Media Research Failure/Film

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Film critics should be above these kinds of factual errors, right? Not if Media Research Failure has anything to say about it...

  • The Netflix blurb for Kingdom of Heaven states that Orlando Bloom's character takes up his sword to free the Holy Land from the Turks. In actuality, the movie is set in between the Second and Third Crusades; the Seljuk Turks controlled the Holy Land in the onset of the First Crusade, and no Turks would go on to control the Holy Land until the Ottoman Turks, nearly 300 years after the last of the big Crusades. Of course, all of that overlooks the bigger error; the film is about Saladin's recapture of the Holy Land from Crusaders, who had at the time been occupying it for almost a century.
  • The X-Men films:
    • In a ridiculously inaccurate negative review for X2: X-Men United by Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post it quickly became clear that he did not bother to watch the movie, or was distracted for most of its length. At one point, he said that Rogue had the power to reverse time, even going so far as to call her "the Mistress of Rewind." He was apparently confused by the scenes in which she extinguishes flames (using Pyro's power) and makes Wolverine's wounds reappear (he let her borrow his Healing Factor. His wounds reappearing is another problem).
    • Another review, this one appearing in the New Times Los Angeles, blasted the first X-Men movie for departing from the comic's signature yellow-and-blue costumes, and for giving Magneto, the "master of all evil", a sympathetic Holocaust-survivor Backstory. Which shows that he did actually read the comic... in the '60s, and not once since.
    • A review of X2 in the Irish Times complained that a character who had been killed in the first film was somehow alive in the second... except he wasn't: Mystique the shapeshifter had taken his place. This was not only pointed out explicitly in the first film (for those viewers too sleepy to notice the characteristic flash of yellow eyes) but was a pivotal plot point in the second, which makes you wonder if the reviewer actually bothered to watch the film.
    • A negative review of the first movie in People Magazine, among other things, said, "Since when do superheroes have such traumatic backstories?" Oh, since about 1939?
  • A continuity announcer on ITV2 claimed that GoldenEye was about "Pierce Brosnan running around the Arctic with Famke Janssen trying to save the world (and his libido)." Famke Janssen's character is a villain from the start.
    • Also, part of the St. Petersburg tank chase was filmed on site. They faked all of the relevant statutes and treasures and smashed replicas on a UK Backlot, but that didn't stop a few breathless "They're destroying our art!" newscasts in Russia.
  • A talking head on CNBC reported that the then-just released Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest movie had broken the opening box office record held by the movie "Aquaman". However, Aquaman was a fictional movie within the universe of Entourage, and has never actually been made, to say nothing of breaking any box office records.
    • An Israeli mainstream news site reported about a new trailer for Medellin, starring Vincent Chase, the star of Aquaman, which is also all plot from the show Entourage. The article had a link to the de-fictional website created for the fictional movie, along with the trailer itself embedded in the page. Shortly after the virtual Face Palms began appearing in the comments section, the article was removed.
  • The Harry Potter film series:
    • One article about the fifth movie showed a picture of Harry and Cho about to kiss, but the caption read that he was puckering up for Hermione Granger. The canon shippers were not amused.
    • A Norwegian newspaper called the aforementioned kiss scene a "highly controversial sex scene".
    • An amazing number of film critics, including Roger Ebert, described the ending of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets as involving a duel with a dragon, whereas the creature Harry fought was actually a basilisk. This may be rather nitpicky, but the fact that the creature was a snake was a bit of a plot point. Not to mention it was called by name numerous times. On the other hand, early descriptions of dragons in western literature describe them as serpents.
    • Robert Pattinson appeared properly in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but wasn't in the next film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, unless you count a two-second flashback. Of course, reporters covering Twilight say he was in two Potter films (after all, that's how it shows up on IMDb) or even mention Phoenix exclusively, since it was more recent.
    • Media coverage from various sources sort of did this with Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson's kiss in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1. While they technically didn't state anything inaccurate about it, they heavily implied the scene was an actual romantic moment rather than an evil vision tormenting Ron. And, of course, lots of attention was given to the fact that they were naked. It even got an unironic nod for "best kiss" from the MTV Movie Awards.
  • The local Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St.Paul, MN) paper's movie review of the 2007 Transformers movie repeatedly referred to the Autobots' human buddy as "Spike". Spike was the equivalent human in the original comic and cartoon.
    • For Transformers 3, we have Movie Juice's negative review that tells us that you can disguise the fact you didn't watch a film with a series of jokes about it. The reviewer called Megan Fox a Decepticon, made jokes about Rosie Huntington Whitely wearing tight dresses and high heels during battle scenes including the scene with the colapsing building, and made several jokes about how silly a lot of the character's names are. To those who haven't seen the film, let me explain these problems: Megan Fox was a human girl in the first film who sided with the good guys, the Decepticon's are aliens and bad guys. RHW did wear a form fitting dress and high heels in one scene that you could call a fight scene, but that was between humans, consisted of two holding one down while a third punched him, and her involvement in the scene was her leaving a party and being abducted by a Decepticon before she's even left the premisis. The collapsing building scene is right after she's been rescued, to which she's already changed into more casual clothing. The characters with funny names are all alien robots, it would be weird if they didn't have alien sounding names. This was, of course, not helped by the reviewer basically trolling anyone who called them out on it.
