian times too. (There is a similar error in The Guns of Navarone... no wonder the boat hit the cliff.)

- "Stop engines!" or "All stop!" - I forget which. The engine-room watch officer immediately obeyed the order... but that pressure-gauge shown in close-up would not have dropped immediately to 0psi. The engines though, were depicted pretty accurately.

- A large herd of rats fleeing along a corridor. On a sparkling-clean, brand-new ship? (Are rats easier to herd than the proverbial cats...?)

- And where or when did Rose find that whistle? I may be wrong but I thought she was not wearing a life-jacket. Jack wasn't, as he sank immediately on dying - I don't know if that itself was likely, or if he'd have floated.

+++==

Still, there is one type even worse as a fellow watcher, perhaps not in the cinema, but certainly TV, as personified by my dearly-departed Grandma.

"Oh look, that's so-&-so in Coronation Street!", she'd exclaim, pointing out a leading character at a key moment in the play whose dramatic illusion she's thus unknowingly blown out of the water.