Did Anyone Else Here Notice this Huge Mistake in the Film "Gravity"?

@DLight Thankyou!

I have seen Capricon One but it was a long time ago and I don't recall the details.

One thing I've wondered about films set in the "Wild West" and earlier in the USA's history was whether the real people would have had modern American accents or still a mixture of European ones. Obviously the film maker can only use present-day actors. I don't know when and how the generica US accent evolved but I think there are bits of Dutch and Irish ancestry in it.

I didn't know the bowler hat was popular! It was invented by the milliner to an English duke - I forget whom - as protective head-gear for the gamekeepers on the duke's estate. They needed something they could wear out in the open as some weather protection, and in woods as protection from striking low branches.

Nor did I know tumbleweed is not an American native plant. I looked it up and was surprised to find "tumbleweed" is a generic name for a range of plants that use the same mechanism to spread their seeds. And that some species, especially the one that arrived from Russia in cargoes, are particularly troublesome, using large amounts of water, often appearing as weeds among crops and in gardens, and helping to spread fires.

As far as I know it has not appeared in the British Isles, but we do have a serious problem with a plant called 'Japanese Knotweed', which spreads partly by runners from deep roots. l understand it is similarly a pest in the USA too, probably other countries as well.


It doesn't surprise me that Hollywood's depiction of the Battle of Alamo is totally wrong, yet I learn that at the time, Texas was not part of the USA so I am I not sure why the film makers would invent a fictional story about a real siege.


Have you seen the German-made TV series Das Boot? It was shown complete, in its own language but with sub-titles, on BBC TV. Subsequently I saw a video edition produced by Warner Brothers. Warner had not made any changes, nor any significant cuts except for one. That is a piece of dialogue between the U-boat Kapitan and one of his officers, which reveals he hates what they ordered to do (sink merchant ships). Warners had removed a few seconds of conversation that ended with the captain snapping something like this:

"They are fine ships and this war has turned us into a knacker's yard!"

No mention of the men drowned in the process, but military people typically don't like to mention the people inside the ships or planes or tanks they are destroying. It's the infantry who are literally face to face with the enemy. The series certainly did not glorify war though.

@ArishMell Yes, I saw the TV show (it was good, well made) and before that the film. Das Boot is probably the best war film ever made, if only because of how realistic it is.
And realistic is how war films should be, and not like the ones that come out of Hollywood that portray US servicemen as the perennial good guys, never doing anything wrong, and always winning in the end. Atrocities were committed by ALL sides during the war.
I'd like to see Hollywood attempt to make a film about Operation Paperclip. Now that would be interesting, if nothing else. I wonder how they'd try to spin it.

@DLight It would be! I'd not heard of it so paused for a little research.

Werner von Braun's name and contributions are well-known but I had no idea of the scale of the operation.

Had they not gone to America it's likely at least some would have found themselves helping the USSR. It was a peculiar situation in which despite the appalling nature of their former regime, and their individual parts in it, it was better they helped the nations that had defeated it.

It's difficult therefore to see how it could be spun short of ignoring the former roles of the scientists and engineers, or portraying them as no more than ordinary, hard-working civilians having to pay lip-service to the Nazi regime simply to survive.

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Have you seen or heard of, the bleak British TV drama The War Game, made in the 1960s? It is set in the aftermath of all-out nuclear war, and centres on the survival of a young woman and subsequent daughter. The mother's pregnancy had been by the boyfriend who died whan a nuclear bomb exploded over their Northern English industrial city of Sheffield.

I have not seen it, but recently read abou tit. It is so horrifying that the Government of the day tried to persuade the BBc not to screen it, through fear of frightening the citizens. It was also so horrifying it picked up major awards Hollywood had hoped to win with a star-studded rival. The critics and judges had agreed that it was a far more realistic impression of what could be than the whiter-than-white US film.