  • Armond White (a film critic who is infamous for panning acclaimed movies and acclaiming panned movies) wrote in his negative review about Toy Story 3: "The toys wage battle with the daycare center’s cynical veteran cast-offs: Hamm the Piggy Bank pig, Lotsa Hugs and Big Baby." Hamm is not from the daycare center: he's one of Andy's toys, and he appeared in the previous two films. Oh, and even more important: he's not a villain! Also, Lotso Huggin Bear, not Lotsa Hugs.
  • In Armond White's review of Inglourious Basterds, he identifies Marcel, the black film projectionist/Shoshanna's lover, as the narrator of the penultimate chapters. There's a LOT wrong with that statement: 1. The brief narration is done by Samuel L. Jackson, who has a distinctive voice to anyone who watches movies. 2. The narration is in English, where Marcel appears to speak only French, 3. There is no narration in the penultimate chapters. The two times Jackson narrates are near the center of the film.
  • Lord of the Rings
    • A review decried the fact that Arwen gets such a small role (whereas in the books, she has all of one line, near the end of Return of the King). Another assumed that Eowyn's killing of the Witch-king was an expansion of her role in the books, but her role in the books was actually reduced for the films. In the film, she kills the Nazgul Lord and sort-of-generally pines for Aragorn. In the book, she slays the Nazgul Lord and delivers a badass speech on how men get all the glory and heroism, whereas women's right is, once men fail, "to be slaughtered at the threshold of our own home."
    • At least one review of the Lord of the Rings movies put forth the opinion that the reason the filmmakers put so much painstaking effort into Gollum's portrayal was simply because CGI is a new toy and they wanted to show it off as much as possible.
    • The Tolkien Sarcasm Page is a deliberately erroneous, tongue-in-cheek summary of The Lord of the Rings. A writer for the Sunday Times took it seriously and used it in preparation for an interview with Cate Blanchett.
    • A newspaper reviewer of The Return of the King made a complaint that the movie included a giant spider and wondered why Peter Jackson felt it was needed. Shelob appears in the series, though her appearance was moved to the third installment for the films.
    • A newspaper synopsis of The Lord of the Rings read "Frodo and friends go on a quest to find a magic ring." Some quest that would have been, given that one of the first things that happens in the story is Frodo getting the ring from Bilbo.
  • A (positive) review of Chasing Amy by Roger Ebert switched the male Heterosexual Life Partners' personalities and quotes (but not roles in the movie) around, rendering poor Ebert confused and disappointed.
  • Ebert mixed up the characters of Brodie and Banky in his review of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. However, as they are both played by Jason Lee, have similar names, appeared as snarky sidekicks in previous Kevin Smith films, and have a comparatively minor role in this one, it is probably understandable.
  • Star Wars
    • One TV-news reporter in 1977 referred to Chewbacca as "Choobie." Another referred to the Millennium Falcon as "Darth Vader's ship".
    • When Star Wars Episode I hit the cinemas, an Austrian magazine attempted to introduce uninitiated readers to the film's universe. There was mention of the fan outcry about the small green Jedi Master named Ewok being too cute, and confused the Neimodian Trade Federation mooks with Sith Lords.
    • It's not uncommon to hear people talk about "Dark Vader", "Hans Solo". Even the actors are prone to such mistakes: James Earl Jones made the "Dark Vader" mistake when referring to his character, and Carrie Fisher referred to Padmé as "Princess Amidala" in a Newsweek interview.
      • Also, using "Darth Vader" to refer to pre-Vader Anakin is a common mistake.
      • Vader is called "Dark Vador" in most French versions. Bringing the business full circle, however, both the English and French names are used in French Canada (with the French name no longer used in official material translated there), causing some people to mix up the two names, leading once again to the "Dark Vader" mistake or variations thereof.[1]
    • Italian magazines sometimes get to call Darth Vader "Death Star". Or with the Italian dub name, Dart Fener.
    • Roger Ebert stated in his review for Revenge of the Sith that Fox could continue the series, regardless of whether or not George Lucas wanted to make another one or not.
  • An NPR reporter once talked about the "Lord of the Narnia" series, apparently mixing two franchises.
  • The Boston Globe reviewer of Donnie Darko seems to have taken a bathroom break during half of the film and walked out fifteen minutes before the ending. No other explanation would suffice. However, he admits to not paying attention to the part where Frank explains to Donnie that he (Frank) comes from outer space. Because the reviewer seemed sure that scene appeared in the movie.
  • The whole kerfuffle that erupted over the film The Last Temptation of Christ was because people were informed about scenes of Jesus settling down, getting married, and having sex. What they weren't informed about was that these scenes were a hallucination caused by the Devil in order to try and convince Jesus not to fulfill his destiny, walk away and have a normal life, a temptation Jesus rejected. You know, as sort of described in the name of the film. Nobody listened, however, and due to staunchly Catholic Media Watchdogs, the film wasn't premiered in Mexico until 2005!
    • Given Mexico's constitution was officially anti-Catholic until 1989 — enforced with varying degrees of viciousness, including several thousand murders in the 1920s — Mexican Catholics are understandably more sensitive about such things than the film's original American audience.
  • A Chilean negative review of the Rocky and Bullwinkle movie called Rocky (who is a flying squirrel) "a beaver". Rocko feels his pain.
  • This article from EW.com was written by someone who, commenting on the upcoming Prince of Persia movie, was apparently completely unaware that the series had new installments in the last 20 years. As many of the commentators on the page point out, 30 seconds on Google would have cleared things up.
  • In the UK series of Gladiators, a character refers to Spartan saying 'he doesn't have 299 friends to back him up now!'. About a second later, the commentator says '300 Greeks fought for Rome, but there's only one Spartan!'.
  • For a time, Hulu described the scene from Back to The Future Part II where Doc whisks Marty and Jennifer off to 2015 as "Doc surprises Marty and Lorraine with an urgent request to come into the future to save their kids." Lorraine is the name of his mother.
  • The Quentin Tarantino release of Hard Core Logo describes the movie as "A hilarious Rockumentary in the laugh-packed tradition of This Is Spinal Tap. . . As magnetic lead singer Joe Dick holds the whole tour together through sheer force of will, all the tensions and pitfalls of the rock nd roll lifestyle come bursting hilariously to the surface! Featuring a memorable appearance by punk rock legend Joey Ramone. . . settle in and enjoy this offbeat comedy as it REALLY cranks up the laughs!" Hard Core Logo has its funny moments, but it is decidedly not a hilarious comedy. Joey Ramone is in it for maybe five minutes at the beginning, and is quickly forgotten.
  • This article from the New York Times wrongfully calls the film Godzilla VS Biollante "Godzilla VS Bioranch". It's made even more annoying by the fact that the article even has a poster from the film that shows the actual title of the film.
  • Crossover with All Animation Is Disney: This newspaper article in Palo Verde Valley Times from December 2006 refers to Castle Rock's The Polar Express as a Disney film.
  • TV Guide's blurb for Godzilla vs Megalon: "Godzilla and giant robot Jet Jaguar team up to fight a giant cockroach (Megalon, a stag beetle) and a big black chicken (Gigan, a bluish-green and gray reptilian cyborg with a beak and mandibles) sent by Seatopians."
  • David Edelstein, reviewing the Bewitched movie in Slate: "Using R.E.M.'s impassioned "Everybody Hurts"—written by Michael Stipe after the suicide of Kurt Cobain—to underscore shots of Kidman and Ferrell feeling blue about their inability to pair off is an aesthetic crime." Take Th... uh, wait a minute, that song was recorded in 1992, while Cobain died in 1994. In fact, the album that "Everybody Hurts" is on, Automatic for the People, was found in Cobain's stereo and was apparently the last album he ever listened to. To his credit, Edelstein quickly issued a (very snotty) retraction. "I don't like having to change something after it's published." Dude, then don't make a mistake on an easily checkable fact.
    • Not to mention that that's not even the right song. The song about Kurt Cobain was "Let Me In", a less well-known song off the album Monster. When Cobain died, Stipe had already been mourning friend River Phoenix. He had been reluctant to write about grief and retread the ground of previous album Automatic for the People. Cobain's death convinced him to get his feelings out. The song is unmistakable because it's such a departure from the rest of the album. Also unmistakable is Everybody Hurts, a comfort anthem with suicidal teenagers in mind. It's intentionally simple, as personal crises may not be the best time for complicated literary interpretation. This stands in stark contrast to the rest of R.E.M.'s entire body of work. Confusing these two songs is no small error from a fan's point of view.
  • One particularly scathing movie review for Silent Hill derided the film for being based on a video game series, but praised the movie's composer for at least writing a unique cinematic score instead of relying on the video game's "beeps and whistles". The music in the movie, of course, was taken directly from the games. Coming at this from another angle, a newspaper blurb on the game Silent Hill Homecoming described it as being based on the movie. There were in fact several Shout-Outs to the movie in Silent Hill: Homecoming, so it's easy to see how they got confused. For example, The Boogeyman/Pyramid Head's design is based off his movie design, and the introduction of the Smog enemy looks almost identical to the introduction of the Armless Man in the movie.
  • Iron Man, starring Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Spark. If you think that's bad, Swedish Metro called him Robert Frost.
  • A History's Mysteries episode on zombies has somebody say that the North American image of zombies was something like "Freddy from Friday the 13th..." Freddy's in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Jason Voorhees is in Friday the 13th. At least they could both be considered zombies, depending on who you ask.
  • An article on a magazine about Quantum of Solace stated that James Bond allied with the exiled General Medrano from Chile to destroy the Quantum Organization. Medrano is actually a Complete Monster and part of Quantum's plan (he's to be installed as dictator). It's also set in Bolivia, not Chile, though it was shot in Chile.
  • Australian newspaper The Age had a still from the movie Watchmen and credited it as being from the upcoming movie The Spirit.
  • Box summaries of movies are great for this (see also the Anime examples). From the back of the DVD of A Christmas Story: "(Ralphie) also endures all kinds of childhood calamaties from snowsuit paralysis to the yellow-eyed Scotty Farkus affair to the dreaded tongue-on-a-frozen-flagpole gambit." Ralphie's brother had the snowsuit paralysis (which was never called as such,) his friend Flick did the flagpole (which was not a gambit,) and the yellow-eyed bully was actually named Scut Farkus.
  • There's been an assumption on the part of some of the reviewing public that Coraline is a Tim Burton film, due to both the animation style and the fact that the trailers hype it as being by "the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas". The director, for both films, is in fact Henry Selick, and Burton has nothing to do with Coraline. Neil Gaiman, author of the original book, has expressed his annoyance with this, and it's been mocked in webcomics.
    • Neil Gaiman, from the above blog entry:

"It was irritating when people started asking me why the advertising said "From the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas", and wasn't it some kind of a sneaky attempt to make people think that it was by Tim Burton?, and I would sigh, and say no, it was a sneaky attempt to make people think it was directed by the person who directed The Nightmare Before Christmas. (And given that people were saying this about trailers that made a point of saying Henry's name, I had little patience with it.)"

    • Another blame for this is the In Case You Forgot Who Wrote It for Nightmare. (In other words, its full title is Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. Mind you, Burton was only responsible for the concept of that movie as he was busy directing Batman Returns at the same time.)
  • Marcus Berkmann in the Daily Telegraph reviewed Batman and Robin without, apparently, bothering to see the movie, as he confidently informed readers that Mr. Freeze was motivated to avenge the death of his wife, whereas in the movie the fact that his wife is very much alive (albeit, y'know, frozen) at the beginning and end of the film is an important plot point.
    • This could have been bad phrasing, as it's technically true — what motivates Freeze heading into the climax is a mistaken belief that Batman unfroze and in the process killed his wife.
  • Sam Wollaston, TV critic for The Guardian, reviewed a TV documentary titled The Human Spider, about a guy who climbed a big building dressed as, obviously, Spider-Man. His review, however, referred to the guy as being dressed as Batman. Because those costumes look so much alike...
  • The Metro even went so far as to call the main character of The Matrix Reloaded Nero and claim the film was about his adventures in Another Dimension.
    • Now... doesn't that sound familiar?
    • Another reviewer somehow confused the three main female characters in "Reloaded", stating that "Hero Neo must also enlist the aid of a virtual beauty, played by Carrie-Anne Moss, who captains a ship of her own." (Now we know that it's possible to be too high while watching this trilogy.)
    • One review claimed that mysteriously Agent Smith had become the only Agent in existence, with all the others from the first movie nowhere to be seen, and blamed this on Hugo Weaving's ego - never mind that there are other agents in several scenes in the movie, albeit different ones from the first, but Smith is no longer an agent at all, but a virus program working for his own ends, against the mainstream machines.
    • This even extends to some of the films' own DVD features. The Ultimate Matrix Collection features commentaries on all the films by three critics, who clearly hadn't been paying much attention (one of them seems to think Zion is in space rather than underground, for starters). The sequels are notorious for being impenetrable, but you're not helping your case when you screw up the few things that are clearly explained.
  • An Indiana Daily Student review of Last Man Standing noted it was a remake of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo but said, "It may seem strange to remake a Kurosawa film as a Western." Not that strange. Oh, and speaking of Yojimbo? Four words: A Fistful of Dollars.
    • Let's not forget that Yojimbo itself was already sort of a remake of Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett.
  • A review of Dragonball Evolution opened with the following informed lines.

Another Japanese manga bites the dust with its cinematic adaptation: in this case, the "Dragonball Evolution" series.

  • Ted Baehr's review of Watchmen is littered with this sort of thing: by far the most hilarious is the lament that Rorschach is seen as a psychopath because he "believes in good and evil" and "truth and justice." Really? I'd have thought hurling a fake supervillain down an elevator shaft would have been more convincing evidence. Oh, and the review ends with a bilious rant on how the film "strongly affirms humanist, socialist, anti-American values promoting a socialist utopia where liberty, justice and goodness are destroyed for the sake of a totalitarian peace."
    • Unfortunate Implications abound when Ted Baehr defends a violent neo-Fascist as believing in "truth and justice".
      • Bonus points for equaling 'humanist' and 'anti-American' even though United States were founded as an epitome of Enlightenment-era humanism.
    • Incidentally, Baehr's conclusion is pretty correct provided one sides with Ozymandias. It doesn't help that Moore left a lot of space for Alternate Character Interpretation
    • Then there was his review of V for Vendetta, which accused the film of being Marxist, despite the fact that it's actually anarchist, and accused it of "Anti-Christian bigotry."
      • Virtually all anarchism after well, Marx, has been at least quasi-Marxist (several writers have called Marxism "Fabian anarchism", given its idea that the state will fade away). Moore's definitely is Marx-influenced.
        • It gets funnier for people living in socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe, as the actions of Norsefire closely resemble the communist regime. Some would say that save for engineering a plague, the severity of regime has been downplayed.
  • A "parent's review" of the Watchmen movie adaptation, instead of reviewing the actual film, listed every single instance of violence or sexual content without mentioning anything else, then concluded that the ultimate message of the story was that "humankind is inherently savage". What? Even more hilarious, another blurb stated the movie's premise as: "After the death of one of his colleagues, the masked vigilante Rorschach sets out on a mission to kill all superheroes."
    • In defense of kids-in-mind.com, the site isn't geared toward "parent reviews", but "parent guides". The entire purpose of the site is to list every instance of even remotely offensive material, along with severity ratings in those categories. They don't even do traditional reviews.
      • That could be forgiven if they didn't have the "Message" section at the end, where they are in fact interpreting (in this case wrongly) what the movie is trying to say. There were many things Watchmen was trying to say, but "humandkind is inherently savage" was not one of them.
    • In UK newspaper The Independent's review, they start off by saying how it is an adaptation of the "much loved" comic, but unfortunately the film doesn't live up to that standard. Okay, that's all right so far, many people agree with that. But the evidence of it not being as good as the original? That one line that was actually in the graphic novel is pretentious drivel, which again is arguably true but it can't make the film worse than the comic because it was in both!
    • Somewhere out there is a review where the author assures the public that soon there will be no more superhero movies, because Hollywood has reached the point where they've made this movie "based off characters nobody has ever heard of." Um...
  • A review of Fanboys by Robert Wilonsky shows that he neglected to watch the full film. At this point in time to save from possible spoilers here is the link to the review for those of you who have seen the movie [1] [dead link] or here [2]
  • A review of Spy Kids 2 said that Carmen and Juni have to fight the evil Romero, and team up with a new duo of Spy Kids to aid them in their battle... Which seemed to reverse the newcomer's roles; since Romero was a good guy (made clear from his first appearance) and the Cortez siblings had to race against, and battle, Gary and Gerti. It also completely ignored Donnagon's blatant corruption and the dangers of the Transmooker device. It was like they didn't even bother to watch the film at all.
  • A review for the G.I. Joe movie states "Formerly a Real American Hero, G.I.Joe is no longer a hero (it's a group)..." Funny... G.I.Joe has almost always referred to a group (the "almost" is there because there was actually a namesake) and not a single person, even before the '80s (when they were first called Real American Heroes).. The original action hero was titled like that, but the toyline (and TV series) that inspired Rise of Cobra most certainly wasn't.
  • A book about the Academy Awards completely screws up the plot of Unforgiven: "After the death of his wife, ex-outlaw (Clint Eastwood) returns to violence to punish corrupt sheriff (Gene Hackman) with the support of two companions (Morgan Freeman and Richard Harris)". He leaves retirement for bounty, offered by a prostitute (who lives in said sheriff's city) on the guys who slashed a colleague's face. The second companion is Jaimz Woolvett, and Richard Harris doesn't even share a scene with Eastwood!
  • A review of Return to Oz criticized the movie for having "unimaginative" characters, such as a man with the head of a pumpkin and a yellow hen. Problem was, those characters—Jack Pumpkinhead and Billina—are straight out of L. Frank Baum's The Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz, which Return to Oz was based on.
    • This is, in a way, partially the fault of whomever decided to title and market this film based on the original, printed page, very weird OZ series in such a way that audiences were doomed to assume it was a sequel to the beloved musical version.
  • P.M. (a popular science magazine) ran a small article about nanotech "liquid metal", citing the Terminator as example of the principle. A terminator did it, but it wasn't Ahnold's character. On top of that, the illustration they used showed RoboCop instead.
  • And here's a kicker: Ted Baehr's Movie Guide did its review of the 2007 TMNT film shortly after its release, and did an utterly atrocious job explaining the film's content factually. For starters:
    • Leonardo and Raphael's fight midway through the movie is described as a battle between Leo and Michaelangelo—at the film's beginning!
    • There can only be a bad explanation for Casey crashing at April's place so often. How could the two of them possibly be chaste???
    • "Stories went nowhere..." In other words, nobody at Movie Guide had ever heard of the 2003 animated series? Or the original comics? The intro was a minimal effort to give newcomers an insight into the film's world, just in the bleak chance that someone going to see it had never been exposed to previous Turtles-related material.
    • The thing with those stars aligning to unleash a beam of energy on Earth that unlocks monsters from another world is merely modification of a common plot device. A similar theme was used in the first Fantastic Four movie, with the cosmic beam storm. But somehow, this is an evil tactic by Satan to get us addicted to looking for answers in -'astrology! Never mind that not one single constellation in the Zodiac (Eastern or Western) was even once mentioned on screen.
    • "Calm yourself" is not simple advice, according to Baher. It's an "evil and false Buddhist doctrine." What???
    • Contrary to Baher's assessment of "a confused view," the movie actually has no problem with vigilantism per se. What it does have a problem with is Punisher-style vigilantism. The Foot Clan and monsters are what they are and are deemed as "worthy to die." Yet, ordinary criminals are not to be killed. They are to only be subdued and left for the police. That is the code of battle honor the Turtles fight with, and is very similar to Batman's.
      • The problem Leonardo has with the "Night Watcher" is because the news has led him to believe that this vigilante actually kills the criminals, making this an in-universe example of Media Research Failure. Those who know the Backstory will know that the Turtles once believed this about Casey, before befriending him. They know of Splinter's code of honor, similar in some ways to Bushido, and they don't trust vigilantes who are not trained in any known code of honor. Not that this matters to MovieGuide, which believes that "bushido" is just a buzzword for "a lie from Satan designed to drag you to Hell."
    • The movie goes to great lengths to explain that without a strong family dynamic, one may never feel at home anywhere, even if they do get everything they originally thought they wanted. Since when does this Aesop constitute a "Romantic Pagan" view?
  • A November 2009 issue of the Seattle Times had a picture of Simon from Alvin and The Chipmunks labeled as Theodore in the picture for an article promoting the new December movies. This was especially Egregious because the person who wrote the article was apparently a fan of the movies.
    • While this is a perfect example of the trope, it should be mentioned that writers do not, in most journalism, have anything to do with the pictures or the captions thereof. So if a picture is mislabelled, that's on the editor, not the writer.
  • When the film adaptation of Hogfather was aired on Finnish TV on Christmas 2009, the review stated that in the movie they "fight bad guys, including the Reaper Man himself". Anyone who knows even the basics of Discworld should know that Death is nearly always (and especially in Hogfather) one of the good guys. Obviously the reviewer hadn't either watched the movie or failed to comprehend it.
    • It is within the realm of possibility that the reviewer thought he was preserving an important spoiler concerning Death's role; he does seem rather sinister up until he starts to talk.
  • When Star Wars: The Phantom Menace came to theaters in Spain, a small weekly publication that was given free along with one of the Spanish people's most relevant newspapers, including several incorrect statements about the original saga, it was said that "... Darth Maul, so fully evil, he kills Qui Gonn (played by Liam Neeson) when he's sleeping".
  • The photo caption in this review of Schindler's List on Roger Ebert's website. It incorrectly identifies Liam Neeson as Ralph Fiennes, and indirectly implies that Ralph Fiennes' character was in the business of saving Jews.
  • A Daily Mail article viciously attacked the film Kick-Ass several weeks before its release; in particular, they claimed that the film was the brain-child of screenwriter Jane Goldman (it wasn't; the film is based on a comic book by Mark Millar), who was also the film's director (she wasn't; Matthew Vaughn was the actual director, and co-wrote the screenplay with Goldman), and that it was about a foul mouthed 11 year-old assassin (the film does in fact feature such a character, but the protagonist is a wannabe superhero). Arguably a subversion, since there's a significant possibility that the article was deliberately badly researched so that they'd have an excuse to attack Goldman, who just happens to be the wife of TV host Jonathan Ross—who the Daily Mail despises for reasons much too long to list here.
    • And the Daily Fail strikes again with its review of Four Lions. The picture accompanying the review is almost as long as the actual review itself. The review accuses the film of bowing to "political correctness". This, of course, being the comedy about Muslim terrorists.
  • The Golden Compass was described by a tv magazine as "in a fantasy world, a girl searches the magic dust that enables travelling between worlds." Funny how the movie never even gets to that point in the book series.
  • A newspaper TV guide reviewed Zombieland as (paraphrased) "Woody Harrelson as a mean zombie hunter, with Jesse Eisenberg as his supporting sidekick, in this inexplicably successful blend of horror and teen rom-com". Apart from the fact that Eisenberg is the lead, and... teen romantic comedy?
    • Might be justified. Eisenberg's character is the lead in the sense that we see the events from his perspective, but he does attach himself to Harrelson's character in a sort of sidekick fashion. After they meet, it's Tallahassee who decides most of where they go and what they do. Teen romantic comedy, though? Um...
    • This is true of most films with a romantic subplot, no matter how minor. It's automatically labelled as a "romance" or "romantic comedy", even if the romance in question has no impact on the main story.
    • Columbus even goes so far as to call himself "a sancho panza type character".
  • Many reviews of the godawful Dungeons & Dragons movie asked why anyone even bothered to make a movie of a game that no one's even played since the 80s (or 70s in some cases). Of course, the game has been in constant publication - and play - since its creation. What the reviews really meant was "a game I saw other kids play when I was younger but not recently because it's much easier to avoid people you don't share common interests with once you graduate from high school, and since I haven't personally seen it in a while, I assume it doesn't exist any more."
  • An early Empire article on Batman Begins referred to Morgan Freeman's character as "Shadowy mobster Lucius Fox,' apparently confusing him with Carmine Falcone, played by Tom Wilkinson. They later made the same mistake, describing Henri Ducard as a mobster. Which is admittedly a step in the right direction. Both gaffes prompted complaints from readers.
  • The Amazon.com product description of the 2005 film Tornado tells us how Josh Barnaby is haunted by the death of brother and is chasing a mile wide tornado in the Midwest. Too bad Josh's surname is Pallady, he's haunted by the death of his father, the main plot has nothing to do with chasing tornadoes and everything to do with Gypsy curses, and 90% of the film takes place in Romania.
  • The book Film in Australia: An Introduction by Albert Moran and Errol Vieth screwed up its section on Lantana. Apparently, they chose to get most of the cast's names from the end credits instead of actually paying attention to the film, and in the process failed to notice that the cast were billed in order of appearance. Thus, they referred to Vince Colosimo's character Nik D'amato as Steve Valdez and his wife Paula as Lisa, who were the fourth and fifth billed characters, right after Leon, Sonja and Jane (three points of the film's love square), but were fairly unimportant to the story. More understandably, they called Geoffrey Rush's character John Somers instead of John Knox (his wife was named Valerie Somers), and more inexplicably, they called Peter Phelps' character Alex instead of Patrick, even though there's no character by that name in the film. Ironically, they still got most of the plot details right.
  • A reviewer of The Last Airbender (one of the few who gave it a positive review) describes how "Aang and friends travel on a flying six-legged albino beaver." The "beaver" in question is actually a bison, and not an albino. Not surprisingly that a positive review came from someone who likely never saw the movie and certainly never watched the TV show on which it is based.
  • The Rotten Tomatoes website and a few movie theatres that gave away free film pamphlets, made this summary from How to Train Your Dragon: "Hiccup goes on a mission to pass their village's initation into manhood by capturing and training a dragon. If he succeeds, he will become a warrior. If he fails, he will be forever banished". This would techically be true had the film been more faithful to Cressida Cowel's book, but so much liberties were taken to change the plot that instead of a boy going through a rite of passage capturing and training dragons, it's a teenager whose village is dedicated to killing dragons befriending an injured dragon and finding that everything he and his village knows about them to be wrong.
  • Siskel and Ebert had never heard of "Weird Al" Yankovic when UHF came out, and derisively assumed that his name sounded so ridiculous that it had to be a made-up name like "Yahoo Serious" ("Weird Al" is indeed a nickname, but Yankovic is his real last name). Their entire perception of the film seemed to be colored by thinking of Al as basically being Yahoo Serious.
  • A small but still irksome example: In an article covering Repo! The Genetic Opera, Fangoria repeatedly referred to Terrance Zdunich's character as "Gravedigger."
  • The Parents Television Council's review of the film version of How To Eat Fried Worms opens with the following statement: "The beloved children's classic ... has come to life in this faithful adaptation of Thomas Rockwell's novel." If the movie is so faithful, how do they explain the differences from the book listed on the Wikipedia article?
  • In the film description of the Rocky Horror Picture Show on Netflix it describes the plot as "... the exploits of naïve couple Brad (Barry Bostwick) and Janet (Susan Sarandon) after they stumble upon the lair of transvestite vampire Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry)." Vampire? Really?
  • A crossword puzzle provided the clue "Comden and Green musical" for "Auntie Mame." Trouble is, Auntie Mame isn't a musical, at least not under that 10-letter title, and Comden and Green only wrote the screenplay for the film of the play Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee adapted from Patrick Dennis's original story. There is a musical adaptation, titled simply Mame, which Comden and Green had nothing to do with.
  • Roger Ebert's review of Labyrinth contains this quote: "One of the key characters in this film is Toby (played by Toby Froud). Froud is a midget who has been given a Muppet head to wear." The character he's thinking of is Hoggle, played by Shari Weiser. Toby is Sarah's baby brother, played by non-midget baby Toby Froud.
  • This article about Guillermo Del Toro joining Dreamworks Animation claims that the studio's 2012 movie "Rise of the Guardians" is a sequel to Zack Snyder's "Legend of the Guardians." You know, that owl movie made by WARNER BROTHERS.
  • The repeated insistence that the flying ship in Stardust is original to the movie and not featured in the book. While Gaiman doesn't elaborate on Tristran and Yvaine's adventure on the ship, its captain has a different name and it isn't a pirate ship, it does in fact appear in the book, and serves roughly the same purpose in the plot.
  • In 2011, Celio (a cloth shop franchise in France) decided to do a special Star Wars themed collection. The iconic vehicle of the saga they used for their TV advertisement? A mkII Viper.
  • This review of the Superman Motion Picture Anthology Blu-Ray keeps crediting Bud Collyer as the lead of the 1940s serials and portrayer of Lois Lane's father in the extended version of the first movie. However, Bud Collyer voiced Superman in the radio series, as well as some cartoons from the 1940s and '60s. Kirk Alyn actually acted as the lead in the serials, and Lois' father in the first movie.
  • More Roger Ebert. In this review of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes movie, he accuses the movie of tossing 'aside the deerstalker hat and meerschaum calabash' (neither of which were ever mentioned in the novel) and also that 'Watson has decided for once and all to abandon the intimacy of 221B for the hazards of married life' (he was married at least twice in the books). Also apparently originally Watson was always 'fretful and frightened' - a base libel against Watson who fought bravely in the Afghan war and was always staunchly by Holmes' side whatever the danger.
    • In his review of Sherlock Holmes - A Game of Shadows; Ebert also says that "I've luxuriated in the genial atmosphere of the Conan Doyle stories, where a step is heard on the stair, a client tells his tale, and Holmes withdraws to his rooms to consider his new case during a period of meditation (involving such study aids as opium).". Given that Holmes never took narcotics during a case (only when out of work) and even when he did, it was either Cocaine or Morphine, one can wonder just how much of Conan Doyle Ebert actually read.
  • The Movie Guide.org review of South Park:Bigger, Longer, and Uncut refers to Big Gay Al as being black. and claimed that "the whole point of SOUTH PARK is that the children in the movie should have been allowed to see the Terrance & Phillip movie, just as the world's children should be allowed to see SOUTH PARK, even though it is rated R. Furthermore, the message of the movie is clear: that adults should let children engage in depraved actions and foul language, and that all this is just part of growing up."
  • The author of The New York Times' review of some remastered Rodgers and Hammerstein DVDs expressed disappointment when he read the back cover of Carousel saying that it came with a film adaptation of its predecessor, Liliom, assumed this referred to the 1930 adaptation, but then found himself watching Fritz Lang's 1934 movie. One must wonder why he felt surprised, since the back DVD cover and the insert listing production notes and DVD features and chapters clearly list the 1934 adaptation among the bonus features. (Granted, other people anticipated the inclusion of the 1930 movie, but they did so before obtaining the DVD.)
  • 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die has a few mistakes, the worst of which is probably claiming, in its review of Terminator 2: Judgement Day that Michael Biehn played John Connor in The Terminator, as opposed to Kyle Reese.
  • At least one review of the first Tomb Raider movie complained of the sets of Angkor Wat and Lara's home being overdone, overdecorated, over the top, and just generally not credible. The scenes were shot on location, or on sets created to match the locations.
  • When The Land Before Time IX was first released, there was a very bizarre review on amazon.com, talking about the film's predecessor, Time of Much Snow. There has never been a Land Before Time film by that name (although the previous movie, while using the title The Big Freeze, did feature a snowstorm as a major plot point, so it is possible that English was not this person's first language). Also, and even more strange, is when the reviewer talks about the reincarnation of Littlefoot's grandmother. Considering his grandmother never died, one must wonder what this person was smoking.
  • Whoever wrote the official website for An American Tail probably never watched any of the movies. They describe Tanya as "always getting her brother into some kind of trouble" (which he does just fine on his own), and when they describe Tony Toponi they imply that he's in love with Tanya, which of course is never even hinted at in the movies. Now granted, the site was probably created with the idea that the Viewers are Morons, which is also sadly reflected in Universal's more recent DVD releases of the movies.
  • The Christian Review website complained in their review of Shrek 2 that Donkey having children with Dragon implied that he was a "Freewheeling playboy" despite the fact that Dragon is the only romantic partner he has and that two people who love each other having children is something that's gone on for ages untold. They didn't seem to have a problem with the end of Chicken Run though, in which the island the chickens land on is swarming with chicks, despite the fact that Rocky is the only fertile rooster in the bunch...
  • The book Disney Dossiers: Files of Characters From the Walt Disney Studios is full of glaring omissions and mistakes. For example, Aladdin's fact sheet says "Parents: None (orphan)", completely neglecting the fact that him finding out his father was alive was the main friggin' plot of Aladdin and the King of Thieves (which the book also claims came out a year earlier than it actually did). Kuzco's profile also seems to negate the existence of Malina by saying that Kuzco has no "significant other" (even though it does sound like something Kuzco would say about himself). Also, for some reason, Donald Duck's filmography highlights includes the DuckTales (1987) movie (which he wasn't even mentioned in), Timon's last name (Berkowitz) and Scar's birth name (Taka) are forgotten, and some of the voice actors for the characters are glaringly omitted (e.g., Cam Clarke for Simba, April Winchell for Cruella de Vil).
    • Plenty of mistakes are abound in the Disney Song Encyclopedia as well. The description for the Tale Spin theme claims that the show is "about the colorful Kit Cloudkicker, who flies his plane through various adventures in the tropics." Um, hello? Baloo was the pilot; Kit was his navigator. The book also claims that Doug retained its theme song from the original Nickelodeon series, but anyone who has seen both versions of the show can tell you that the theme songs sound nothing alike.
    • Another Disney book mistake: In Disney: The First 100 Years, a caption from the opening scene of The Lion King is given this caption: "Rafiki holds baby Simba while Mufasa and Nala smile proudly." Simba's mother is named Sarabi; Nala was Simba's love interest.
    • An article [dead link] on depictions of tobacco and alcohol use in movies for children identifies Lampwick as Lampwit.
  • Speaking of Disney, Netflix has been inaccurate on the info of two of the movies in the Disney Animated Canon: Oliver and Company and Brother Bear. Respectively, Netflix says that Fagin was the villain when it's actually Sykes, and that Kenai was avenging his father when Sitka is clearly his eldest brother.
  • Movie critic Eleanor Ringel claimed in her review of Tom and Jerry, The Movie that the Tom and Jerry series won fifteen Academy Awards for Outstanding Animated Short Subjects. They were nominated fifteen times and won seven Academy Awards.
  • The book Planet Of The Apes Chronicles is well known among Planet of the Apes fans for its many errors in regards to the films.
  • Some movie theaters used to give patrons a pamphlet with one-sentence descriptions of current movies. According to this paper, "The Mummy Returns" was about the main characters discovering their son was the reincarnation of Osiris.
  • Roger Ebert has a few:
    • He believed that the Bug's goal in Men in Black was to "conquer the Earth". The Bug had no interest in Earth at all outside of the fact that it had to go there to retrieve the Galaxy.
    • In his review for Army of Darkness, he mixed up Ash's chainsaw and shotgun hands.
  • In "The Next Plinkett Review", a teaser for RedLetterMedia's review of Ghostbusters 2016, Mr. Plinkett interrupts his rage at the Ghostbusters reboot when he sees paper ads in the Blu-Ray case he got in the mail. He sees something peculiar in one ad:

"'Own These Other Great Titles Today'. Ghostbusters [the original] and Ghostbusters II are rated R? Goosebumps [the movie], Pixels are rated R?? Oh Sony, such great quality control..."

  • All the mentioned movies are rated PG, except Pixels, which is rated PG-13.
  • A review on Vulture.com for the film adaptation of Ready Player One consistently referred to the OASIS as "ORACLE" throughout, suggesting that the reviewer, one David Edelstein, hadn't actually seen the film at all -- or even any of the trailers. (Someone at Vulture eventually caught on and corrected the article, but not until a few days had passed.)
Back to Media Research Failure
  1. ↑ A French-Canadian movie site, for example, has many reviews referring to the character as "Darth Vader", "Dark Vader" or "Darth Vador" but never "Dark Vador".
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Media_Research_Failure/Film?oldid=2025478"